The average human lifespan is currently about 73 years, and this number may seem normal these days. However, about 100 years ago, global life expectancy was much lower, ranging between 30 and 50 years, depending on the region. In 1900, the average life expectancy of newborns was only 32 years, according to the Our World in Data platform.
This means that people were mostly born and died young, and there were not many elderly people, and those who reached the age of 50 were considered centenarians.
Elderly people more than children
By 2015, the number of people over the age of 50 in the world exceeded 1.6 billion, and this number is expected to double by 2050 to reach about 3.2 billion people, according to the Oxford Economics platform.
Last year, the number of elderly people – aged 50 and over – exceeded the number of children under the age of 15 for the first time in history, in general.
The world’s population of 8 billion now consists of 2 billion children, 2 billion elderly, and 4 billion young people and other adults, according to the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Brookings Institution.
By 2030, it is expected that 1 in 6 people globally will be age 60 or over, nearly 1.4 billion people in total. By 2050, this number is expected to reach 2.1 billion people, according to the World Economic Forum.
“Longevity Economy”
This emerging global situation has led to the dawn of a new economy called “longevity economics,” which focuses on studying the economic effects of increasing life expectancy and an aging population. It also studies how longer population lives affect various aspects of the economy, including health care costs. Retirement systems, labor markets, and aggregate productivity.
“Longevity economics” also refers to the economic contributions of people aged 50 or over to the global economy.
According to the global “Longevity Economy” report issued by AARB in 2020, the population over the age of 50 contributed about $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34%, equivalent to about 3 times combined revenues. The 100 most profitable companies in the world in 2020.
World Data Lab expects spending growth for this group to represent approximately 5.5% over the next decade. Seniors’ spending accounted for 42% of total spending worldwide in 2024, and as they grow in number and wealth, their relative contribution will continue to rise dramatically. Steady.
Within this group of seniors, it is expected that those aged 65 years and over will be the ones who spend the most. It is also expected that the new group of seniors will have accumulated higher financial savings than their predecessors, and therefore per capita spending will also increase. .
The combination of these two forces is expected to lead to overall growth in senior spending of between 6% and 6.5% annually over the next decade, making the age group 65 and older the fastest growing. In fact, a large portion of this spending will go towards “prolonging life” more and more – according to the Brookings Institution – which prompts us to look at the other side of the picture, which is how much do the wealthy people in the world pay to improve their health (extend their lives)?
Americans spend the most
Americans are spending more time and money improving their health to take care of themselves in the future, and this comes in the wake of the United States leading the global economy in the field of “longevity”, which reached $5.2 billion in investments in 2022, according to the “Longevity Technology” website.
A new study of 3,000 people found that nearly half of Americans (41%) are willing to spend time ensuring they can live as long as possible.
The study, conducted by A/B Consulting in partnership with Marvin VC in June 2023, revealed the extent to which wealthy Americans are willing to go to extremes in their quest to “extend their lives,” according to what Fortune magazine reported.
The illusion of living forever
The results show that wealthy Americans can and do spend more money on health-improving practices, even experimental, unsafe ones.
The study found that high-income groups, that is, those who live in families with an income of more than $250,000 a year, were more likely to spend their time and money on their health compared to those who live in families whose income is less than $50,000 a year.
46% of high-income Americans say they will use the majority of discretionary income to improve health, compared to 34% of low-income Americans, with more than half of high-income Americans willing to participate in clinical trials aimed at improving health.
Moreover, 41% of upper-income Americans say they would load up their brains on a computer to live forever compared to 19% of lower-income Americans, according to the study.
Likewise, 40% of high-income Americans will genetically modify their children in the future compared to 20% of low-income Americans, and 42% of high-income Americans will take risky medications for chronic health problems.
“As health care costs rise and health increasingly becomes a privilege for the elite, our study confirms the idea that wealthier populations are willing to invest in more sophisticated and risky treatments, almost all of which are associated with significant additional costs,” Fortune magazine quoted Anarjya Vardhana, general partner at Maveron, as saying.
Billionaire spending
The trend in health improvement and anti-aging has enormous investment potential, with the potential to deliver unprecedented returns for investors. The world’s billionaires pay huge sums of money, establish companies and institutions, and fund massive scientific research for this purpose. Among the big names is the founder of… Amazon “Jeff Bezos“And founder Google Larry Page, Sergey Brin, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and Tesla founderElon MuskAnd other wealthy people in the world.
The companies and institutions funded by these wealthy people focus on specialized projects costing billions of dollars in the fight against aging, leading to “aging that is almost insignificant.”
It includes control strategies Aging They fund advanced scientific experiments and projects that include partial cellular reprogramming aimed at reprogramming cells and returning them to a youthful state, or at least partially reversing epigenetic changes, which is one of the causes of aging and aging using so-called “Yamanka factors.”
Companies such as Google Calico are investigating alternative ways to achieve partial cellular reprogramming without the use of Yamanka agents. It has partnered with pharmaceutical giants to research and trial new market-targeted anti-aging drugs.
Calico California Life Company was announced in 2013 as a project aimed at combating aging and related diseases, by searching for ways to “harness advanced technologies.”
It is listed as an American biotechnology research and development company, and according to the official description on its website, “We will use knowledge to innovate interventions that enable people to live longer, healthier lives. Executing this mission will require an unprecedented level of multidisciplinary effort and a long-term focus that is already funded.” “.
Google has allocated $1.5 billion for this goal.
In general, the company is still conservative about the methods and means it uses, as well as the results it has reached, but it is widely believed that Calico takes a “big data” approach to health by collecting huge amounts of information about patients, and analyzing it to help accelerate the path to drug discoveries. Treatments that combat aging and associated diseases.
Elon Musk
In the Amazon series Upload, the concept of mind uploading was explored as a man’s memories and personality were uploaded into an avatar that resembled him.
In his article commenting on the series, writer Devendra Hardware asked, “Even if some technology can carry your mind to the cloud, is the resulting consciousness still you?” This is a very important ethical question that awaits an answer.
NeuraLink, a company founded by Musk, works on “brain-machine interfaces” to upload the human mind.
The value of Musk’s “NeoraLink” for transplanting brain stem cells was about $2 billion in a private financing round two years ago, but it became worth about $5 billion last year based on stock deals carried out privately, according to what informed sources told Reuters.
Some purchases by wealthy, optimistic investors boosted the valuation in recent months, the sources said, before NeuraLink announced that US regulators had approved a human trial on its brain chip.
3D printer
One way to improve health is to use biotechnology and medicine to “keep the body rejuvenated” and this can be done in several ways, including genetic engineering that prevents (or reverses) cell aging.
It will also become possible to replace vital body organs that are sick or suffering from a defect with other new parts, and many scientists are working to create human organs using 3D printers loaded with living cells, which could one day make human organ donors redundant.
The global bioprinting market, valued at approximately $2.1 billion in 2021, is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 16.2%, reaching nearly $5 billion by 2027.
Among the most prominent companies investing in this field are: 3D BioCorp, 3D Bioprinting Solutions, Celllink, and others.