75 years of nation-wide life expectancy is also likely to include early deaths due to accidents, cancer and such. People who die of "old age" typically do later than 75.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

When people talks about life expectancy 99.99% of the time they mean life expectancy at birth, at every year the life expectancy change. Using this life table someone with 61 years, have a life expectancy of 19.7 years, that means he's expected to live until he's 80.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Yep, and that was true even going all the way back through history. People weren't routinely dying in their 30s or whatever before modern medicine; it's just that a lot more of them were dying in infancy/early childhood and that brought down the average. (That's the situation anti-vaxxers are trying to go back to, BTW.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I would say it’s appropriate to loop cancer deaths into the “old age” bucket – DNA getting old and making mistakes replicating seems relevant.

load more comments (5 replies)