Welcome to Running: A FEVER, a podcast about fitness, diet, and medicine. I’m Michael Davis, and my goal is to live a long, healthy, happy, active life right up to the very end. If that sounds good to you, you’re in the right place.
Well, given what I’ve just said, this question might be moot: Do you really want a longer life? I always put those modifiers in. My conditions for living to a ripe age. And I think most of us would say that without some sense of enjoyment, some purpose for living, it might not be worth it.
But there are other things we need to consider. What about the implications for broader society? Can we, as the human race, support this concept? I don’t know if I’ll answer those questions completely in this episode, but I will explore some of the potential problems and benefits of having a population in which maturity takes on new meaning.
I told you in the introduction of this series that I was concerned about my current ailments and if they could be cured. Perhaps technology will advance enough to provide affordable solutions that would eliminate conditions like hypertension. Though they are in their infancy, we’ve already seen possible pharmaceutical solutions to the disease of obesity. But here’s another theory. If we knew we would live longer, would we take better care of ourselves? I know that’s a thought that occurs to me often, and I’m constantly reminding my mother, who has a goal of living to 165, that she needs to keep herself in tip-top condition. It’s a virtuous cycle. The better we are at staying fit, and the longer we commit to that, the longer we live, the more we need to keep fit, and so on. Hopefully, the emergence of medical technologies and our fitness regime will give us not just a longer lifespan but a longer health span as well.
What do you plan to do in your retirement years? A hundred years ago, there was no such thing as retirement. At least in the United States, according to a 2024 survey, it is now common to retire at age 62, while the life expectancy of people who reach the age of 62 is between 81 and 84. What if you had as much time in retirement as you did in your working life? Would you start a new career? Become a super-volunteer, supporting causes that could change the world for the better? Would you become a non-starving artist? Perhaps you love your job and wouldn’t retire at all. Can you imagine someone working in your occupation with 80 years of experience? How would all of these individual activities affect society as a whole?
One potential problem many scientists and others tout is that the world would run out of resources in less than 100 years. Stephen Hawking is one of these. He said that we have 100 years to find a new planet on which to live, and the nearest Earth-like planet is 10,000 years travel away. Agricultural technology has surpassed our population growth in the past, but what if humans start living for over 100 years and beyond? Americans are estimated to waste two-thirds of our food and over 99% of our water. It is not unreasonable to suggest that that will need to change as societies advance and lifespans increase.
What about global warming? If humans are causing it, will more humans on the earth worsen it? The most populated areas are near areas that could suffer from flooding as oceans rise. Hopefully, advances in technology will decrease and possibly reverse these effects. But thus far, some advances have perhaps made things worse by increasing our need for energy.
I have long believed that Social Security would be non-existent by the time I can quit my day job (I don’t like the “r” word). And as of now, it looks like it will begin at least reducing from the current benefit level by then. The US Social Security Administration estimates that benefits will be forced to a 25% reduction by 2030 due to the depletion of the trust fund that supplements current tax revenues. Suppose instead of living 20 years in retirement, people could live 40 years or more. Social Security is the reason most older people don’t live in poverty in this country. What would happen to them (or us, I should say)?
What about healthcare? The common thought is that the older people get, the more medical care they need and the more of a burden on society they become. However, unlike the financial problems we predict, medical care will not be a problem if we continue to advance our understanding and use of the genetic information this series has tried to convey. The idea is that it can reduce aging. Curing one disease may have a small impact on the cost of healthcare as another disease comes up to take its place. However, curing aging would eliminate many diseases simultaneously, reducing the cost of medical care and increasing its availability. We could invest a portion of that savings into research, exponentially improving healthcare as we reduce its cost. Imagine a world in which the expensive treatment of a debilitating and fatal disease could be reduced to the low price of gene therapy, possibly available in a pill.
There is reason to think overpopulation will not be as big a problem as we make it out to be. Until the late 1960s, the average number of children each woman had was five. Due to increasing socioeconomic opportunities for women, that average has continuously fallen over the last few decades. The rate of increase in our population has dropped from two percent in 1970 to about one percent today. The United Nations estimates that the world population will peak in 2100 at about eleven billion, then begin to decline.
And even though those estimates are based on people living, on average, into their 80s, If we stopped all death today, meaning everyone would have an infinite lifespan, we would add a billion people to the earth’s population every eighteen years, which is a slower pace than we’ve seen in the last few decades. And while I believe we can extend life, and life expectancies continue to rise over time, I don’t think we’re going to eliminate death anytime soon.
Perhaps nothing that could come from prolonged life would be more impactful than eliminating hurry. The philosopher Seneca said “Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future”. He could have said, “Stop and smell the roses”. People act differently when time is not an issue. If we had more time in our lives, how would we act? Realizing we had time to recover from our mistakes, would we take more risks? Would we worry about working a few more years before retiring, thinking we’d miss out on the little active life we had left? Would we take more time to learn before rushing into the corporate world?
So what is the answer? I don’t know the answer, but I can speculate that the same technological advances that will extend life will also expand our ability to survive on the resources available to us indefinitely. Human ingenuity seemingly has no limits. The explosive advancement of AI will require enormous amounts of power generation, but if AI is, short of the human brain, the ultimate problem-solver, won’t it enable more efficiency in its own operation and other areas of human life? And remember, AI is a product of human ingenuity, the same ingenuity that has developed agriculture, mostly or entirely eliminated many diseases, invented sanitation, immunization, hospitals, and universities, and the list goes on. How can we think this won’t continue and exponentially increase? And if we can do all of these things, what right have we to say that we can’t build a society that works together to make it possible for us to live long lives together on this earth we call home? I say none.
References:
Sinclair, David A. and LaPlante, Matthew D. (2019). Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To. Atria Books.
https://tinyurl.com/hypertension-condition
https://tinyurl.com/obesity-disease
https://tinyurl.com/life-expectancy-us-uk
https://tinyurl.com/average-retirement-age-is-62
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html