Does the ten year old child provide an actuarial model for superlongevity?
According to the actuarial tables:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
A ten year old boy has a probability of survival in that year of 0.999918. After that, his probability of survival in a given year decreases with every additional year.
If you could lock in the ten year old's probability of survival per year after the age of 10, mathematically a population of such individuals would have a "half life" of ~ 8000 years. In other words, if you had a population of 1,000 such individuals with their annual probability of survival fixed at .999918, about half of them could survive for 8,000 years or so.
Of course this sort of calculation doesn't mean anything without an empirical demonstration; the data have to come in over 8,000 years. That shows the problem with claims of life extension breaktrhoughs within current human life expectancies. You can't measure the results any faster than the rate at which humans already happen to live, and unmodified humans can regularly live longer than other mammals any way.
A half life of ~8000 given current-day levels of accidental and other death. If we get our act together enough to get rid of the problem of aging, I would assume that we would continue to get rid of other sources of death as well, which would make the actuarial model less useful.
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