Related papers: The shortness of human life constitutes its limit
Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies.…
There is sustained and widespread interest in understanding the limit, if any, to the human lifespan. Apart from its intrinsic and biological interest, changes in survival in old age have implications for the sustainability of social…
Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for…
The existence of an upper limit to the human lifespan has been widely debated, with studies offering both supporting and opposing evidence. Using unique individual-level death and population records for individuals aged 90 and older in…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
We use a combination of extreme value theory, survival analysis and computer-intensive methods to analyze the mortality of Italian and French semi-supercentenarians for whom there are validated records. After accounting for the effects of…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
Gompertz's law tells us that for humans above the age of 35 the death rate increases exponentially with a doubling time of about 10 years. Here, we show that the same law continues to hold even for ages over 100. Beyond 106 there is so far…
Recent discoveries show steady improvements in life expectancy during modern decades. Does this support that humans continue to live longer in future? We recently put forward the maximum survival tendency, as found in survival curves of…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented, and their survival far beyond reproductive age may be a byproduct rather than tool of evolution. Physical approach, which takes…
Trends in human longevity are puzzling, especially when considering the limits of human longevity. Partially, the conflicting assertions are based upon demographic evidence and the interpretation of survival and mortality curves using the…
Applying a modification of Extreme value Theory (thanks to a dual distribution technique by the authors on data over the past 2,500 years, we show that pandemics are extremely fat-tailed in terms of fatalities, with a marked potentially…
In recent we introduced, developed and established a new concept, model, methodology and principle for studying human longevity in terms of demographic basis. We call the new model the "Weon model", which is a general model modified from…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
The anthropic principle implies that life can emerge and be sustained only in a narrow range of values of fundamental constants. Here we show that anthropic arguments can set powerful constraints on {\em transient} variations of the…
Current observations of the fraction of dark energy and a lower limit on its tension, coupled with an assumption of the non-convexity of the dark energy potential, are used to derive a lower limit of 26 billion years for the future age of…
We study supercritical age-structured branching models starting from a single particle with a random lifetime, where the reproduction law depends on the remaining lifetime of the parent. The lifespan of an individual is decided at its birth…
Aggregated health data such as claims data from health insurances become more and more available for research purposes. Estimates of excess mortality from prevalence and incidence of a chronic condition have only been possible for ages 50…
Consider the following statement: $B(t, \Delta t)$: a $t$ years old person NN will survive another $\Delta t$ years, where $t, \Delta t\in \mathbb{R}$ are nonnegative real numbers. We know only that NN is $t$ years old and nothing about the…
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…