You thought losing David Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Prince, Umberto Eco, and Carrie Fisher made 2016 a pretty tough year? Well … we have bad news for you. MIT researchers from the Center for Research in Social Complexity believe that we should expect the number of famous people to die each year to continue to increase probably for the next years, but not forever. They say “we should expect more famous people to die in 2017 than in 2016. Why? The answer is simple: because the number of famous people has increased over time.” In their methodology, they defined a “famous person” as someone present in more than 20 Wikipedia language editions as of February, 2016. There are 29,421 of those. They also show that the increase in expected number of deaths is not just a function of population growth, as “for centuries, the growth in famous people has been outpacing that of global population.” We are now also observing the death of increasingly older famous people, who did their best work in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, and whose fame was amplified through television. The reason why the researchers believe that this trend of increased number of famous people deaths is set to continue is that “we may soon reach a time when what will limit the number of famous people we produce will no longer be our means of communication, but our limited attention and human memory. Maybe, we are already there.”

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