Re:There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives hu...
by nonbel on Friday June 29, 2018 @08:02PM
(#17428765)
Imagine you keep flipping 10 coins, stopping each once it has come up heads. Eventually all will have come up heads. But if you do this a bunch of times and keep track of how many times you flipped the last coin, there will be a certain number of flips at which the end is most commonly reached.
The "mortality rate" increasing then flattening out is just this curve reaching its peak then declining. The math of this is easy enough to figure out so not sure why there is a mystery amongst biologists about it.
Re:There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives hu...
by nonbel on Saturday June 30, 2018 @09:29AM
(#17430813)
Well hopefully one person actually writes the simulation, etc then calculates the hazard rate curve.
I guarantee that once you understand how universal and simple the phenomenon is that's going here on you will be stunned at the ridiculousness of this "lifespan controversy".
One of two things may be true:
1) As we age, mortality rate increases until certain
2) As we age, mortality rate increases, and then levels off at some point
The latter doesn't mean you'll live forever: you're still already rolling the dice at the highest handicap every year. But it does mean there's no fundamental age everyone MUST die by (aka "live forever", if you're one in a billion).
The more interesting differentiation between the two, and the reason biology is interested in the question, is as an answer to "If we want to maximally prolong life, what do we do?"
If the flattening risk (option 2) model is correct, then we could extend life very far indeed by simply preventing people from dying of things that normally kill them by age 85 (e.g. disease, cancer) and then provide them with high quality medical support (to best fight the risk of their expiring from "normal" causes, e.g. accidents).
On the other hand, if it's ever-increasing risk (option 1), we should instead spend our effort at untangling the microbiology mysteries at the root of aging, and see if we can instead re-engineer systems to not work the way they currently do.
Or as my father (PhD in pathology) quips on the whole matter, "At some point, old folks are past the point that all of things that normally kill people would have killed them. And by virtue of still being alive, it's probable they're more resistant. We say they've reached escape velocity."