It's a 50/50 change once 105, and given that the odds of 32 coin tosses all coming up heads is 1 in 4,294,967,296 does that mean there's a 137 year old person running around somewhere?
No. Ignoring the running around, we would only expect there to be one alive, if, about 30 years ago, there were about 4 billion 105 year olds on the planet.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/21/worlds-cente... claims there are about half a million centenarians now. At 50% mortality/year, half of them should be between 100 and 101 years old, but chances are it’s higher because the world’s population was growing fast a century ago.
That would give us one or two 118 to 119 year olds 18 years from now. I wouldn’t rule that out.
I'm only in my early 30's and I am already considering myself 35, at 969 you'd think you'd round up to an even thousand. I'll only believe that exact time if someone counts the rings.
The Hebrews took from the Egyptians a great love of numbers and numerology. 969 probably rolled off the tongue really well in their language. It was all originally passed orally in verse.
I once took up the Ussher chronology thing, wading through the begats, just to see if there was any sort of basis on which a person could legitimately convince themselves they were doing a proper chronology. Turns out that 969 means ol' Meth drowned in the Flood his grandson was known for - or at least kicked off in the few months preceding it. I'm thinking "drowned in the Flood" is something you're supposed to carry away from the tale, in much the same way as he's listed as somebody's son and somebody's father, without any accomplishments worth mentioning, nor any notable piety. There's probably another part of the tale, now lost, that folks were originally supposed to know.
You are forgetting you first need to reach 105, which very few do, so the population you apply the coin toss to is much smaller. While not impossible according to the article, it would be incredibly unlikely anybody lived to 137. There is a reasonable chance someone around 118-119 is living somewhere though.
