4 ms·

But if you multiply that 0.000001% by 7 billion people, what do you get?

mikeash 11y ago
The wording of "no human" implies that the total population is already accounted for.
richmarr 11y ago
I agree, the article's assumptions are lined up to stretch to an attention grabbing headline, but... "99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130" is not the same as "99.999999% chance of an individual reaching 130". Sorry, just my statistics pedantry for the day.
- isp 11y ago
  It's definitely not the same: I think you're missing a "not" in "99.999999% chance of an individual reaching 130". :-)
hueving 11y ago
You're mixing up confidence vs probability.
schoen 11y ago
It's not phrased as a "probability that an individual human will live to 130", but as a "probability that any human will live to 130" (although I'm not sure whether that's the calculation that the original author intended to do or whether it was correct). ... but I think it was (if you assume the unlimited validity of that law as ages increase, and its validity to everyone in the population), because I tried to use that formula and my bc crashed (!), the first time I've ever seen that. It was trying to compute e to the power of -1196855871164164755229127183619028619603176.29243358214210581124 which was the probability of a particular individual surviving to 130 according to the formula. That is a super-small number, which dwarfs the human population of 7 billion, so probably the original author did mean to say the thing about anyone-ever, and was probably correct within these assumptions about exponentials and their applicability.
- chiph 11y ago
  So someone like Lazarus Long has a (very small) chance to exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long
  - schoen 11y ago
    Well, the formula is defined for a probability of living to any age -- it gives some positive probability no matter what you put in. But the probability of living to age 130 under this formula is already so low as to be hard to visualize. I think this formula is a bit off at the high end because I evaluated it for 120 -- an age that at least one person has lived to -- and also got a probability suggesting that this would never have happened in human history. But it seems like the formula is still pretty close for almost all of the population.

The wording of "no human" implies that the total population is already accounted for.

I agree, the article's assumptions are lined up to stretch to an attention grabbing headline, but... "99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130" is not the same as "99.999999% chance of an individual reaching 130". Sorry, just my statistics pedantry for the day.

isp 11y ago
It's definitely not the same: I think you're missing a "not" in "99.999999% chance of an individual reaching 130". :-)

hueving 11y ago

You're mixing up confidence vs probability.

schoen 11y ago

It's not phrased as a "probability that an individual human will live to 130", but as a "probability that any human will live to 130" (although I'm not sure whether that's the calculation that the original author intended to do or whether it was correct). ... but I think it was (if you assume the unlimited validity of that law as ages increase, and its validity to everyone in the population), because I tried to use that formula and my bc crashed (!), the first time I've ever seen that. It was trying to compute e to the power of -1196855871164164755229127183619028619603176.29243358214210581124 which was the probability of a particular individual surviving to 130 according to the formula. That is a super-small number, which dwarfs the human population of 7 billion, so probably the original author did mean to say the thing about anyone-ever, and was probably correct within these assumptions about exponentials and their applicability.

chiph 11y ago
So someone like Lazarus Long has a (very small) chance to exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long
- schoen 11y ago
  Well, the formula is defined for a probability of living to any age -- it gives some positive probability no matter what you put in. But the probability of living to age 130 under this formula is already so low as to be hard to visualize. I think this formula is a bit off at the high end because I evaluated it for 120 -- an age that at least one person has lived to -- and also got a probability suggesting that this would never have happened in human history. But it seems like the formula is still pretty close for almost all of the population.