How many should partake this year at the memorial? How many of the original anointed, whose number was "sealed" in 1935 would likely be alive today?
I've examined the general survival rate of people of this age group in the US. More specifically, the survival rate of the general US population which was over the age of 16 in the year 1935 through the year 2003. Then applying that rate to the number of anointed in 1935 to get the number that should be alive today. I'm assuming here that all anointed were over the age of 16 when the 144,000 positions filled up.
Additionally, I discounted the number of "backfilled" positions from my estimate, as they should be negligible, especially since the anointed represent the most exclusive group of holy ones God ever created!
To do this we first need to find out how many folks over the age of 16 in the year 1935 were alive in 2003:
According to this chart,
http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/NC-EST2003/NC-EST2003-01.pdf
Americans aged over 84 the year 2003 totaled 4,713,465 people. These survivors would have been over the age of 16 in 1935.
If we subtract the foreign born people from this number, we get a good estimate of how many of this group was living in the US in 1935. We find the number of foreign-born people over 84 in 2003 is 394,000 from here:
http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/foreign/ppl-174/tab02-01.pdf
And subtracting it from our total population over 84 years old gives us: 4,319,465
OKAY! The total US population in 1935 was approximately 127,200,000, interpolated from this chart: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0110380.html
Of this total population, the number over the age of 16 can be estimated from this chart:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0110384.html
One can roughly estimate that about 65% of the population in 1935 was over the age of 16, which leaves us with: 127,200,000 * 0.65 = 82,680,000.
SO, out of this population of 82,680,000, aged over 16 in 1935,
4,319,465
were alive in the year 2003. That?s a survival rate of 5.2 %If we apply this survival rate to the original number of anointed people in 1935, and assuming this totaled about 40,000 people:
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/10/84381/1386578/post.ashx#1386578
then roughly 2,080 of this original crop should have been alive in 2003. But the number of partakers in 2003 was 8,565. This was about 4 times as many partakers as one would likely expect by looking at these numbers. That?s pretty far off, even accounting for some of the fudge factors here. With each passing year since 2003, the size of this group, all in their late 80s, should be dropping down dramatically, as the mortality rate goes up exponentially with every passing year. So this year one would expect quite a dropoff from the year before.
Food for thought. I?d be interested to see how the numbers add up.