I am not talking about Cancer here but ageing.
I wondered why there is such an effort to find cures etc for cancer but there does not seem to be as much fuss about curing ageing which as far as i am aware is a degenerative disease caused by your body not producing as many cells as are dieing, I understand this may be a simplistic view but i am an amateur who has never studied science after high school apart from on my own time.
In terms of curable diseases i would (again possibly a simplistic view) have thought ageing would seem like one of the more easily tackled diseases to try and find a cure for as we understand generally what is happening. I am sure in practice it is not quite as simple as i am stating but surely something that is within the realms of possibility and not in the too distant future.
Stories about breakthroughs in relation to cancer treatments and cures catch my eye as i am sure they do many others, and i wonder if general cures for cancer will be found in my lifetime and from what i have read this is not out of the question.
This got me thinking , what if there was a medical breakthrough and a cure was found for ageing? For a split second i think wow wouldn't that be amazing! Not having to get old in the sense we are used to just now, being alive long enough to see the advances mankind is able to make and alive long enough to find answers to some of the greater questions mankind is trying to answer about the universe etc.
Then the reality sets in, it would be total chaos and would probably send us back centuries in the space of a few decades and the thoughts about what direction the human race would be headed are dire at best! The current world population is around 7 billion and we have food shortages, housing problems, pollution problems etc already and there are concerns just with natural population increases about how we will cope as a planet. Can you imagine if a cure was developed for ageing and almost overnight everyone was living to 300, 400, 500 years old and beyond until they were killed by other causes not related to ageing? Even if everyone was prudent and only had 1 child as i think China does, if you lived to 300 then your child having a child who has a child who has a child etc, by the time you died there could easily be 15 people alive at once draining the planets resources at once who you brought into the world.
In just 30 years the population would probably be hitting 15 billion and in 60 years 30 billion and 90 years 60 billion etc. I really doubt the modern world has anywhere even close to the infrastructure in place to deal with this. What would happen to peoples pensions i mean people couldn't work for 40 years then spend 400 years collecting pensions. There are food shortages now how on earth could the planet cope with ten time the population in just 90 years. There appear to be problems with power grids being near capacity just now and the fossil fuel situation is well known surely this could never cope with 10x the demand in a relatively short timeframe. Would the worlds financial markets completely collapse? Would more wars over territories and resources break out? Anyway you cut it the reality of a cure for ageing would create total and utter global chaos and in a very quick time period too!
So this got me thinking....
Would and could the worlds governments/medical community afford to tell us if there were suck a breakthrough in finding a cure for ageing?
I don't see any way they could tell us without condemning the planet to a dreadful short and long term future unless some very very strict measures for population control and some radical thinking was introduced almost immediately.
