Extending the time we are alive, slowing down or even stopping human aging, is one of the most pursued scientific challenges throughout history. Just two centuries ago, our life expectancy barely exceeded 40 years, but technological and medical discoveries have made the 21st century a path of dizzying advances that have doubled our life expectancy and brought us closer to the so-called super longevity.
In Spain, life expectancy at birth has doubled in the last century: we have gone from hopefully reaching 40 years in 1900 to exceeding 83 years in 2019, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics (INE). In the last 50 years, the number of people over the age of 80 has tripled, while the number of those over the age of 90 has increased fivefold. This global trend indicates that, by 2050, the number of centenarians will increase from 533,000 to more than three million, according to United Nations data.
"We are very close to living 150 years," says biochemist Juan Carlos Izpisúa in the National Geographic documentary Science of Life: Longevity. "We have started to study aging in monkeys because we think it has a greater relevance for humans."Scientific advances are increasing and place us one step away from a future that, according to this expert, is much closer than we thought. it may seem.
However, this new reality poses profound changes at many levels that could transform society as we know it. Is extending life necessarily good? What social, psychological and economic consequences could a super long-lived society have?
Will it change our concept of age?
“The transition towards a life span of 150 years will probably take place slowly, so that we will have time to assimilate being able to reach that age and assume the possible psychological consequences it has”, explains Juan Manuel García González, a sociologist specializing in superlongevity and first author of the recent study Research in people aged 100 and over: protocol of the centenary studies of Seville and Castilla y León, to National Geographic.
Living in longer-lived societies could affect our way of relating or things as basic as our concept of love or family, as explained by the philosopher Juan Antonio Valor Yébenes in the documentary. Our concept of age will not be the same, and neither will being young or being old, as well as the activities that we associate with these times. Everything can vary because everything is induced according to our current concept of old age.
Until now, “this increase in life expectancy, and therefore in longevity, that is, that more and more people reach increasingly advanced ages, has already changed our society and has been accompanied by a change in the family model derived from an increasingly low birth rate: homes are smaller and families less extensive”.
The change in family nuclei is accompanied by an increasingly aging population. This "causes the models of intergenerational relations or the pension system to change as well," explains García González. “We cannot talk about social change without taking into account those intergenerational relationships on which the entire system is based.”
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— K-J4X Mon Jan 18 00:34:28 +0000 2021
In this line, experts are already talking about the current precariousness of young people could be a drag on the evolution of the increase in longevity and life expectancy.
Aging with mental and emotional health
Along with the increase in life expectancy, over the years we have also seen a qualitative increase in the health of the very elderly, who they age in better conditions, according to the CSIC study A profile of the elderly in Spain.
“If this longevity is accompanied by the same health that there is now when they reach 110 or 120, our studies indicate that centenarians or supercentenarians who have adequate physical health and do not present cognitive deterioration tend to have a very good emotional health”, explains García González.
Most of the scientific studies that have been carried out so far on super longevity and centenarians have focused on analysis from demography, medicine or genetics. However, "there are few who have asked [centenarians] directly how they are doing."
To delve into the emotional health of these elderly people, García González and his team have conducted more than thirty interviews with centenarians who had a good cognitive state. “In general, they showed very good emotional health, they were happy to have reached that age in good condition and happy to be accompanied by their family, despite having lost many loved ones along the way,” she explains.
Several interviews were recorded on video for a scientific documentary called A vivir que son 100 años, organized by the General Foundation of the Higher Council for Scientific Research with the aim of giving a scientific vision of longevity and healthy aging.
The societies of the future
The projections that try to investigate what the societies that the new longevity draws will be like have focused above all on how to live in good health and how to sustain a society with a higher percentage of people in advanced ages. According to the study by García González, "the projection says that they will be friendlier, more open, accessible and supportive cities."
The redistribution of work will be one of the great transformations of our towns and cities during the 21st century, with the possibility of reducing the working day thanks to the advancement of technology and artificial intelligence, or extending the retirement age in order to maintain pensions of more and more elderly people. Without yet being sure of where we will go at the work level, we do begin to see changes at the social level derived from the increase in our life expectancy when taking a look at the statistics. For example, marriages of people over the age of 60 in Spain have multiplied by five in four decades, according to data from the INE.
Despite the fact that there is no consolidated knowledge in this regard, society is advancing faster and faster at a technological and scientific level, which will accelerate discoveries more and more every day. Without going any further, a recent study published in the scientific journal Nature discovered a new longevity biomarker, thanks to the fact that blood concentrations of protein produced in neurons offer clues about the survival prospects of people over ninety years of age. Along these lines, an international research team led by the CSIC's Institute of Evolutionary Biology has identified more than 2,000 genes linked to human longevity using an evolutionary perspective in mammals.
While academia continues its race against time to study these questions and try to understand what our old age will be like in the future, the new longevity advances in leaps and bounds. The current objective is for the science of the present to serve as a "starting point for the growing number of social science studies on centenarians that will be published in Spain in the short and medium term and that will host a range of very diverse investigations".