In a current thread Sam Stone posits that a person that doesn’t age would have an average lifespan of 200-300 years before he/she dies of something non-age related. Let’s put some brainpower into this.
First of all, sooner or later you get cancer, and it would get you whether you aged or not, right? There are also accidents, a bunch of ailments you get as you age rather than because you age, and so forth. All together, how long could the average non-aging person expect to live?
Well what I assume is meant by “not aging” is that the person stops at the end of his maturation period–so roughly at age 25 or so. So theoretically one could just look at what the odds are of dying when you are 25.
However, given that someone who is 25 will be more likely to still be doing silly things like driving drunk than someone who has put a few more years under their belt, or that they will be unlikely to have developed cancer or anything due to health and time-on-earth factors, etc. it is rather difficult to say. One could just say those all balance out and permuting the likelihood of dying at age 25 on until you are left with a population of zero is good enough–but that seems rather cheap.
The problem is that if you look at odds for things on people, those odds are related to a slope. At 25 the odds that you might develop a cancerous growth might be 1 in 5000, then 1 in 4000 at 30, 1 in 3000 at 25, etc. Now some of that slope will be due to overall fitness level and some of it to time-on-earth. But is that a 50-50 split? Probably not as while as your fitness level is fairly guaranteed to have reached 0 by the age of 120, you may never have had cancer.
So to figure out the probability of fatal disease, we need to remove the fitness part and just leave in the time-on-earth. And then do similar things for “death by misadventure”, etc.
Just to offer a plan of attack before people go statistic searching.
If aging is taken out of consideration, then your chance of dying in the course of any given year (of disease or accident) will remain constant. It’s the same deal as the chance that a radioactive atom will decay in the next second - it remains constant. And that means that, like radioactive isotopes, you cannot talk of the whole lifetime of a non-aging human population, but only of a half-life. After x years half of your non-aging humans will be dead. After 2x years three quarters will be dead, and so on.
As for the actual value of x, I have no idea. But I’d be disappointed if it were less than 150 years.
I do not think this is a valid assumption. Just as some people have a genetic predispostion towards some cancers, others have a much lower genetic risk of cancer unless they are exposed to powerful carcinogens or radiation. I don’t think cancer is waiting in everyone’s future if they just live long enough.
For first level approximation we should probably consider that the mortality rate will be less than the current minimum mortality rate of any ‘adult’ age group. This is because I susspect people will tend towards the most safety concious living when there is no longer the beleith “I’m going to get old soon, lets enjoy myself whilst I can”
For the USA yearly mortality rates for both sexes all races in year 2002.
danger PDF showd that it seems to be the 25-29 year old group with a rate of 94.7 / 100000
We should also note that the 5-9 year group has a much lower rate of 15.2 / 100000
Which suggests to me that Adult pursuits and activities (having a job, being able to drive, alowd to drink) increase the mortality rate by roughly 6 times.
This gives first approximations of average lifespan between 1056 and 6579 years.
What is left over is cumulative effects. The build up of carcinogens, poisons, minor damage and the like over time. These will likely reduce the first order approximations above by a very large amount but I susspect there will be no way to accurately determine how much effect such things have.
The only time we stop aging is when we are dead… so the answer to your question is that you would live until the point you stop aging.
Except, isn’t that exactly what “dying of old age” is? If we’re leaving those in, the answer is 70-80 years, same as in town.
I suspect that cancer is actually in this category, too: Most cancers are found primarily in older folks, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider the increased risk of cancer to be one of the effects of “aging” that the OP is positing we eliminate.
In the book, “Younger Next Year” the authors make a clear distinction between decay and aging. The fact in the US is that most seniors live very destructive lifestyles and so decay has come to be automatically associated with aging. If you have a poor diet and lead a sedentary lifestyle, your body decays regardless of your age. Seniors that exercise daily and have good nutrition tend to stay healthy well into their eighties. Eliminating aging wouldn’t stop the cumulative effects of decay, so you would also need to lead a healthy lifestyle if you want to remain healthy.
Good point, but to live you have to use energy. And so have chemical transfer from the outside world to the living cells and back again. Certainly you could live at 25 years old for 25000 years quite easily if you were frozen solid for the entire time. You might even be possible to be resucitated afterwards. But that isn’t living as far as I would consider it.
So to live we need to metabolise. This entails subjecting the body to the potential of external and internally generated poisons or pathogens. How close you can get to elliminating all such poisons determines how close you can approach my first approximation numbers above.
Next there is the fact that mortality rates don’t take into account non lethal injuries (obviously). Now though someone might survive the loss of one lung without appearing in the mortality figures, such a person would be screwed if in a few hundred years time they by similar laws of chance were to lose the other lung.
Unless ut us also possible to restore any lost bodily capabilities due to disease or damage then these thihgs will eventually take their toll.
An example if drinking a glass of wine kills 100 neurons, over 25 years of drinking the combined effect might be negligable. Over 500 years of drinking the effect could add up to a significant portion of the brain tissue. This sort of damage cannot be called normal aging as far as I can see.
[QUOTE=Bippy the Beardless]
An example if drinking a glass of wine kills 100 neurons, over 25 years of drinking the combined effect might be negligable.QUOTE]
I agree; way too slow. That’s why I drink vodka.
I read a sci-fi novel in which this was a plot point. A woman went to an actuarian and asked what an estimated lifespan would be if all natural causes of death were eliminated. The answer was that if the chances of dying accidentally in a given year were 1 in 5000 (totally made up number), then 5000 years would be the expected lifespan.
Whether that’s true or not, I don’t now. However, now that I think about it, that doesn’t seem quite right. I think Alive at Both Ends’s method is more accurate.
If anyone can recognize the title of that book, let me know, as I’ve forgotten it.