Will There Ever Be A Time When No One Alive Has Walked On Another World?

The death of Neil Armstrong brought out a lot of emotions in me. I wasn't around when he took his first steps on the moon, but I was certainly aware of the magnitude of this achievement. To be able to look up to the moon and know that he and eleven others had walked there, on that sphere so far away, was captivating.

The death of the last frontiersman also instilled a thought in my head, though. No one has walked on the moon in nearly forty years. Some of you may remember this profound post made by Randall Munroe on xkcd:

With no plans in the near future to revisit the moon- and with Mars still a ways off- there may soon be a time when there will be no one alive who has walked on another planet or moon. It's a sad thing to think about.

When will that be, if it happens? I don't have the time to look up actuarial tables, so I used the average life expectancies for people with ages equal to the remaining astronauts (as can be found on Wolfram|Alpha). I took an extra liberty and assumed that, on average, each of them are within the top 10% of the population in terms of health (astronauts must be fit, and their habits likely continue into an older age). I did not do any research into their individual health conditions.

I also feel like getting someone on Mars is a matter of when, not if. NASA doesn't have any sort of formal timetable out on this project, but I've heard 2030 as a ballpark figure by multiple sources. My goal is to discover the odds of any of the astronauts surviving to 2030.

The results are promising on this front. By the time 2030 comes around three astronauts in particular- Eugene Cernan, Charles Duke, and Harrison Schmitt- will be younger than the lifespan for the top 10% of people their age. Taking all the astronauts together, the average chance that any one of them will survive until 2030 is about 7%. All things considered, I'd say the odds are good that someone will survive until we set foot on Mars. Anything past that 2030 date, however, and the odds go sharply down. All of the astronauts will be pushing 100 by then.

I don't feel great about looking at "death rates" because there's hardly anything statistical about it. It all depends on your lifestyle and past, and for these astronauts, I'm sure there's a long, bright future still ahead of them. I mean no disrespect to anyone, especially Neil Armstrong.

America needs a new frontiersman now, and I'm sure NASA is hard at work on it. You could say our Curiosity needs to be satisfied again. Let us move forward to Mars, while we look backwards with fond memories of our missions to the moon. RIP, Neil Armstrong.

My data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnZrkjWWJajQdGlLMzFNWm1RUWFaZHJ5ZllRVkQ4c2c