This video will tell you the odds of you living to 127 years old. Also, you can learn about your chances to live through the next year. Curious, eh? They show some interesting statistics here regarding the life and death.
Over 170,000 views per the first day confirm that this topic is catchy.
Hi, this is Emily from MinuteEarth.
Not to sound super-morbid, but with each passing second of life, the cells in our bodies accrue a little more damage, which is, at least partly, why as people get older, their odds of dying increase. Today, a 40-year-old has 0.3% chance of dying in the next year. Well, a 60-year-old has a 1% chance of dying in the next year, an 80-year-old has a 5% chance, and a 100-year-old has a 50% chance.
But around that age, there's some evidence that the odds of dying level off. So, what would make the mortality curve flatten out like that? One theory is that it has to do with natural selection and bad genes. Take a hypothetical gene mutation that proves fatal during childhood because it kills its host before they get old enough to reproduce – it never gets passed on, natural selection weeds it out.
On the other hand, a nasty mutation that tends to kill people after they grow up and reproduce, can get passed on, but here's where things get complicated. Because human kids depend on their parents for survival. So, a bad gene, that tends to kill relatively young adults, is also likely to indirectly kill their young kids and, thus, be weeded from the gene pool, too. But a bad gene that kills slightly older adults, has a lower chance of indirectly killing their slightly older, more self-sufficient kids and, thus, has a lower chance of getting weeded out of the gene pool. And the gene that kills even older adults, has an even lower chance of also killing their descendants.
In short, natural selection’s ability to eliminate harmful genes gets lower and lower as the age at which those genes strike gets higher and higher. And this could explain the weird death rate curve. Like, think of natural selection as a magical force field that protects people from the grim reaper, but it gets weaker as people get older, so their odds of dying go up. Eventually, the force field wears off entirely. So, while people's chances of dying at that age are really high, they don't go up any further because there's no protection left to lose.
And if the death rate really does level out, say, somewhere around 50% – once we hit 100 years of age – how long humans can ultimately live is just a numbers game. Right now, there are about half a million 100-year-olds on Earth. If half of them die each year, only about 15,000 will make it to 105, only about 500 will make it to 110, and odds are, none of the current centenarians will beat the old age record of 122. But if we count all 7.7 billion people living on the planet today, odds are that 15 of them will beat that record and one lucky human will live to the ripe old age of 127.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxLSTOE5TaM
