Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_of...

As a student with a mathematics background (and boy do we love 'simplifications'). I can never stop theorizing and thinking about what would happen if we would just insist on a maximum age of lets say 80. It will probably never happen, but just think about it. It's both morbid and fascinating in it's own sense.

That's an unwarranted claim. Various quantities of interest of complex systems more often than not follow certain statistical distributions. This is especially true about natural systems.

Flip 100 coins, call it one trial. Perform such trials a large number of times, a few hundred let's say. For each trial count the number of heads. In the end create a histogram (frequency of N-head trials, N ranging from 0 to 100). It'll look like a gaussian distribution! The emergence of such distribution feels strange, even though we pretty much know everything about the system. (Incidentally this is related to the Central Limit Theorem). Similar idea applies to human mortality distributions.

The best you could say is that these are very counter-intuitive observations/facts.

Evolution programmed us to make a human, but it didn't program us to stop developing. We're like a cake left in the oven. No one told the concrete suppliers to go home, so they just keep dumping it everywhere on our completed skyscraper.

We were built to die.

http://www.senescence.info/programmed_aging.html

This might be one of the more accessible papers: http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.short#ref-10

It's weird, we all pretend like it won't happen. We do our best to live without thinking about the fact that we have a X% chance of not making it to our next birthday.

I thought about my friend from college who died of cancer a year or so ago. I thought about my parents, who are quickly approaching those scary 1-in-1XX odds of dying every year.

It's like there's this scary axe-murderer out there, who's killing people left and right, and we all just do our best to ignore him. Because there's no stopping him. He'll come for you... He'll come for all of us. The only thing you can do is try not to think about it.

I think that graph would look almost perfect if the decay was exponential rather than linear. A better hypothesis would be every time you are hit by a lightning bolt, you are twice as likely to be restruck every year. So if you are hit and it was a 1/40 chance, next year would be a 1/20 chance until you are hit 5 times.

I'd really like to see a study that examines people's life expectancy when they move (very early) from a modern environment to one that resembles their parents' living conditions 10-20 years ago, the hypothesis being that their genes would have adapted to cope with those conditions and not with more recent changes, so they might live longer and healthier on average. Usually we do the opposite, many people move from rural to urban areas, so they need to adapt to more changes than those happening at an already fast pace in one area.

(apologies for half-serious unscientific techie ramblings)

*And all the other organisms that "reproduce" this way.

The frustrating part is if people throw enough money at the problem it can be solved ! its not like the problem of time-travel or anti-gravity. Ageing in just a computation problem that can be solved with enough data !

I wished my fellow humans spent a large part of the economy trying to solve it.