It's been good news of late for the pro-life, anti-death faction.
By that, we mean those zealots who advocate for maximizing our time on Earth, who just don't want people to die any time, for any reason, whatsoever. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that U.S. life expectancy is up to an all-time high of 78 years and 2 months.
That's the amount of time a baby born in 2009 is expected to live. Thus, most of today's Pittsburgh toddlers can count on about 75 more March Madness tournaments where they get their hopes up for the Pitt basketball team -- "Yeah, I know I was disappointed before, but this year clearly is the year, finally" -- only to have their hearts broken. (But, honestly, next year does look like THE year, doesn't it, Pitt fans?)
Those kids born two years ago are so lucky in so many other ways. Just think -- they will be a generation that lives to see completion of the reconstruction of Route 28 ... possibly. They will be able to travel most of their lives by subway to the North Shore, rather than face the daunting task on a beautiful summer evening of, say, walking across the Clemente Bridge.
The economic downturn must have affected the Grim Reaper's business operations. Somehow, even though there are more people in this country every year, there were 36,000 fewer deaths in 2009 than the year before.
There's a certain amount of logic to that trend, in the midst of the worst recession of modern times. If you're sitting at home, unemployed in your pajamas all day while watching TV, you're no longer risking a deadly car accident on your commute or an untimely demise at work from an industrial mishap or courtesy of an unhappy, deranged colleague hiding his semi-automatic in his lunchbox. (The CDC statistics indicate the chance of death from both accidents and homicides declined.)
Death rates are also down for the biggest killers of all: heart disease and cancer. If such trends keep up for another few millennia, we could reach the point where the only things anyone dies from are lightning strikes (about 58 U.S. victims per year) and shark attacks (about one victim annually).
We could all sit around growing old together, gossiping about how much better Tyler or Heather looked when they were 100 and could still reach their arms over their shoulders to comb what's left of their hair.
Unfortunately, none of that information is necessarily reliable (not to mention it's lacking consolation for the wimps who died despite the better chances of avoiding it).
The CDC now admits it made a mistake a year ago when it announced that life expectancy had declined in 2008, which then appeared to be a rare setback for humankind's heroic stride toward immortality. The agency says a computer programming error gave a false impression of backsliding, which appears to be another case of computers doing whatever they can to bedevil their human foes.
Assuming things are correct now, life expectancy points in the right direction, which officials ascribe to such factors as improved medical treatment, vaccination campaigns and anti-smoking measures. They don't mention anything about how much more time people have been devoting to Facebook (which hardly kills anyone) without commensurate increase in more hazardous hobbies, such as rattlesnake roundups.
Males keep narrowing the life expectancy gap on females, though not at a rate that women need to worry about (or hope for) being outnumbered. Today's boy toddlers can expect to live to 75.7 years, compared with 80.6 years for girls.
Thirty years ago, the gender gap was 7.8 years of life expectancy instead of 4.9 years. It seems that every year men are being a little less stupid than the year before about something, figuring out that they need to smoke less or exercise more or cut off their arm when it's pinned under a rock so they won't die all alone in some remote location.
Put it all together, and you've got a society of people forging ahead with strong hopes of living long and healthy lives -- perhaps even so long that they will see the Point State Park fountain spurting water again with the Pirates finishing a baseball season above .500. The possibility does give one something to live for, after all.
First Published: March 21, 2011, 8:00 a.m.