Living Longer

There is an article in a recent Oprah magazine that says we may soon have a lifespan of 150 years, routinely. I find this idea appalling. How incredibly selfish and destructive to the planet and life overall.

The planet is currently supporting about 6.5 billion people in varying levels of comfort. Because of some dolt’s study that showed there was a 4% drop off in certain bird’s hatching from eggs, DDT was banned. In our industrialized, less humid climate of the US, that was okay. But then we decided in our Eurocentric authority and with the consent of other industrialized nations, that DDT should be banned worldwide. And if it wasn’t, we would withhold funds.

So there are millions in Africa now with malaria and other insect-vector diseases who are seriously ill or dying. But the bird eggs are hatching at 84% rather than 80% so the world feels pure and holy.

Then there is AIDS, which according to stuff I’ve researched is really a constellation of diseases under one umbrella. If you die of any of these different diseases, you died of AIDS because the medical community called it. The treatment for AIDS isn’t patently proscribed, but must be individually produced to meet the various types of HIV or AIDS infection because, as I said, it is really a variety of diseases.

In the industrialized world, those specific and costly remedies are available. Again, in Africa, not so much. The same is true for India and China. Large and poor populations simply do not have the resources to use or waste that we do in the Euro-American worlds.

So, now we want to live 150 years. There are already too many people on the planet to maintain our resource intensive lifestyle for any but a select few. The cost of that high resource lifestyle is that the unselect many have even lower standards of living. There is a finite amount of goods for use on the planet. If there were enough resources for each person on the planet to get 100 units, then simple math takes over. If Person A [Euro-American] uses 167 then that leaves Person B [poverty Third World] only 33 units.

The world is a closed system. There is only so much of anything to go around. One of the things we are supposed to do is get the hell out of the way. My own family tree is not all that large because the most children to any one couple was five. However, my husband’s grandmother was one of ten children and I didn’t count back that far. Out of the seventy-eight people born in the last 150ish years, forty-four have moved on to what ever it is that comes after life on earth. Thirty-four of us are still hanging around sucking up resources.

As much as I miss my mother and father, it was their job to move on so that I could meet my grandchildren. I am comfortable with the idea that it will eventually be my day to move on for my great-grandchildren, giving them my space and my allotted resources. It is the least I can do for the people I love.

To be so selfish, so piggy about resources seems to me to be the ultimate in resource hogging. Not only will it take some amount of resources to keep the coots alive, but they will have the experience and take the jobs away from the “youngsters” of sixty or so. What possible good can there be in this scenario? How long would it take to reach “adulthood” if you were living to 150? But biology would remain and so you would be stuck with teenagers and twentysomethings with raging hormones and not even a glimmer of a hope for a job and a way to support themselves or any offspring cuz the 125 year old has claimed that spot.

Whoever thought this out did not think it out very clearly. The ramifications are horrific. Certainly we can only hope that this never comes to pass. It would be the end of life. Those without the resources to purchase long life would be even more disadvantaged by the possibility. The outrage at this inequity could only lead to there being far fewer people of any age after the wars that ensued. Until everyone can live up to a certain standard of living, creating a larger gap in that standards is beyond the pale.