Heart Beat Calculation

A topic which came up in a scientific/medical talk I was at recently: How many times does the heart beat in a typical lifetime?

Let's use the average U.S. life expectancy of about 78 years and a very conservative estimate of heart rate at 60 beats per minute (as a child the heart rate is much higher, so this is probably an underestimate).

(60 beats/minute) x (60minutes/hour) x (24hrs/day) x (365 days/year) x (78 years/lifetime) = 2,459,808,000 = about 2.5 billion heart beats per lifetime.

That's pretty impressive, especially when you consider the intricate machinery within individual heart cells that somehow survives the wear and tear of having to fully relax & contract once a second for an entire lifetime...