Related papers: Supercentenarian paradox
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
A recent study in the 2017 Living to 100 Monograph published by the Society of Actuaries suggests, in contrast to previous research, that the risk of death after 110 increases with age. By fitting a Gompertz model to estimated central death…
Using a temporal version of the Copernican principle, Gott has proposed a statistical predictor of future longevity based on present age [J. R. Gott III, Nature 363, 315 (1993)] and applied the predictor to a variety of examples, including…
In this paper, we affirm our earlier findings of evidence for a limit to human lifespan. In particular, we assess the analyses in extreme value theory (EVT) performed by Rootz\'en and Zholud. We find that their criticisms of our work are…
The Great Filter interpretation of Fermi's great silence asserts that $Npq$ is not a very large number, where $N$ is the number of potentially life-supporting planets in the observable universe, $p$ is the probability that a randomly chosen…
The time dependence of the survival probability, S(t), is determined for diffusing particles in two dimensions which are also driven by a random unidirectional zero-mean velocity field, v_x(y). For a semi-infinite system with unbounded y…
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…
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…
Fermi's Paradox is the contradiction between the fact that it would seem to be highly probable that there are other technologically advanced species beyond the Earth, and the fact that there is no generally accepted evidence for their…
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be…
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…
It is sometimes asserted that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. We critically examine the assumptions inherent in this argument. Using a lottery model for biogenesis in the Universe, we…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
We consider a supercritical branching population, where individuals have i.i.d. lifetime durations (which are not necessarily exponentially distributed) and give birth (singly) at constant rate. We assume that individuals independently…
We consider a random forest $\mathcal{F}^*$, defined as a sequence of i.i.d. birth-death (BD) trees, each started at time 0 from a single ancestor, stopped at the first tree having survived up to a fixed time $T$. We denote by…
The affirmative statement of the existence of extraterrestrial life is tentatively raised to the status of a principle. Accordingly, Fermi's question is answered and the anthropic principle is shown to be falsifiable. The time-scale for the…