There are people out there who are quite seriously trying to make human beings immortal. It sounds like something from a bad 1970s pulp comic, but it’s true. Of course, when serious people say “immortal,” they’re not talking Highlander. They’re talking biological immortality, sometimes called by fancy names like “negligible senescence”: the elimination of death by aging. Whether we can (or should) ever achieve biological immortality is a question I’ll leave to people smarter than me, but either way, biological immortality doesn’t mean full immortality. It just means that you can no longer die from, say, a heart attack or cancer or just generally wearing out. You can still quite easily die from things like falls, car accidents, or having Clancy Brown chop your head off with a sword.

There are a number of organisms out there which are either believed or known to be biologically immortal, or at the very least, nearly so. These include interesting but relatively simple organisms like hydras and jellyfish, but also more complex organisms like the bristlecone pine (many living specimens of which are confirmed to be over 1,000 years old, and one of which is over 5,000 years old), and the lobster. (Technically, though, the lobster isn’t really immortal, since they must molt to heal, and each molt takes more energy than the last, until the molts grow so energy-intensive they exhaust the lobster to death.) For the record, the oldest animal for which the age is well-established was a quahog clam named Ming Hafrun, who died at 507 years old when some Icelandic researchers plucked it out of the water.

If a human was made biologically immortal, how long could they expect to live before getting hit by a bus or falling down the stairs (or getting stabbed in the neck by Christopher Lambert)? That’s actually not too hard to estimate. According to the CDC (see Table 18), there were 62.6 injury-related deaths per 100,000 Americans, in 2014. With a bit of naïve math (I’m not adjusting for things like age, which probably inflates that statistic a fair bit, since older people are at a higher risk of falls and similar) that means the probability of death by accident is 0.000626 per year, or roughly 0.06%. Knowing that, it’s almost trivial to compute the probability of surviving X years:

probability of surviving X years = (1 – 0.00626)^X

This formula is based on one of my favorite tricks in probability: to compute the probability of surviving, you do the obvious and convert that to the probability of not-dying. And you can take it one step further. At what age would 90% of a biologically-immortal group still be alive? All you have to do is solve this equation for N:

0.9 = (1- 0.00626)^N

which is no trouble for Wolfram Alpha a math genius like me: a biological immortal would have a 90% chance of surviving 168 years. Here are a few more figures:

• A 75% probability of living up to 459 years.
• A 50% probability of living up to 1,107 years.
• A 25% probability of living up to 2,214 years.
• A 10% probability of living up to 3,677 years.
• A 5% probability of living up to 4,784 years.
• A 1% probability of living up to 7,354 years.
• A one-in-a-thousand chance of living 11,031 years.
• A one-in-a-million chance of living 22,062 years.

For reference, the probability of a member of a population surviving (in the US, in 2012, including death by biological causes) doesn’t drop below 75% until around age 70. To put it in slightly annoying media jargon: if we’re biologically immortal, then 459 is the new 70.