The Problem With Life Expectancy

In order to truly understand differences among animal lifespans, we need to stop thinking about a specific number and start thinking about a distribution.

LEARN MORE
**************
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Life Expectancy At Birth: The average number of years a newborn in a particular group could expect to live.
- Life Expectancy After Babyhood: The average number of years a member of a particular group could expect to live given that they had survived their first year.
- Maximum Life Expectancy: The age at which the oldest known member of a particular group died.
- Mortality Rate: The frequency of occurrence of death within a particular group during a particular time period.
- Life Table: A table that shows the number of individuals within a group that survive from one year to the next until they are all dead.
- Survivorship Curve: A plot of the data in a particular life table that shows the years on the x-axis and the number or percent of survivors on the y-axis.

SUPPORT MINUTEEARTH
**************************
If you like what we do, you can help us!:
- Share this video with your friends and family
- Leave us a comment (we read them!)

CREDITS
*********
David Goldenberg | Script Writer, Narrator and Director
Sarah Berman | Illustration, Video Editing and Animation
Nathaniel Schroeder | Music

MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC

OUR STAFF
************
Sarah Berman • Arcadi Garcia Rius
David Goldenberg • Julián Gustavo Gómez
Melissa Hayes • Alex Reich • Henry Reich
Peter Reich • Ever Salazar • Kate Yoshida

OUR LINKS
************

REFERENCES
**************

[diamondjub]

fun fact: the reason life expectancy in ancient times is lower is because people died at younger ages, those that survived could actually reach 70-ish

[neolexiousneolexian]

Tbf, *most* things are better represented as higher-resolution continua and fields than as a single number.

If you break down life expectancy to the month, then you can also probably see more about reproductive cycle, since more babies happen in the spring and more deaths happen in the winter (so you should have slight drops in the survival graph at, e.g. 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, etc). Etc.

[deponentfutures]

'Let's Call Her Shelley' is a weird name for a turtle

[hedgehog]

It bears mentioning that the very low infant mortality rate of humans is almost entirely due to modern medicine as well as sociological changes that lead to people having few babies. Infant mortality and childhood mortality was very high in pre-industrial time and it's on account of modern hospitals, professional midwives, better health and safety, and modern medicine in general that people now almost certainly can expect to survive both growing up and giving birth.

[anzahanifathallah]

that Death Note reference at 0:51 is really cool

[kuzy]

1:12
Little fish: How old are you?
Turtle: 80!
Me: Eighty factorial?!!!

[lyrablack]

I'm taking a statistics class and realizing how many frickin' statistics are absolutely _everywhere_

[ProfessorDenn]

If your turtle manages to reach it's Blastoise phase, it'll probably survive for quite a long time.

[derpycats]

At 2:07, that graph makes me think: wow at 90 years old, you would have outlived 80% of people born at the same time as you. That’s crazy

[UkiMalefu]

The actual life expectancy for dogs is: not enough.

[JohnFKennedy]

I love how you broke down the information in this video and made it so easy to understand! I honestly didn’t know that life expectancy was calculated differently for different animals. Awesome video !

[CeruleanTrafficlight]

I feel like the graph for cats would be strongly impacted considering indoor vs. indoor-outdoor vs. feral housecats

[WanderTheNomad]

I love when we promote looking at things through different lens. It provides us with a broader view of things, which can hopefully lead to more helpful solutions to the variety of issues we face.

[johnsteinat]

I really enjoyed the lap that came with this video

[MrMineHeads.]

Imagine living to 60 and knowing that you've only lived half your life.

[jobengals]

Humans only extremely recently started having such a ridiculously low infant mortality rate over the past 100-200 years.

It’s not nearly about the intensive care from parents, it’s about our modern medicine today.

[thetntsheep]

"Curve's eye view" is my new favourite phrase

[hedwig]

What a great way to look at life, death, and what it means to be part of this world :)

[CultistO]

Minor correction: at 2:19, you say "the trend continues to curve downward". The graph and arrow however, actually show an upward "curving" trend (the rate is getting less and less negative each step), it's just that the curve is still very negative.

[poketopa]

What the heck did we do as a species to deserve a channel as pure and awesome as Minute Earth?