Re: Age 141?

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Sun, 15 Mar 1998 17:27:27 -0800 (PST)

> >Potential lifespans aren't absolute; the chance of death never goes
> >to 1. With humans the chance of death seems to max out at about
> >40% per year or so. With enough people, or enough luck, you could
> >probably get any age you wanted; it's just that the number of people
> >or amount of luck required goes up fast and exponentially.
>
> As I understand you, the larger the sample, the larger the resulting
> estimate? Has anyone seen any estimates based on the theory of
> programmed cell death?

The effect he's talking about is not medical, merely statistical.
The larger the population, the greater the chance for a > 0
measurement at the far right of the bell curve. While one might
be able to calculate an expected maximum age of a particular
population, it wouldn't really be a meaningful piece of information
because it would be based on the empirical properties of the
curve we have now, and there's no reason to suspect that those
would hold for a different population.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC