My brother has a knack for finding bizarre, and sometimes alarming, news articles that run the gamut of topics. He loves to send them on via e-mail and I’ve often considered blogging about them. I’m sure I’ll write about one again, but the first one I’ve decided to write about concerns lifespan extension. Basically the issue boils down to this, if you had the option, would you choose to live longer?
There are really two topics here, extending this life or being cloned into a new life as the same person. Who really knows if either is possible, I’m sure one, if not both, will be at some point, but this particular article focused in on extending this life. To avoid writing too much, I’ll stick to that one.
So, if you had the option of undergoing a medical procedure that could help you live, and this is important, a HEALTHY life for longer, would you want to? The article described doctors who think they have found a way to dramatically slow the effects of aging so that we not only live longer, but do so in a healthy state. A number of thoughts came to mind, so here are the top few in the order they came
One, our population is already growing at an alarming rate, particularly in certain countries like China where measures have been put into place to slow it due to overpopulation. We are currently at 6.8 billion and continuing to grow. Consider this, in 1900, which is not that long ago considering how long humans have been around, the world population was 1.65 billion, and in 1800 it was under a billion! By the way, women who have 14 babies aren’t helping anything – that’s just nonsense if you ask me.
Sometimes I feel like we are a virus to Earth. We have spread at incredible rates, cut down the forests, depleted natural resources, polluted the water and air, extinct other species, and generally ruined the beautiful state of the planet. If we lived longer our cities would continue to grown in size, we would use up more and more resources, and we would surely continue to see all of the problems I listed above continue to become more dire. According to physicists such as John Bernal, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, and John Avery, life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. But we seem to take part in that process in a much more harmful and invasive way than any other organism. By the way, thanks to Wikipedia for that definition.
Ok, the obvious thought was that we are already helping ourselves live way longer than ever before though pharmaceutical drugs and modernization. The average lifespan today is 66.12 and in early 20th century it was 30-40. Obviously that’s an average range, and it’s way higher in some areas of the world, and much lower in others. So, is this any different that what we’ve already done?
The biggest mind boggler I came across was whether we are preconditioned to expect to live to a certain age. I, to be 100% honest, would be absolutely content to life a full, healthy life that extended into my late 70’s or 80’s. My grandparents are 85 and 86 and still very active and healthy, and I would love to do the same. But, do I accept that only because that’s what I think is supposed to happen? If it was normal for people to live to be 150, or on the other side of the coin, 30, would I be perfectly content to do the same? The answer is of course I would because that would be the accept norm of everyone I knew.
This leads perfectly into my next thought, whether we are messing with things we need not mess with. Is science going to places it shouldn’t go? The answer is nobody can really know. When it comes to cloning, the human genome project, life extension, stem-cell research, and so many other topics that prod the ever-present beehive of how far is too far, there is no real answer of what will be good for us, and what will be bad. The only way we will know is to actually move forward with it and see, which is what we always end up doing.
I guess the real question is are we like the cat in the old adage – will curiosity some day kill us? I’ll likely not live to see the answer, but I’m curious to know!
