Should science be working to prolong people's lives?

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We are hardly at what is normal. Life was backbreaking labor from sunup to sundown, six days a week from six to the grave.

Medical science did some, but technology did a lot more.

Rome knew bad water caused disease, but it took a massive iron industry to supply modern cities, about a hundred years ago.

150 years ago all energy was man or animal, and 99% of labor was spent on food production. The few cash crops that could be produced, Cotton, took slavery to be profitable, and textiles women and children working six twelves.

The reduction of labor, Thanks Machines!, lead to people not just wearing out and dying.

Just comparing the war babies to their parents, products of the Depression, they were healthy, even though we lived on junk food. We did eat all the time. Fat people were rare. Work still involved labor, but with shorter hours.

The combination of office work, which exploded in the fifties and sixties, rich foods, and simple shopping, the Supermarket, the electric fridge, gas stove, took all the labor out of eating. Moreso fast foods, and enough calories to feed someone in Africa for a week, for lunch.

They were adding ten pounds a decade, and as they just sat most of the time, it was fat. It was their children who started life fat and went on to become eating machines. A lot died before fifty, or of Cancer before sixty-five.

Thin people lived another twenty years or more. I think they were the ones who could survive on less, lived through famines, died early when doing heavy labor, who were now more fit to live.

Available food, The High School Era where most did not go to work at twelve, but spent another six years growing, and a life of moderate labor. These are the factors that lead to extended life.

Just a well raised animal. Well fed in youth, moderate excise, then an active life with moderation in food.

In all places where this has been the case, many live to an active hundred. Few live much longer. It seems the natural lifespan.

This was before medical science, it is a lifestyle that works.

Should we do something about the men who drive themselves into the grave at 43 by being hard driving in life? Should we do something about bad diet choices? Excess diet? Most now die early of their own behaviors.

While some fat was around, todays Obease is something new, a product of our times. I think it a social rather than a medical condition.

Too much food, too little activity, this has never been the human condition.

I think we are close to providing the best conditions for a human to live a hundred years, I do not think most want to, and from those I know in their ninties, Living longer would be extending decline.

I think the place to extend life is in youth, One mutable thing is puberty, which a hundred years ago was 17 for girls. Now it happens as early as eight. I have seen the photographs of the Victorians, Children till the late teens, and looking like they were in their twenties at forty. They aged well.

Preserving the bloom of youth, the prime of beauty, it does not matter if you crash and burn at sixty. You had a good run. Delaying puberty does seem to delay aging. If that would also lead to an active 100, I do not know. But after that, the DNA keeps getting shorter, then you breakdown and die.

Keeping the DNA from getting shorter, delaying puberty, perhaps forever, could be a model of a long and healthy life.

It would change the social and economic system.

I think we are already over the line, the habitat declines, land and ocean are crashing. Fresh water and energy are showing cost effective shortages.

Our wastes are backing up. A few decades ago the Mississippi Dead Zone was the one, now we have a dozen at major water outlets, Clean Air and Water Acts slowed the process, but the total amount continued to increase.

The idea we could manage for sustained yield was all wrong, Close a fishery for depleted stocks, they stay depleted. The survivors survived because they lived in a limited world, and they continue to do so.

It is like we have a mass dieoff, the survivors live on farms, even if left alone, they will not repopulate New York.

Clear cutting forests and commercial farming, the top soil eroded, natural fertility declined, and Nitrogen from the air is expensive, and without it, our farmland will not remain fertile. An inch of topsoil takes 10,000 years to form, under grass with buffalo. Trace Elements are removed with crops and animals, and then they are gone.

A few small holes in the Biologly Chain, it no longer works.

We are fully in one of the Major Extinction Periods. Some are gone forever, Passenger Pigeons by the billions, ducks that blotted out the sun for days in their passing, Dodos, Sea Cows, ninety million buffalo reduced to a few thousand, and at one point, thirteen. The oyster has been reduced by 99%.

The idea of restoring the productive ability lost is called Magic.

We are like Greek Debt, even if Magic Thinking reduces it by half, the needed cuts to pay it, reduce the economy, and so the debt doubles.

Total worldwide birth control tomorrow would do nothing, The generation up to die are WWI and Depression Babies, The WWII war babies will live another twenty years. There are not enough to support them now, and no births for twenty years would make matters worse.

A fair and shared downsizing is the only way, Drought, famine, new diseases, Once decline sets in it is unstoppable.

In Biological Populations, after a long rise to great numbers, the dieoff reduces them by 90-95% very quickly.

Reproduction has been in decline. It has fallen below replacment in the industrial world, and even in the worst poverty, has declined with the drop in child mortality. We could have a steady population decline.

The problem is a new one, up to WWI, people died in their fifties, by 1933, 64. Since then now 80, and in Japan 90. This is about a third of the population that never existed before.

Post WWII, the normal turnover of real estate stopped. Suburbia was built because the old did not die. Cities became Senior Centers, Retired, non productive, but still the center of jobs, so the commuter was born.

The children of suburbia had to build new and farther away, because the old still did not die.

The old model that worked, a city with a ring of farmland, became a declining city with a ring of suburbs.

By the time the old died the cities had fallen into disrepair, lost their tax base, and become Detroit, where no one wants to live. Too expensive to restore, or remove, but a natural habitat for Crackheads.

We spend a lot to support the old, which is killing the economic value of cities. It would be cheaper to build a very comfortable city with all the supports needed by an older non productive population.

No taxes, free rent and utilities, food, medical care, public transportation. They would become an industry, profitable,

About a quarter of the population should live there.

This would free up the rest of the country for the productive years.

We have already destroyed the real estate market for decades to come, which has killed building trades, New cities would produce a period of full employment, they can be connected by high speed trains, a new electric grid, water lines, regional sewer, and the remaining land can be priced right to be redeveloped.

Most of our economic problems come from the changing demographic of the last 75 years.

Well one thing is most people would not want to live too long. Most people by the time they are 50-60 think they have had full lives. There would be few that would want to live past the norm.

I myself would love to live as long as possible because I love learning through discovery and I love seeing the progress of man. And because of my Aspergers I have an emotional disconnect. Without that most people would go insane because NTs can't stand seeing things they grow attached to get destroyed. I have seen people ball their eyes out because an EMPTY building burned down.