Can We Live Longer?
According to Reuters, exciting, just-published research has raised hopes for an anti-aging pill, which will lead to a nation overrun with seniors, sucking the lifeblood from their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, while constantly criticizing them and complaining about pretty much everything. Personally, I look forward to this.
After all, I'm an American. We're going to live more or less forever here in the U.S.A., especially if you correct the stats by eliminating the poor, especially infant mortality among the poor which skews the stats for comfortable white Americans like me, which are, frankly, off the charts.
I'm especially looking forward to the complaining. Since my wife and I have done so much for our own children, I expect they will visit us all the time in the nursing home, where we can complain about how we are being treated, and there will be a lot to complain about, starting with the fact that although they could take us in, our children have forced us to be in this goddamn nursing home.
But complaining will get a bit repetitious even for me, so I intend to be more entertaining by making observations about the many mistakes my children are making in the raising of their children. Since we're parents, my wife and I are authorities on the subject, although we may not always agree on everything, which will lead to entertaining quarrels which our children, and everybody else, will want to hear.
The just-published article was written (and this is one hell of a coincidence) by a scientist who has a pharmaceutical company already testing the pill. This sounds like an FDA fast-track slam dunk. In fact, it should be pre-approved, like a credit card application. Hey, let's go! I want this pill now!
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The question is will you want to live longer after Bush is done protecting our freedoms.
Extending a person's lifetime endlessly appeals to me as much as living to be 100 yrs old. I don't care if I aging gracefully or disgracefully. Even if one has the monthly income to live in comfort & pay for care givers there is a point when, as the old country song says, "...life gets tedious...".
As a noted book says, "There is a time to live and a time to die...". While some are visited weekly by their children and delighted by the visits, others treasure the solitude one has when the children are scattered & the only contact you have with your grown children is an occasional phone call on holidays. Knowing that your grown children are self supporting & have their own life [or what ever is considered a life in 2007] can be satisfying. While the western politician who suggested that aged people had a duty to die got flack for it, one gets to a point when consuming with out producing feels like free loading. I, for one, have no desire to work anymore at anything. Dying while I had my faculties would be good. I'm content to pass the earth on to younger people. Those who wish to live forever may have my portion of the earth. I want to rest-the eternal rest.
All I can say is, if such a think were ever to be invented and sold to the public, there'd be a lot of old people taking low income jobs to get by.
No social security system is going to pay for people to live 30-40 years more without working. I'm a believer in Social Security, and I can attest to that concept...Social Security was originally created when people only lived to 70, maximum. 5-6 years of retirement. Not 50-60.
You're missing the real message of this news story, which is how some researchers have started looking for ways to change the basic mechanism of aging. In other words, instead of trying to eak out a few more years in an aging body with an absolute upper life-span of about 120, they are trying to understand why we age at all... and deal with those basic processes directly. If they are successful, the goal will be to live in a relatively middle-aged body until you die of an irreversible injury (think plane crash) or fast-acting disease (ebola-class). Given the low rates of death from causes like these, we are realistically talking about living for centuries, and not in a decrepit body, but something like what you had in your thirties, before aging really kicked in.
In case you haven't heard about this, try looking up the SENS Project and Aubrey de Grey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_negligible_senescence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
This is a serious movement which has been gaining some respectability among more mainstream gerontologists lately. This could turn out to be the most momentous trend in your lifetime, since it could mean regaining and extending your middle age for centuries.
Obviously, if it turns out to work, this will turn society inside out. Practically every social institution will have to be re-thought from the ground up. But I do believe that, if it's at all possible, it will be developed. There are already too many smart people researching it, too many rich people around the world willing to fund it, even if only for themselves (or so they may think); and too many curious people, like myself, who have already heard about it, and believe anything good enough for the rich is good enough for you and me.
Please give this topic due diligence, it's probably the most important topic you've ever stumbled across. Seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_life_extension-related_topics
I thought the "afterlife" is supposed to be glorious. Why all the hesitation?
I agree. There was a time when children took care of their mother and father when they could not longer care for themselves. I believe the Amish people still do so. Now, well you just shove them into a nursing home and wait until they die, so you can get the inheritance if there is one by the time you pay out all your savings for food and heat and other necessities. Not only that, but on the way, you have the opportunity to blame your mother, or your father, for all you own faults--at the age of forty five!!!
That is the way of the world today. I have made a resolution. I will chain myself to the kitchen stove, before I will ever allow myself to enter a nursing home. I may die chained to the stove--and the children will say I was "demented" .
Yes, there was a time when parents took care of their children as well. Since fathers left the home to work (the industrial revolution) the primary social contract has been broken: parents care for children and children care for parents.
No one who farmed their children out to daycare should be surprised to be treated the same way.
Well, you got Viagra - look where that took us.
Not one woman I know EVER asked for it.
And this doesn't fit well with that "EndTime" popularity....don't they all want to leave that body even before they were born?
"Ugly bags of mostly water"
~Alien Genius on Star Trek~
Yooze got a one-track mind Mommadona. Do you have time for anything else but hating all things men-related. Are you a man?
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