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If we consider the average lifespan as say 80 years old, I find it quite interesting that no single human ever has achieved even close to twice that age.
by mongol 5y ago
If we consider the average lifespan as say 80 years old, I find it quite interesting that no single human ever has achieved even close to twice that age.
- lawlorino 5y agoWhy?
- jlkuester7 5y agoI think the GP just means that the tail of the age bell curve seems (surprisingly) short to them. The implication being that when doing statistics with a large number of data points, you often see several outliers that are way outside the curve. In the case of age, the tail of the curve falls to 0 very quickly.
- darkerside 5y agoWe've done a lot to shift this away from a normalized curve, which feels very unfair to us as humans, to one where more people have a chance to live to a longer age. We've spent much less effort trying to extend the longest lifespans. This seems totally rational to me.
- buran77 5y agoIt seems strange for some people because they imagine this "average" as a classical mean and the intuitive shape of the bell curve - the biggest chunk must be in the middle ("for every child that dies at birth someone must live to be 160 to have the 80 years average where most people should be") rather than a statistical life expectancy. We substantially reduced a lot of the external factors killing us early (disease, war, accidents, etc.) and we're hitting the real limit of human lifespan. We haven't addressed this because we don't have the tools yet. So all the work was to push the curve to the right because that benefits most people and it has a lower threshold to achieve this, without actually pushing the tail end further right because it benefits very few and it seems like an impossible task today. The average speed for an F1 race might be 250Km/h. This doesn't mean any of the cars can ever hit close to 500Km/h. Just that we eliminated most of the reasons cars were slowing down and were left with the fundamental limits of the car's speed as dictated by it's engine, grip, aerodynamics, or weight.
- inglor_cz 5y agoWell, we already have a lot of medical interventions that skew our species' "normal", pre-civilizational population tree towards something never seen in nature. In a Stone Age society you would definitely find people twice as old as their group's average lifespan. But that average lifespan would be rather low.
- darebak 5y agoDidn't most people live to their 60s if they survived childhood and pregnancies?
- 6502nerdface 5y agoYeah it depends whether you count all of the infant deaths in the average.
- inglor_cz 5y agoThe bones from old burial sites up to and including the Middle Ages indicate that most people didn't live into their 60s. Not even those who reached 30 in good health. There always are old adults present, but they are rare. From your nickname, I gather you are a Czech. I can link an article about analysis of an early medieval cemetery in Rajhradice to you. 244 buried people, 220 skeletons were successfully analyzed for age. No one over 60, eight people over fifty (almost all women). https://karolinum.cz/data/clanek/5704/Praehist_34_1_0007.pdf https://karolinum.cz/data/clanek/5704/Praehist_34_1_0007.pdf
- thfuran 5y agoThe child (<5 years) mortality rate in the US in 1800 was 46.29%. I can't seem to readily find US life expectancy at birth for 1800, but most places seems to have been 30-35, which would correspond to life expectancy at 6 years of age of at least 51-60. Life expectancy at birth was around 30-35 for at least the several preceding centuries in Europe.
- inglor_cz 5y agoThis is a nice graph from the Modern Age (mid-1500s to late 1900s) in England. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/data/13030/tf/ft096n99tf/figures/ft096n99tf_00004.gif https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/data/13030/tf/ft0... Basically, until the 19th century, between 25-35 % of people lived to be 60 or more. In the 20th century, this grew rapidly up to 90 per cent. 80 y.o.-s would be very rare even in the 19th century, while now about half of the population lives to be eighty. Note that this is the Modern Age. In the Middle Ages, survival would have been worse. A more primitive agriculture, less developed long distance trade and fewer staple foods (no potatoes etc. in Europe prior to the Columbian exchange) would result in frequent famines that took the infirm first. Things would be yet worse in the Early Middle Ages, the period of frequent nomadic incursions and warfare in most of Europe. At least the High Middle Ages were relatively peaceful compared to the period before.
- throwaway81523 5y agoIf we consider the average height as say 160 cm tall, I find it quite interesting that no single human has achieved even close to twice that height.
- gshubert17 5y ago>> find it quite interesting that no single human ever has achieved even close to [160 years]. Human mortality varies widely, but one relationship seems constant: death rate increases exponentially with age. A mortality table from 2011 shows males age 40 have a death rate of 2.1 per thousand; at age 100 the death rate is 357.9 per thousand. That's an increase of a factor of 170 over 60 years, or about 9% per year. Mortality graphs are almost straight lines on semilog plots. Different groups (men versus women, different countries, etc.) show different y-intercepts but the slopes of all these mortality curves is about the same. From this we can deduce that males aged 104 (in this sample) have about a 50% chance of dying within the next year: another way of saying their life expectancy is 1 year. Mortality rates which increase 9% a year, will double in 8 years. So a male aged 112 will have a life expectancy of 6 months. At age 120, 3 months. And so on. That's why we don't see many humans older than 110 or so, and why no one has lived past 130.