Editorial: Old enough to know better

Thursday, Nov. 24, 2005 | 7:57 a.m.

With religion, politics, war in Iraq and evolution vs. intelligent design all taboo table-talk for Thanksgiving, here's a question sure to spark some lively discourse with the main course:

How long is too long to live?

USA Today recently reported that U.S. Census Bureau figures show an estimated 71,000 Americans are at least 100 years old. By 2010, the Census Bureau predicts, 114,000 Americans will be 100 or older. And by 2020 an estimated 241,000 of the nation's residents will be centenarians.

We didn't live half that long a century ago. In 1905 the average American lived 47 years, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, the average American can expect to live 78 years.

Many of us, it seems, are destined to live much longer despite growing concerns that obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease is reaching epidemic proportions in some age groups.

Certainly, antibiotics that eradicated diseases that once wiped out whole communities and drugs that treat heart disease are among the major contributors to our extended lifespans. Gene research may hold more keys to halting cancer and even the aging process. Some experts wonder whether continued research will push average life expectancies to 150 or even 200 years.

If someone was 200 years old today, he or she would have been born while Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were exploring the western regions of the Louisiana Purchase. He or she would have seen wagons give way to trains, bicycles, horseless carriages, automobiles, airplanes, jets and space shuttles. It's enough to turn one's hair gray.

But most of us, a USA Today poll shows, would rather die earlier -- at about 87. One geriatrics expert, who co-authored a book on aging, told USA Today that "most people just want to live as healthy and as full a life as they can." And that, it seems, is a plan we can all live with.