Jason Kottke tweeted:
Kids, don’t ever aspire to be the world’s oldest person. Have you not noticed that they’re always dying?
which is a good point but I would bet big money that the world’s youngest person dies more often than the oldest.
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3 comments
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March 13, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Rob
I’m less sure; I think it might be quite close. The record for oldest person in the world doesn’t change much, which means the oldest person in the world must die about once a year.
Estimating how often the youngest person in the world dies is a bit harder. There is one birth every 0.25 seconds in the world, which means for the youngest person in the world to die they have to die within 0.25 seconds of being born. I didn’t know where to get statistics on this, but there are ~3 million deaths a year within the first week (“Early neo-natal mortality”). If we extrapolate linearly we can guess that there are 5 deaths a year in the first second of life.
So oldest person about once a year. Youngest person 1.25 times a year.
I’m pretty suspicious of my linear extrapolation, however.
March 13, 2010 at 11:04 pm
jeff
right, its by no means obvious because of the huge number of births.
March 14, 2010 at 3:04 am
obv
Actually, I’d say that every holder of the title of youngest person alive and oldest person alive dies just as often, which is to say 100% of the time.