{"id":24,"date":"2005-04-20T15:30:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-20T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=24"},"modified":"2007-09-03T16:54:10","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T20:54:10","slug":"how-long-is-this-pope-good-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=24","title":{"rendered":"How Long Is This Pope Good For?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Various sites have suggested that a 78-year-old pope is unlikely to be in office for more than 5-6 years, and one hostile comment somewhere gave an &#147;over and under&#148; of 4 years.  This U.S. government <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/lifetables\/life89_1_1.pdf\">life tables site<\/a> (PDF) gives the average remaining life expectancy of a 78-year-old American male as 7.99 years, and the numbers for Germans can&#146;t be much different. Since the data are from 1989-91 and life expectancies have increased in the intervening years, since the Pope has access to the very best medical care, and since this particular pope seems to be in better-than-average physical condition for his age, I would imagine his estimated remaining life-span would be around 10 years, perhaps even 11 or 12.  (Even for 78-year-olds, life tables must include a certain percentage of chronic alcoholics, drug addicts, and heavy smokers who haven&#146;t quite succeeded in killing themselves, as well as some already diagnosed with terminal illnesses.  These will tend to lower the average.)  Of course, nothing is certain, and  Benedict XVI could &#151; <em>absit omen!<\/em> &#151; drop dead next week or still be in office in twenty years. But he is likely to last longer than some of the more pessimistic estimates. (More optimistic, I guess, when they come from Ratzingerphobes.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Various sites have suggested that a 78-year-old pope is unlikely to be in office for more than 5-6 years, and one hostile comment somewhere gave an &#147;over and under&#148; of 4 years. This U.S. government life tables site (PDF) gives the average remaining life expectancy of a 78-year-old American male as 7.99 years, and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}