The US has a rapidly aging population with falling birthrates and unprecedented longer life expectancies. Some futurists even predict humans will remain healthy and productive past their 120th birthday as medicine advances. Yesterday’s exceptionally long lives could become tomorrow’s norms.

But in contrast to this, a new survey finds Americans don’t necessarily want to live much longer lives.

  • When asked whether they personally would want medical treatments to extend their lives by decades – so they could live to be 120 or more – 56% of adult Americans aged 18 and over said no.
  • When asked how long they would like to live, 69% gave an answer of between 79 and 100 years.

The median average of this range of answers on ideal age comes to 90 years – about 11 years longer than the current life expectancy of Americans.

However, while it seems they are not sure about seeking medical treatment to slow aging for themselves, individual Americans feel others may be less hesitant, because when asked if they thought most people would choose to have medical treatment to extend their lives, 68% said yes.

The telephone survey by the Pew Research Center, released online this week, took place between late March and early April 2013 and sampled a nationally representative group of over 2,000 adults. It examined attitudes to aging and health care, personal life satisfaction, views on potential advances in medicine (such as radical life extension) and other bioethical topics.

The overall impression is that the average American is not too concerned about the aging US population.

Nearly 90% of survey respondents said having more elderly people in the population was either a good thing for society or did not make a lot of difference.

The findings also suggest Americans see old age positively:

  • 81% said they were satisfied with their lives today.
    These people anticipate that in 10 years’ time their lives will be either better (56%) or the same (28%).

Financial resources: while 2 out of 5 said they were “somewhat worried” (one fifth said “a lot,” another fifth said “a little”) about running out, more than half said they either didn’t worry too much about money or didn’t worry about it at all.

Americans appear to be optimistic about future progress in science.

  • About 70% said they thought most forms of cancer will be curable by 2050, and that prosthetic limbs will outperform natural ones.
  • Two thirds see medical progress that extends lifespan as generally a good thing, and do not see it as interfering with nature.

However, the survey also showed there is some wariness about new medicine: 41% of Americans said today’s medical treatments often cause as many problems as they solve and only 24% said they had a lot of confidence that new treatments were carefully tested before being made generally available.

A recent report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that US life expectancy varies from state to state, and also by gender and race.

Written by Catharine Paddock PhD