It would surely be a different one. It has been thought that during the first 75 years of a life, genes have a small influence on longevity.
Once you reach mids, genes matter more, with regard to longevity. We also know that as one ages our chromosomes become shorter, making us more prone to diseases, but some of this can be offset with a healthy diet and exercise, so we may be able to have a longer life. A study conducted by the University of Southern Denmark and Duke University in North Carolina, however, looks at this with a different viewpoint.
The study representing 42 institutions in 14 countries, which looked at humans and 30 non-human primates, states that all species have succeeded in living longer by reducing the rate of infant mortality and juvenile mortality because of better living conditions. They state that people are living longer because they are not dying younger. The concept supports the invariant rate of aging hypothesis that says a species has a never-changing rate of ageing from adulthood.
Another study at the University of Leeds analysed countries and looked at 11 social indicators and seven environmental indicators for a longer life.
The seven environmental indicators included Co2 emissions from burning of fossil fuel, phosphorus used as an industrial and commercial raw material, nitrogen as a by-production of fuel combustion, among others.
They also looked at other social parameters such as employment, equality, democratic quality, social support, education, access to energy income, sanitation, nutrition, life satisfaction and healthy life expectancy. The invariant rate of ageing hypothesis states that these above mentioned factors are responsible for us dying early.
In essence, if so much depends on the environment, we must strive to reach these targets and reduce pollution. Dr Altaf Patel writes on good medicine and age-old common sense Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own From the same author: - Can you dream your way to success? Read 0 Comment post a comment.
Continue without login. For the foreseeable future, life extension will be just a wonderfully shiny bauble of luxury far beyond most of our reach. And how could we ethically pursue such an end—dedicating resources and time—when those in the developing world on average die a full 30 years before those in the West?
Technology advances first for those who have the money, then moves forward for the rest. At the dawn of the cell phone, many people in Africa still lacked landlines—but by the time the continent had advanced far enough to address that problem, portable phone tech had become so cheap that it allowed Africa to bypass those legacy systems entirely , leapfrog landlines, and go straight to mobiles.
Disparity of access is a valid concern, especially when lack of access means death. However, as we probe the edges of our limits, we must remain dedicated to eventually making any discoveries available to all. And besides, limited access may be necessary, at least at first. The world has only so many resources, and our booming population is already stressing what we have available.
If we were to add another 20 to 40 years to the lifespans of every person on Earth, it could have cataclysmic global consequence. At the end of the 18th century, English cleric, scholar, and demographer Thomas Malthus postulated that death is the best check against a famine induced global cataclysmic tragedy.
In other words: Unless enough of us bow out early on account of stupidity, violence, or health, homo sapiens is screwed. Of all the arguments against life extension, the Malthusian catastrophe is the one that worries Davis the most. Rather than think about the problem in the abstract, he teamed up with a demographer to find out what would happen to the world if we were to live to be , or even 1, years old.
What they found was that sustainable life extension may come with some pretty tough decisions. In the first set of numbers they ran, everyone in his hypothetical population of a billion people are on some form life-extension therapy that allows them to live to which is a number bandied about as possible within our lifetimes.
In the second set, the life-extension tech is way better, and everyone lives to 1, which Davis believes would be the median life expectancy if we could remove all age-related diseases. But if we tighten our belts a little—say one child per every two women—things start to level out at a one-third increase after a couple of decades, then starts to decline.
The same happens in the second scenario after years. This was because after a certain amount of living, human life would become unspeakably boring. We need new experiences in order to have reasons to keep on going. But after enough time has passed, we will have experienced everything that we, as individuals, find stimulating. The former is a contingent, the latter a categorical, desire. A life devoid of categorical desires, Williams claimed, would devolve into a mush of undifferentiated banality, containing no reason to keep on going.
Born in , Elina drinks an elixir that keeps her biologically speaking at age 42 forever. However, by the time she is over years old, Elina has experienced everything she wants, and as a result her life is cold, empty, boring and withdrawn. There is nothing left to live for. Accordingly, she decides to stop drinking the elixir, and releases herself from the tedium of immortality. Imagine that the natural biological lifespan of a human being was 1, years.
In that case, in her s, Elina would have died comparatively young. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed even if usually unknown time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. In turn, Scheffler argues, everything that we value — and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life — must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings.
Sure, we can imagine what it would be like to be immortal, if we find that an amusing way to pass the time. A desire for immortality is thus a paradox: it would frustrate itself were it ever to be achieved. You might think you want to live forever, but reflection should convince you otherwise. But is it quite so clear? What is interesting in this regard is that, when we return to wider popular culture, instances abound of immortality being presented not as a blessing, but a curse. Initially thinking that these must be the happiest of all beings, Gulliver revises his view when he learns that Struldbrugs never stop ageing, leading them to sink into decrepitude and insanity, roaming the kingdom as disgusting brutes shunned by normal humans.
It seems, then, that both philosophers and popular culture keep trying to tell us the same thing: you might think that you want to live forever, but reflection should convince you otherwise.
And yet, if this is ultimately true — as philosophers and popular culture seem to want to say that it is — then another question arises: why do we keep needing to be told? There is something both deeply and persistently appealing about the idea of immortality, and that cannot be dispelled by simply pointing to examples where immortality would be a curse. For Kass, to argue that life is better without death is to argue "that human life would be better being something other than human. Kass' position is controversial, but it gets at some of the central issues surrounding the life extension debate: What is aging?
Is it a disease to be cured or a natural part of life? If natural, is it necessarily good for us? In numerous presentations and papers throughout the years, Kass has argued for what he calls the "virtues of mortality. To number our days, Kass contends, "is the condition for making them count and for treasuring and appreciating all that life brings.
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