Apparently, babies born this year have a 1 in 3 chance of re

[Steven M. McCann]

I think it would be safe to assume quite a few will live a good deal past it.
Who knows? maybe middle age won't start until you're 60,
the retirement age could be put back to 85 (the Tories are already working on it!)
40 year olds might be considered youngsters.

[Steven M. McCann]

Should have said "reaching 100".

[Matthew Tassier]

Even assuming you meant to add "in the UK" too, it still feels like lazy/populist/detached statistical work to me. Yes, ONS, I'm looking at you.

In reality a Brit turning 97 this year has a 1 in 3 chance of reaching 100.

Also 40 year olds are youngsters.

[Gavin Chipper]

Yeah, it's just made up. What are they basing it on?

[David Williams]

Yeah, it's just made up. What are they basing it on?

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetable ... o-100.html
Perhaps you could save me the trouble of reading it by having a look at the statistical bulletin at the bottom and pointing out the flaws.

[Gavin Chipper]

Yeah, it's just made up. What are they basing it on?

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetable ... o-100.html
Perhaps you could save me the trouble of reading it by having a look at the statistical bulletin at the bottom and pointing out the flaws.

I had a look through this. While it may be a bit strong to say it's "just made up", all future predictions of life expectancy are based on some massive guesstimation and basically extending a few graphs in the direction they look like they're going in. First of all, you can't simply extend life expectancy indefinitely (other then by stopping ageing - see below). By having more healthy lives etc., people still have a limit to how long they will live. No-one really knows if the average person has the genes to live to 100 by just eating more fruit and vegetables, avoiding stress and exercising.

But then obviously you have improvements in medical science. But this needs to be more than simply treating illnesses better. People's bodies will still pack up. So then we're talking about stopping/reversing the ageing process. This technology is likely to happen at some point, and you can't work out when it will happen by simply extrapolating from a life expectancy graph. I'd say it's very likely that this will happen within the next 100 years, so someone born today reaching 100 may also reach 1000.