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Re:There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives hu... by kbenson on Friday June 29, 2018 @07:41PM (#17428693)
> mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday

Isn't the question whether or not we can affect the odds here? If we can increase it to 75:25 at this plateau, then we also are also increasing the age longest lived of these people are predicted to live for immensely, and the last person of this example group of 1 million starting at age 105 you give would expect that last person to die not 10 years later (at 115) on average as with a 50:50 mortality, but around 48 years later, at 153. Every slight change in that mortality rate affects that long tail quite a bit, relatively speaking.

I for one believe that might have an immense effect on how people view their health and longevity. If people believe that taking care of themselves might give them many decades of additional life instead of a few years, that could lead to a wider shift.

Re:There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives hu... by Something1234 on Sunday July 01, 2018 @11:52AM (#17436042)
How did you come to 48 years later? When I calculated it came to about 21 years.

    In [2]: def reduce_pop(pop, prob):
       ...:     if pop <= 1:
       ...:         return 1
       ...:     return 1 + reduce_pop(pop * prob, prob)
       ...: 

    In [3]: reduce_pop(1000000, 0.5)
    Out[3]: 21
Where pop is the initial starting group, and prob is how many die off(with 50:50 I expected half of them die off each year).

Please correct me if my math is wrong or if I'm miss interpreting how to calculate this.

Re:There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives hu... by kbenson on Monday July 02, 2018 @04:54AM (#17440212)
48 is for the 75:25 probability.

I did have the wrong number of years for 50:50 though, it's not the 10 I stated. This problem is the reverse of binary doubling, and I knew 10 bits are a needed to get to 1024, and my brain just sealed out thousand and million. It takes 20 bits to get to over 1 million, so 20 halvings from exactly 1 million should get you to less than 1.