"Estimating personal lifespan vs. years needed to get rarest medals, given local spawn rates"

#PokemonGO: I play about 2.5 hrs a day and am one of the higher level players in my town at level 33. I live in a mountain desert town in the Southwest. There's very few water spawns in town and it's a 2+ hour drive to the nearest big city that has any water, but over the months I've mapped out a walking route that goes past several of the (few) spawn points in my little town.After I found the water spawn pts and started paying serious attention to them in mid Sept, I found my first Dratini in early October, then hatched one over Halloween, and found another just before Christmas. (That's with 9 incubators running constantly and hatching approx 20 eggs per day). Grand total of Dratini acquired in my town is thus 3, including hatches, from Sept 15 (when my water spawn monitoring effort really started) to Jan 4. No Dragonair or Dragonite ever sighted.That's 3 Dratini in 111 days, or 37 days per Dratini. (includes hatches)On Jan 5 I flew in New Orleans for work, where I was routinely finding 1 Dratini per hour along the Mississippi just in a single 1 km stretch over riverfront. At one point I had 3 Dratini on my tracker at once! Plus a Dragonair! It was amazing. I'm sitting in the airport now looking at all my New Orleans Dratini and realized I have actually got up to 37 dragon catches. So I only need 163 more Dratini to get my gold Dragon Tamer medal! So I wanted to calculate how long it'll take me to get that medal if I keep playing in my home town.Let's ignore gen2 - Kingdra will help me out here since it's dragon type, but we don't know when gen2 will come out. Let's also ignore the possibility of more travel to coastal cities. The calculation will be, just as a thought exercise: if I stayed in my Southwest desert town, and if Dratini were the only way I can catch dragon type, would I survive long enough to get the gold Dragon Tamer medal?Supposing I stay just at home and have no more trips and gen2 never arrives, if I keep up the current level of effort (~2 hrs per day, ~10+ miles walked per day, 9 incubators always running) I can expect to get my needed 163 Dratini in just 6031 days, or 16.6 years.I am currently 51.6 years old so I have to survive to 68.2 years old. Actuarial tables using my current age and gender estimate my lifespan as 82.8 years, so that might be possible. But, major monkey wrench, that's IF I can keep up the 2-3 h/d effort, which seems unlikely given that I'm already developing knee arthritis. I am going to have to knee replacement surgery in the next few years. So it appears likely the walking rate will slow to (let's be optimistic here) 1/3 what it is now. My dr estimates 5 years before arthritis really slows me down.Estimates start getting fuzzy here but, optimistically assuming that in 5 years I will slow down but CAN get the surgery and CAN then still can walk at (say)1/3 the rate I do now - and for simplicity's sake let's just say I reduce the walking rate all at once on a single day, and let's ignore the surgery recovery time - the remaining ~11.6 years of Dratini effort will triple to ~34.8 years, or at a rough estimate 39.8 yrs total, putting me at 91.4 years old by the time I get my gold Dragon Tamer medal, by which time I will have been dead for 8.6 years.I figure I'll finish off the medal once I am ghost type. They can engrave the medal on my tombstone. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2iWCPHZ