If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
Unfortunately, no, this is pure wishful thinking.<p>Using life expectancy is a misleading argument, and I believe intentionally so. Life expectancy is a function of early mortality. Longevity is the average age at death of people who die only of old age, and it doesn&#x27;t vary much and hasn&#x27;t for thousands of years. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Longevity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Longevity</a><p>Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won&#x27;t come to pass. I wish they would, but they won&#x27;t.<p>The part that bothers me is that Kurzweil, at least, knows his argument is wrong, it is clear that he&#x27;s intentionally misusing the data and knows it. Take a look at the very last graph and paragraph in this piece, for example: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kurzweilai.net&#x2F;the-law-of-accelerating-returns" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kurzweilai.net&#x2F;the-law-of-accelerating-returns</a>.<p>Kurzweil uses data from 1850-1920 and then conveniently skips all the years between 1920 and 2000. That is not possible to do accidentally, it is a misleading abuse of statistics. Unfortunately for Kurzweil, if you look at the data between 1920 and 2000, it paints a completely different picture, one of life expectancy asymptotically flat-lining.<p>Kurzweil also appears to conflate life expectancy with longevity, he says &quot;In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity;&quot;. That statement is false. We added to human life expectancy, <i>not</i> longevity. And the gains were due to reductions in infant mortality and violence, and improvements in medicine and general health.