Is Life Expectancy Finally Topping Out?

Illustration: Kotryna Zukauskaite

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief futurist, says that if you can just hang on until 2029, medical advances will start to “add one additional year, every year, to your life expectancy. In 1850, the combined life expectancies of men and women stood at around 40 years in the United States, Canada, Japan and much of Europe. The trend may well continue for a few decades, given that life expectancies of elderly people in affluent countries rose almost linearly from 1950 to 2000 at a combined rate of about 34 days per year.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org