A change of pace

Evidently, the relative lack of fresh population-related information has hampered my post count. Either that or I've been too busy to do the research myself. In the meantime, I think I'll post some musings on the subject


It has been claimed before that there is no limit to the human life span, but I wonder how realistic this is?

Note that life span is the total number of years a human being is physiologically able to live; not to be confused with life expectancy which is the expected number of years out of his/her life span. Researchers claim that since life span has been climbing for the past 200 years (probably a little less than a year a decade) that there is no tail end to it. Yet I might note that life expectancy has also been on the climb during this time, and at a much faster rate. If we considered one of the highest life expectancies in the world, like that of Japan (81.15), to be the mean of the age distribution, we should be seeing the right outliers moving out at a further rate, one more comparable to the growth of life expectancy.

I had a teacher once that said that life expectancy was just going to keep growing and growing and growing, but as the income/technology effect on life expectancy appears to have diminishing returns, I think we'll find that we'll cap out at 115, which I presume to be our life span.