I repeated twice this stats was about people who already made it up to 60. The point is that if you survived childhood 90 years ago and lived a decent and moderate life, your expected life was only 8-10% less than today with all those medications and technological advantages.
I understand the logic, I just didn't understand the emphasis. I have no idea what it feels like to be a parent, but from speaking with people who are parents I have a solid impression that the death of a child causes much more grief than the death of an adult. Surely therefore, a greater-than-50% death rate among children (as recently as the "glorious" Roman era it seems to have been around 80%, and in some societies they didn't even name children until they had survived for a full year) must have an onerous overall effect on the general mood and attitude of a society, and this in turn must affect its culture and evolution.
We've been conditioned over many centuries to expect people to begin keeling over in their 60s. (Even in ancient Rome the average adult who managed to survive childhood lived into his 50s, and this stable figure goes all the way back beyond Biblical times to the nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic Era.) Even those of us who are already in our sixties find ourselves paying more attention to our wills and our end-of-life health-care directives, and picking the low-hanging fruit off of our "bucket lists," instead of making ten-year plans. The younger people we're going to leave behind may miss us and weep a little, but I'm sure most of them won't feel as despondent and cheated by fate, as they would if one of their toddlers, kids or teenagers died.
Sure, we all have the capacity to adapt to the conditions that life presents us. I have no doubt that people who were
accustomed to six or eight children out of ten dying before puberty managed somehow to also become a little more
inured to it, otherwise civilization would have collapsed in a miasma of tears. But still, that reality has to have given them a much different perspective on life and the universe, and this would have affected their cultural development.
Or not. One thing that amazes and puzzles me is that once those very few precious children survived into adolescence, the adults had no qualms about sending them into war. You'd think they would have wrapped them in their society's closest equivalent of styrofoam and shipped them off to the most peaceful place they knew of. But then, even today I don't understand why so many parents are not just cavalier but
proud that their children are out there killing each other with guns and bombs and chemicals and, if all else fails, their bare hands. If my mother had tried to send me off to war I would have shot her first. Getting rid of the adult morons who think that war is ever the answer seems like a great way to start improving the world and increasing
everybody else's life expectancty.
Another point is that if we only improved 10% in 90 years, just how much more improvement can we expect in the next 100 years? Articles are dreaming about living up to 120+ and I don't think that will happen nor do I think it should.
The Wikipedia list of the
hundred oldest people who ever lived only goes back to someone born in 1871 who made it to 115. This suspiciously coincides with the dawn of modern scientific medicine and public health: plentiful clean water, wrapped food, covered sewers, asepsis, vaccines, antibiotics, etc. So it could be that it really was these advantages that got us that far. The oldest person on record who lived to 122 was born in 1875. We'll obviously have to be patient and wait a few more decades to see if the people who were born in the 1880s, 1890s and the early 20th century had more advantages, since if they're going to celebrate their 125th birthdays they're simply not old enough to show up yet.
Those of you in your 20s and 30s? It will be the next century before anyone knows if you live to 130 or 135 with your artificial organs and cyber-enhanced brains!
In any case, it's reasonable to assume that most of the benefits of 21st-century medicine (which IMHO will be heavily centered on bits of nanotechnology cruising through our bloodstream making microscopic repairs along the way) will accrue to younger people
because there are so many more of them. Even if the maximum age doesn't rise much beyond 122, the average life expectancy could still rise into the 90s or 100s if they can keep people in their 60s, 70s and 80s from dying of stroke, heart attack and Alzheimers, the three leading causes of death in that age group. Nanobots would certainly be the key to that!
And why not look at all the causes of death in all age groups? Road accidents are in the top five worldwide, and in America guns have recently begun to kill more people than cars. Robotic technology will probably make a quantum improvement in road safety once the bugs are worked out. As for guns, if only we could divide the country in half and put all the gun nuts in one half and the rest of us in the other half, they could happily kill each other off and the rest of us would be safe.
For teenagers, suicide is one of the top five killers. We need to do something about that. Overdosing on
prescription medications is another, figure that out?
Unless they can give me youth and health....
We've covered the "health" part, but they're certainly working on the "youth" part. At age 69, Mrs. Fraggle and I look like our parents did when they were 55--except for her father who died of TB at that age, a disease which hardly kills anybody in the developed countries today. And there's nothing remarkable about us. Most Americans around age 70 look
old but not decrepit. My best friend is 65 and she looks 45. Guys in their 30s want to dance with her, guys in their 40s want to take her home, and guys in their 50s think they're too old for her!
