Live to 120 February 22, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , trackbackBy 2010, new anti-aging drugs will be available which will lift the average life span by 20 years, according to an article in yesterday’s guardian.
Assuming this meant staying at the health and fitness of 50, say, until 70, rather than just extending decrepitude, this suggests some radical changes in lifestyle. Will the answer to our low rate of childbirth be to work longer, and increase the overall proportion of our lives spent working back to the levels of the mid twentieth century? Will the trend we seem to be seeing now of people making a transition into retirement by reducing hours gradually and developing portfolio careers later in life happen over a far longer period? Will it mean, as suggested in the article, that the retirement age is raised to 85, or even more? With careful planning, it might be possible for many to still become financially independent in their 60s, able to devote their energy away from the commercial world and into other activities of their own choosing and invention. The promise of increased leisure brought about by technology might finally come true.
It might become easier for women to return to having children in their twenties, when they know that, at 45, they still have 40 years working life to build a career, rather than less than 20. Great-grandparents would be commonplace, and able to participate more in child-rearing, giving parents two generations of help ahead of them rather than one. Families would be bigger, with an extra generation alive at any one time.
A longer productive life would make paying for education, then house, then retirement easier, and would go some way to easing the burden of an aging population. If the wisdom that at least some find as they age was combined with better health and the energy to keep participating in public life, that may help to give a longer term perspective to our society. Or it could easily lead to ossifying attitudes and frustration from those coming up behind, having to wait longer and longer for ‘their turn’.
Perhaps it could lead to ageism being truly recognised as one of the last great prejudices, and that infering wisdom, inability to learn or anything else based simply on age is as ridiculous as basing it on gender or race. Or it could lead to a reverse-ageism becoming more common, with the young increasingly disregarded by the huge mass of more experienced elders who’ve had the benefits of compound interest to boot.
But, as James Lovelock points out in his new book, it means that each of us spends more time on the earth, consuming its resources. Birth rates would have to drop drastically to accomodate a 20% increase in life span. In Western Europe, we’re already heading down that path to some extent, but will that just mean that the future remembers us as the greedy generation, who wouldn’t let go?
For myself, if those drugs appear and seem safe, I’ll be very keen to take them. The world is a fabulous place, and the next century will be a fascinating time to live through.
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