Well, that’s not really my question. But it’s a catchier title than
Maybe this belongs in GQ, but there’s more leeway for non-factual answers here.
Well, if you’re standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon at 11:59:59 pm wearing roller skates with one foot on a banana peel and the other on a bunch of tiny ball bearings, you probably have a fairly good chance of not seeing the sunrise tomorrow. 
A similar question was [thread=433706]asked recently[/thread]. Which in turn led to this Straight Dope column.
Similar question, yes; but I think I have a different question.
I don’t know if I can articulate the question properly. Let’s try this:
“Out of all the people alive right now, how many of them will be dead tomorrow at this time?”
It’s not that I’m offended or annoyed by your question, but…Why do you ask?
From time to time, during conversations about random events, I’ll say “Hey, you could die tomorrow!” – my way of telling people to appreciate life, live in the moment.
So, I turned that over and wondered: what are the odds for any given person on any given day?
Global population = 6,602,224,175
Global death rate = 8.37 per 1,000 annually
Deaths per year = 55,260,616
Deaths per day = 151,399
Odds of an individual dying on any given day = 151,399 / 6,602,224,175
From here
Hmmm. I was on a site earlier this week that predicts how old you’ll live to be if all goes well. According to it I’m supposed to live to be ~85. So if I have 55 years years left in which to accidentally bump myself off my odds of that happening tomorrow are like 1 in 20,000, right?
No, because the chance of dying the next day will increase as you get older. You’re much more likely to snuff it at age 80 than at age 30.
My calculator had some problems with those numbers so I just did a simpler calculation. Life expectancy = 80 years. There are 365 days in a year.
80 * 365= 29,200.
You have a 1 in 29,200 chance of dying within 24 hours.
No I’m sorry but I just have to quote some old git on being interviewed on their one hundreth birthday .
Do you think you’ll be celebrating your birthday this time next year?
Absaloutly!
Why are you so confident ?
Records show that very few people die on their one hundred and first birthday.
But to be serious if you live in the third world ,if you live in a crime ridden ghetto in the first world or if you are a sabre soldier in a first world army your chances of being dead tomorrow morning are significantly higher then the statistical average.
But speaking from the soldiers point of view ,you know that statistically people in your profession will have a much more likely chance of being dead in the near future .
But you also know without any doubt whatsoever in your mind that it wont be you ,it’ll be one of your mates ,
You completely ,totally know this .
Totally and with no reservations .
Not now not ever.
OP: In your 3 posts you’ve asked 4 distinct questions with 4 distinct answers.
A simple calculation of actual planetwide mortality yesterday versus planetwide population yesterday gives you a crude overall liklihood. But with various people having individual liklihoods varying by a factor of (WAG) 10,000 or more, that planetwide average hides a lot of differences.
Given that you’re a young-ish middle-class-ish person in the US, you & the people you deal with are severe outliers in any planetwide calculation. In other words, you’re vastly LESS likely to die tomorrow than the planetwide average would seem to indicate.
So you need numbers more tailored to your audience. Here’s (1.1MB PDF) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf a place to start, and here Life table - Wikipedia is some background info to help it make sense.
Doing some crude calculations from the survivorship tables we see that for a US 30 year old of unknown gender & race, the odds on dying tomorrow are about 0.0003%, or 1 in 329,000. For a 95 year old white female the numbers are 0.04% or 1 in 2500.
And even these numbers, which reflect the whole US population, are still crude averages hiding differences of (WAG) 20 or more to 1 between individuals. As a 30-something US male, are you a gang-banger or a shoe salesman? Do you ride a motorcycle? Do drugs? Skydive? Smoke? Have bad genes? Live downwind of an industrial area? Weigh too much? Live with a nutcase? All the above?
We do have at least one professional actuary here who can provide more insight if you want a real answer.
Fifty/Fifty. Either you will die or you won’t die. How difficult is that?
(Joke shamelessly stolen from Corner Gas)
Hmmmm. On September 10, 2001 I would have said the chances of any one person dying the next day by voluntarily jumping out of the World Trade Center Twin Towers was absolutely zero, nada, nope, would not happen. Don’t even bring up over 100 people.
Shows you how wrong statistics can be at predicting the future.
I agree with your (Simple) method but thee is no way that average life expectancy is 80 years for the entire worl population today. It is probably more like 50 (just a guess). It is still hard to find selected groups that have an average life expectancy that high but there are probably a few.
But isn’t life expectancy the amount of time that the average person is expected to live? In that case, the probability can’t be equal through 80 years. That would give an average date of death of 40 years.
And, obviously, since there aren’t a bunch of people living to 160, the chance of death is not constant each day.
I think the question posed by the OP is being stretched and most of the answers here (while accurate) are more complicated than need be in order to answer the scope of the original question.
Here is what was asked.
I interpret that as asking - out of all of the human organisms alive today, how many of them are going to be dead tomorrow and what are the odds that any one of us will be one of them?
No need to bring life expectancy, actuarial tables or any other factors into the equation.
I think I summed up the answer by researching the global population, determining the global death rate and calculating the likelihood that any one of us (in the global sense) will be missing out on tomorrow’s midnight snack. Not factoring in age or location or disease or anything else. Just all things being equal, how likely is death for any given human being.
The actual number based on the statistics that I quoted is 1 in 22,932
I’d say 100%, if I can just find you and kill you. What’s your address again?
Here are life tables for Canada. Even if you’re in the U.S., I bet they’d be approximately the same. I would think that you could probably look up the q(x) value from the 1x1 table for your age. This will give you the probability of death for this year of your life. If you divide that by 365, I think you would get a reasonable approximation of your chances of dying tomorrow.