They are, but this, too, alas, is greatly exaggerated. People seem to confuse huge improvements in infant mortality (which has affects life expectancy at birth) with extensions in the natural life span (which basically hasn't happened). Here's the sad truth: life expectancy at age 65 has been increase at the rate of about one year per decade. There were centenarians a century ago, and there are centenarians today; they are not as rare today as they were then, they still aren't common, not even among women. It's not as if people were suddenly living to 115 and 120. It's not like the George Bernard Shaw play, Back to Methuselah, in which the human life span is suddenly extended to 300 years.jginseattle wrote:The fact fact is that people are living longer.
Wikipedia has a chart that's interesting in this regard. This is the distribution of the death ages of the signers of the Constitution in 1787. The average age at death was 67 years.