I can't say that I like the article. It's too fatalistic.
I prefer to picture the other sort of exit, one far in the future, where I have worn out my body without overstaying my welcome.
Message - "Be polite and die please." Here is another person that is looking forward to death, this one, for the sake of propriety. Do people really think that life on earth is a party and that there's some fixed time limit we
should be here where anything more deserves the punishment of a period of suffering followed by non-existence? Why should a person be punished with more ailments, pain and a death sentence simply for the passage of time? The mental gymnastics required to suggest that this is a good thing baffles me. The next summer outing I have I'm going to ask my friend who shows up early, stays late and drinks all the good wine to politely go off into the woods and get eaten by a bear. Hopefully he dies a slow painful death but shame on him for his rudeness.
Although this trend of ever-lengthening lifespans cannot continue indefinitely (even for optimists and narcissists), the actual limit—and even the demonstrable existence of a limit—is a subject of continuing controversy among demographers and gerontologists.
The author starts the article off suggesting that we don't know why we age yet predicts that there is a limit that cannot be exceeded simply because the statistics suggest a specific pattern. In other words, because we are ignorant have not accomplished something means we never will. We are rapidly uncovering the specific causes of aging at the molecular level. When we do flush this out it's only a matter of time before we can develop the tools to engineer at this level and intervene. The only roadblock between perfectly re-engineering ourselves for sustaining the ravages of aging is a finite amount complexity, the tools to tackle this complexity and the time to develop these tools. Advancements across every field of science indicate that this is an absolute certainty. In 100 years we'll have the computational horsepower to simulate every atomic force of every atom in the body... for all the people in China!
But the aging population in the developed world (including its scientists) also propels the field. In the end, however, if our real motivation is to loosen death's grip on humanity, we need to go beyond a material understanding of the biology of aging, lifespan and death.
The real motivation isn't to simply
loosen deaths' grip on humanity but rather just not die at all.
Most of humanity still does not die of old age, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything," as Jaques laments in As You Like It. Instead, most of humanity dies young, of preventable causes brought about by poverty and unequal access to health care.
Thanks to medical technology this is changing - rapidly too. All statistics are pointing to an aging population and a majority of elderly within a few decades. Fast forward a few centuries the majority of people in advanced civilizations will ONLY die from aging related failures, if at all.
Any account of the causes of death that focuses solely on biology without considering the social and economic settings in which our biology plays out is at best incomplete, and at worse, misguided.
So we should be more concerned about established social norms (the politeness thing again) and our economy above fighting diseases and the horrible suffering that accompanies them. Trying to save 100,000 lives per day is misguided because it's rude to the other party goers who might not get their share of weinershnitzels with grey poupon.
What is misguided is the thinking that solving health and longevity problems should be delayed until we figure out how to fit elderly people into the an equation that doesn't account for them. Religion and culture have factored them out because until now, it didn't need to account for people living beyond 60.
Over my lifetime, cheating death may not be about tricking the limits of our biology, but instead about changing how we live our lives.
There's no need for hopelessness and despair because you might be able to do both. Improving lifestyle can certainly improve health and longevity (not to mention a higher quality life) but aging interventions will likely start to emerge alongside rapidly advancing medical technology. The longer one lives, the more of this biological trickery and technology we'll all be able to take advantage of. Hopefully someone else hasn't decided for us that it's impolite to enjoy more of this world because we've had our share of weinershnitzels.
Edited by maestro949, 25 September 2007 - 08:47 AM.
