Sooner or later, we'll always encounter someone trying to tell us how to live. It's inevitable, and I admit that in some cases they do it with good intentions. However, on the other side, we find people calculating how or when we will die, and one result is the Gompertz-Makeham mortality law, which measures the probability of death throughout our lives.
Developing a precise mortality rate is almost as complicated as fighting death itself. After all, even in the most stable and safe regions of the world, any statistic can go down the drain with the appearance of extraordinary events, such as a natural catastrophe or an armed conflict. But these possibilities do not make experts give up.
In fact, the opposite happens, and their effort has extended over hundreds of years. One of the best examples is the so-called Gompertz-Makeham mortality law, created by the English mathematicians William Makeham and Benjamin Gompertz.
Gompertz-Makeham Mortality Law
This "law of death" establishes that the mortality rate in humans equals the sum of two special components: one dependent on age (the Gompertz function) and one independent (the Makeham term).
If we imagine a protected environment that minimizes exposure to external causes of death (for example, a highly developed country with abundant access to basic resources and health services), the Makeham term is reduced to almost irrelevant values, simplifying the calculation to a reduced "Gompertz law".
In the early nineteenth century, Gompertz basically suggested that the mortality rate grows exponentially with age, and despite its age, that idea has proven to be very effective.
The web is full of graphs representing the Gompertz-Makeham mortality law applying different factors, but in general we find that infants have a probability of death similar to that of a person aged 50-55, falling rapidly to its lowest point between ages 8 and 12.
The graph reaches some stability around age 20, but from age 30 onwards, it's all upward. In the "Gompertz version", the numbers are even harsher: Your chances of dying double every eight years.
