Re: Is lifespan following Moore's Law (ie: increasing exponentially)?

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
12 Oct 1999 09:55:09 +0200

"O'Regan, Emlyn" <Emlyn.ORegan@actew.com.au> writes:

> Question is in the subject line. Sorry for this basic question, any one know
> the answer to this?

According to the diagram of life expectation at birth on page 85 in Leonard Hayflick's _How and Why We Age_ (taken from Dublin, Lotka and Spiegelman, _Length of Life_, The Ronald Press, New York 1936 and the US National Center for Health Statistics) I get something that might be an exponential after the 1700's, but the information is a bit too uncertain to tell for sure and it could just as well be a power of time or something different.

However, the diagram on page 88 shows life expectation at different ages for the United states 1900-1987, and that curve family is not exponential, it seems to be quite linear (the data is from National Center for Health Statistics, Statistical Bulletin, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company 1987). The rate of increase has even decreased the last decades, as most of the easily treated causes of death have been fixed. The increase is around 0.25 years more of life expectacy at birth per year for males, and somewhat more for females.

We better get that up to one year per year.

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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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