Why are Humans living longer?

[Res Ipsa]

I’m just goofing around. The visualizations are all funny. If I’m perpendicular to the axis of motion, I appear to get faster and thinner at the same time.

[Doctor Steuss]

If I’m perpendicular to the axis of motion, I appear to get faster and thinner at the same time.

Follow Res for more hacks on how to quickly get that summertime bod.

[Imwashingmypirate]

I think humans are living longer due to advances in medicine and especially dentistry. Plus, we're slowly learning the diets that promote life and which ones promote death.

This is one of the reasons (or at least the prevailing theory) on the prevalence of heart disease now, compared to 100 years ago. People (and their hearts) are living longer. It isn't so much that there's more heart disease, it's that people who would have had heart disease 100 years ago were usually already dead before it had a chance to present. Same likely applies to some extent to cancer.

You live long enough, and systems will start getting funky that in previous generations rarely lived long enough to get funky.

I thought heart disease is more prevalent now because people eat SH17 now. Whereas years ago, they would have eaten sugar and processed food. But also, we do need to consider that a hundred years ago, they wouldn't have had the technology we have now that could assess what a person died of every time. So I think we can't accurately say that these issues have increased because people live longer when there are other variables that might affect the results.

[Imwashingmypirate]

I’m just goofing around. The visualizations are all funny. If I’m perpendicular to the axis of motion, I appear to get faster and thinner at the same time.

Had a rude thought... kinda sounds like we would become plasma like.

[Doctor Steuss]

I thought heart disease is more prevalent now because people eat SH17 now. Whereas years ago, they would have eaten sugar and processed food. But also, we do need to consider that a hundred years ago, they wouldn't have had the technology we have now that could assess what a person died of every time. So I think we can't accurately say that these issues have increased because people live longer when there are other variables that might affect the results.

There certainly is a dose dependent link between ultra processed food consumption, and all-cause mortality. The fact remains though, that even with UPF consumption, people are living longer now than they did prior to the advent of UPF.

It's the increased overall life span that generally makes such things even measurable. The hazard ratio for UPF consumption for death due to cardiovascular diseases is around 1.50.

When the most common causes of death were influenza, diphtheria, or tuberculosis, people generally weren't living long enough where dietary habits would impact overall lifespan.

I also think we underestimate just how "unbalanced" people's diets were even 50 years ago. The glow of the "good ole days" tends to cloud how we look at our current time. One great (American) example is the old food pyramid, compared to the current "My Plate" food guide.

[Imwashingmypirate]

I thought heart disease is more prevalent now because people eat SH17 now. Whereas years ago, they would have eaten sugar and processed food. But also, we do need to consider that a hundred years ago, they wouldn't have had the technology we have now that could assess what a person died of every time. So I think we can't accurately say that these issues have increased because people live longer when there are other variables that might affect the results.

There certainly is a dose dependent link between ultra processed food consumption, and all-cause mortality. The fact remains though, that even with UPF consumption, people are living longer now than they did prior to the advent of UPF.

It's the increased overall life span that generally makes such things even measurable. The hazard ratio for UPF consumption for death due to cardiovascular diseases is around 1.50.

When the most common causes of death were influenza, diphtheria, or tuberculosis, people generally weren't living long enough where dietary habits would impact overall lifespan.

I also think we underestimate just how "unbalanced" people's diets were even 50 years ago. The glow of the "good ole days" tends to cloud how we look at our current time.

Very good points. Thanks for explaining. Didn't consider disease.

Edit: disease as in viruses and infection

[Some Schmo]

The glow of the "good ole days" tends to cloud how we look at our current time.

I listened to someone (I really wish I could remember the reference) who was saying that studies show the "nostalgia of the good old days" happens to everyone who ages. Every generation feels like they came from a better time (usually when they were younger and knew a lot less about what was happening in the world), when in reality, we remember what we liked and discard most of the bad stuff, never being made aware of most of it, giving us an overall picture of a better time.

That's the only reason the slogan "Make America Great Again" works for some people, like America was once a better place to live overall. In some ways it may have been better for certain people, but it's a much better place to live for a lot more people than it used to be.

[Res Ipsa]

If I’m perpendicular to the axis of motion, I appear to get faster and thinner at the same time.

Follow Res for more hacks on how to quickly get that summertime bod.

Rockets are the answer to everything!

[Bond]

The answers are a lot simpler. Improvements in health care leading to fewer infant deaths, fewer strokes/heart attacks, and less smoking. Deaths of despair are becoming the main obstacle to pushing the average lifespan.

[Some Schmo]

"The age of the universe" is the age that would be measured by a co-moving observer—that is, by an observer for whom the expansion of the universe is equal in all directions.

That kind of co-moving observer is a lot like the old Newtonian concept of an observer who is at absolute rest. And it's true that the expansion of the universe does break the rule that there are no preferred reference frames.

That was never really the rule, though. The rule is that there are no "locally preferred frames". Any observations that you can make within any smallish volume of spacetime can be described in any reference frame you want, and the laws of nature will look the same in all of them. If you want to observe large-scale properties of the universe, though, then what you see doesn't just depend on the laws of nature, but also on the particular initial conditions of a big chunk of the universe.

The issue isn't a special weird loophole that comes up in cosmology. Running into a wall doesn't produce the same effects as standing still beside the wall, even though the frames that are moving and not moving, relative to the wall, are equally valid as frames. As far as the laws of nature are concerned, the wall could just as well have been moving differently, but given that the wall is doing what it is doing, one frame is running into the wall and the other frame isn't. It's the same here. The particular way the universe happens to be expanding, given the actual initial conditions that we had, selects a particular set of reference frames to be ones in which the expansion is the same in all directions.

These are the frames that are implied when we talk about the age of the universe. An observer who has been moving relative to those frames at high speed ever since the Big Bang, or who has been living close to an event horizon all this time, will have recorded a much shorter elapsed time than that age.

Thanks for that. I suppose I suspected the explanation to be something like this.