They didn’t say aging stops, but rather the death rates stop rising further after a time, which means that a 90 year old is as likely not to make it to 91 as a 99 year old would be not to make it to a 100.
But by then the rate of death per year is high enough that it doesn’t matter much, and within a few such years such a person will be very likely dead due to the cumulative probability of death over several years.
They didn’t say aging stops, but rather the death rates stop rising further after a time
They (Rose and his colleagues) do say that aging stops, and that is what they mean by it.
From the article: “The existence of an age at which human aging stops is no longer questionable, nor is its potential malleability.” The point about that malleability is that if you can get aging to stop at an earlier age, this will substantially extend lifespan, and this may be a more productive research avenue than trying to make elderly bodies live longer.
Ok. Age-related death rates converging asymptotically is a known fact since at least 1939. P(death) was estimated to converge to about 0.439 per annum for women and 0.544 for men. That’s a 99% chance to die after 8 years for a woman.
I’m not sure this translates into a cessation of aging. Even if P(death) was a hundredth of that, people would still die over time. They would just not die as fast as they do now.
What is the definition of aging there anyway? For me, I’d say an intrinsic biological tendency to die over time does not qualify as being freed from aging.
They didn’t say aging stops, but rather the death rates stop rising further after a time, which means that a 90 year old is as likely not to make it to 91 as a 99 year old would be not to make it to a 100.
But by then the rate of death per year is high enough that it doesn’t matter much, and within a few such years such a person will be very likely dead due to the cumulative probability of death over several years.
They (Rose and his colleagues) do say that aging stops, and that is what they mean by it.
From the article: “The existence of an age at which human aging stops is no longer questionable, nor is its potential malleability.” The point about that malleability is that if you can get aging to stop at an earlier age, this will substantially extend lifespan, and this may be a more productive research avenue than trying to make elderly bodies live longer.
Ok. Age-related death rates converging asymptotically is a known fact since at least 1939. P(death) was estimated to converge to about 0.439 per annum for women and 0.544 for men. That’s a 99% chance to die after 8 years for a woman.
I’m not sure this translates into a cessation of aging. Even if P(death) was a hundredth of that, people would still die over time. They would just not die as fast as they do now. What is the definition of aging there anyway? For me, I’d say an intrinsic biological tendency to die over time does not qualify as being freed from aging.
http://longevity-science.org/Greenwood-Human-Biology-1939.pdf
A neutron has the same probability of decaying in the next second no matter how old it is, and neutrons definitely don’t age.