When and how will you die? Just in case that bubbly topic comes up at the next cocktail party, Nathan Yau of the Flowing Data blog has done his part to make sure you’re covered.
He mined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create an interactive graphic where you can enter your sex, race and age for an unsettling picture of your odds of making it through each fleeting year and what will likely be your demise.
“Each dot represents one of your simulated lives, and as each year passes, more of your simulated selves pass away,” Yau, who has a PHD in statistics from UCLA, explained. “Color corresponds to cause of death, and the bars on the right keep track of the cumulative percentages.”
Let’s put it this way: the fewer colored dots the better.
Understandably, when you’re young, external factors are the leading cause of death. Think car accidents. Diseases emerge to claim lives in the older years. From 80 years on, when the odds really start getting stacked against your survival, circulatory problems like heart disease and strokes are the top killer.
“This surprised me because it seems like cancer would be the leading cause just going off general news,” Yau wrote in his blog post. “This is certainly true up to a certain age, but get past that and your heart can only keep going for so long.”
Care to contemplate your mortality from a statistical perspective? Try it out here.