Longevity and its impact on society — 1

The average human life span has been steadily climbing from less than twenty-five in the early nineteenth century to over seventy in recent years. The spread of the increase in life span has not been uniform across continents. In the US, the life expectancy of an average human is 78, while in the Latin American region it stands at 71. The figure is unsurprisingly low in the African continent at 61. In India, it is near 69 years while in China it is 76 years. Whatsoever the numbers today are, the trend indicates an upward trajectory in the coming decades with more technological innovation and other advancements in healthcare practices.

This increase in human life span is ideally a good economic indicator but it has its cons too. With advancements in other fields and more emerging technologies replacing jobs, this population will be redundant and if we all keep living longer and longer, there will be many societal effects — which not many are prepared for.

Problems will emerge once the population of the elderly will be more than three-tenth of the global population, estimating an equal share for children. In such a scenario, the productive population will be less than half and people who need to be looked after and they will be put stress upon the scarce economic resources.

Then shall we ask ourselves if longevity is truly a good intention gone wrong or was it fundamentally flawed from the beginning — but thriving on fears of the mere mortals — that eventually led to a depressed workforce with heaps of economic problems?

Throughout history, humans have tried to understand mortality and ageing and to overcome them. From magical elixirs to preventative healthcare by use genomics, everything is about changing fate. Egyptology’s sacred rituals of mummified kings are similar in ideation to rebirths and cryogenic life extension. The awareness of human being that we are going to die someday — knowledge of our fate — has been the ultimate motivation to change it and has occupied thousands in its research for millennia.

So far most advancements have been about increasing our life spans, and very little attention has gone into increasing our health spans. Today people live up to their eightieth birthdays, by popping pills. Nearly one in two Americans are popping pills. From prescription medication to wellness kits, pills are steadily becoming the norm for life. Consider this: how about a life without pills?

As much as it may resemble a conspiracy theory, we all know it is true. From the local physician to the super-speciality doctor you know, all recommend some form of medication for the smallest ailments. Why? We have no time to heal, all we care for is a quick recovery in this fast-paced world. Humanities lackadaisical attitude has kept us miles away from the first innovation on increasing our health spans. Health requires a holistic approach, from nutrition to mindfulness. From high-stress (isn’t stress inevitable?) low-anxiety work environments to relationships. Everything has its weightage on our health spans. One can be twenty-five yet look thirty-five (many people do, like me — sometimes).

It is a choice we can make, whether to truly age or look more aged than we truly are.

Latest medical technologies are enabling us to treat ailments that we have not been able to heal before. Tissue engineering and regeneration are two recent medical marvels and are one of many breakthroughs. Talking about tissue engineering and emerging healthcare trends, have you heard of regrowing a cut fingertip? Well, it is possible instead of that ugly looking scar. The solution is a milestone in biology and is known as the extracellular matrix. It is a medical marvel, especially for athletes and soldiers (neh, not much help on the battlefield but during rehabilitation).

Recent progress in genomics is commendable. It is helping in the screening and treatment of diseases in an effective and affordable manner. Recently, I read that a few types of cancers are on the verge of being cured. All thanks to the sequencing of human genomes, that is enabling personalized cancer and HIV treatments, making them more effective than ever in the past.

In this decade, we will enter into a time when scientists can prevent diseases and help our bodies regenerate, thereby leading to many of us enjoying a far more healthy and longer life. The question that lies ahead of us is: if we achieve lengthened and healthy life spans, is this always a good thing?

To answer that, we need to dive into the innate psychology of humans. Purpose. As impressive as it may be, the long life has moral, ethical and psychological concerns. Humans have a vivid perspective of life and often are unable to focus on things beyond 30-years. Most people do not enjoy their career beyond seven-to-ten years. And as attention spans get shorter, our interest in any field of our life will inevitably reduce to a single-digit year.

Now, if we were to live longer, say over a hundred years, we would eventually lose interest in life and struggle to find meaning in it, leading to a plethora of troubles for oneself, the family and the society at large.

An argument that often counters the perspective of long-age and interest is with us living over seventy-years while our ancestors lived a mere thirty or hardly fourty years. My counter to that is to analyse the attention span. Today, we are not inquisitive enough to dig into a subject all by ourselves with all the advances in technology and the Internet. Today we collaborate and use computation to solve problems that earlier took ten or twenty years. So the idea of evolving interests may not all satisfying hence needs more investigation.

You cannot build high rise apartment in a slum. The dwellers of the slum, with envy and agony, will bring the high rise to its knees in years to come, if they are not accomodated with better living conditions and opportunities. It is similar to the notion of a negative-sum game, only here the loser has a tendency to react violently.

My only objection to research into longevity and ageing is its disproportionate costs or poor use of resources. Today while few hundreds desire to live for two-hundred years, hundreds of thousands are dying of treatable diseases in developed nations. Hundreds of millions die each year in developing nations for malnutrition, lack of sewage treatment and clear water — things for which the technology is available and can be made accessible. Multiple factors add to this injustice and inequality, which make me consider research into longevity and ageing to have the potential to provide benefits to all communities, including the poor unprivileged and underserved, but is not aligned to our immediate needs and goals.

In the following posts on this series examining longevity and societal impacts, I will discuss the pros and cons of longevity. My next post will be on how longevity will boost economies, by creating an educated workforce, and talk on population growth and the changes it will bring to the family unit.

Stay tuned!