Why you can expect to live past your life expectancy

This is our submission to the #VeritasiumContest

Length restriction is one minute, so apologies for the brevity. I'll have a longer video about life expectancy and how COVID affected it later.

[paintbrush]

Rare moment when science's "well actually 🤔" is good news

[iwersonsch]

Another important point: The life expectancy at birth lags behind by an entire lifetime because if you're born in say 2000, it will be calculated based off the people who died around the year 2000, not who will die around the year 2080. Since life expectancy is expected to rise with further medical and societal advances, you can also expect to live longer than whatever your life expectancy was at some earlier point in Human civilization.

[NielMalan]

The oft-quoted statistic "life expectancy" is actually shorthand for "life expectancy at birth".

[steveywonder]

And this is the basis of Actuarial Science in a nutshell. As an Actuary I've never had someone explain that so clearly and concisely before. Thanks Sabine!

[mmicoski]

If you are alive, then you expect to live more. When you die, that expectation abruptly ends

[Maciej-Komosinski]

0:25 The second arrow points at the mode ("the age at which most people die"). The median for this specific distribution is slightly to the left (around 84), between the mean and the mode. For a distribution that exceeds above 100 years (as the probability of death does), the median will move a bit more towards the mode.

[JapLomm]

I didn't know I needed Sabine's "shorts" in my life.

[vpilot]

Thank you, Dr Hossenfelder, for the reprieve.

[brianarbenz]

As a journalist and policy researcher, I long had trouble explaining to people what Life Expectancy and Infant Mortality statistics really mean. Thanks, this succinct piece will help.

[AICoffeeBreak]

Thanks for this! You were the reason I found out about the contest and was brave enough to submit something too! 😊

[darthmortus]

Forget adding 10 years, work on life-extension technology so we can add 10million years if we so choose.

:P

[MemphiStig]

reminds me of the old poster "God put me on earth to accomplish a certain amount of things. Right now, i'm so far behind, i'll never die."

[osirisgem]

I love you and your channel. I feel enriched when I watch things you post, not spoken down to, because lets face it, I don't know much about the things you talk about but I leave knowing far more. That is a good deal as far as I look at it.

[frankrosenbloom]

Information to die for. I'm an MD and I've tried explaining this to my patients but few understand. Thanks.

[RogerBrowne]

"When you reach your life expectancy, you can expect to live another 8 to 10 years". But if you manage to live for those 8 to 10 years, you can expect to live a further few years on top of that, and so on. But when you eventually die, you will inevitably die before that ever-extending "time that you can expect to live". What a paradox!

[khosrofakhreddini]

It is not the length of life that counts, but the quality of life. Thanks

[hodor]

"Unintentional injury" is the leading cause of death from childhood to middle age, so if you want to grow old...
drive safe
look both ways
be careful around heights
don't do anything stupid

[rafaelmunoz]

Still we could die any moment anyway, a human life is as fragile as a flower under a feet 🌺🌺🌺

[jonathanrobertson]

It is Sabine's explanation which also puts into context the "average age" of people in the past. Usually, when historians say, a person in "this area and in this time only had a life expectancy of so many years, " it disregards the fact, like Sabine said, that if you can make it past a certain point, your life expectancy is quite good, and defies "the average."

[Raptor]

Very great explanation.

Put another way, that highschool acquaintance you had who died in a motorcycle accident at 18. He's pulling the life expectancy stats down, because there's no cut off line on the age spectrum where you can say this person 'doesn't count'.

It also explains why women 'live longer than men'. They don't really, men just engage is riskier activities throughout their lives (like the motorcycle).