How likely is it that I could be dead now? How often have I survived a statistical death?
I turned 30 this year and I have been whining about “getting old”. My parents laughed it off, telling me that I’m practically still a kid.
Yes, with my current life expectancy, there is plenty of life ahead for me. But life expectancy is a statistical mean, an average. I might not have much of a life ahead.
To prove a point, I looked deeper into the statistics. The answers I got left me with mixed feelings.
Probability is a funny thing. Probabilistically, I could be dead at any given moment. To help me understand this better, I created this thought experiment.
I imagine there are 100 Me’s in 100 potential futures. How many version’s of me would die this year? How many versions of me would live until 100?
To understand this better, we cannot just look at life expectancy. We need to know the probability of death for every life year. The Department of Statistics Singapore provides this information in its Complete Life Tables.
The Department of Statistics Singapore also provides this neat tool. You can calculate the proportion of the population expected to be alive at a given age. I plugged in my gender and current age and got this.
Image there are 100 Me’s alive today. Most will make it over the age of 65. Less than half will not survive past 85. And only 1 will be older than 100. Only one!
Given that there is less than a coin flip chance that I will survive until 85. I wonder how likely is it that I would already be dead?
If there are 100 Me’s at birth, how many Me’s would have passed away already?
For this, I took the Life Tables and computed the probability of being dead by a given age.
If we cut this graph evenly into 100 horizontal slices, we get 100 intersections [1] that determine each of my 100 Me’s death. E.g. the 25th intersection represents the death of the 25th Me, in this case at the age of 75.
