11
Mar
A Not So Talked About Way Of Tackling The Aging Population Problem
Submitted by Pete on Tue, 03/11/2008 - 06:26.
We always hear about the problems with our aging population, and the solution proposed always seems to be to let me young people migrate into the country, or encourage the birth rate to increase through various 'incentives'...
Which when you think about it, is just a little bit stupid.. really, it costs about $500,000+ (amount does not include loss of productivity or time investment changing diapers etc) to bring up the average kid from 0-21, and the government pays people $5,000 as a 'bonus' for having a kid. If the pure idiocracy of this idea doesn't shine through straight away, all you have to do is to take a bus or a train ride through a dodgy neighbourhood enough times and you'll eventually see some meth addicted failure talking to another unwashed drug addicted social outcast about how they or one of their acquaintance's is having a kid merely to take advantage of the governments 'baby bonus'.
Eugenics has gotten a bit of a bad name for good reasons, yet this is exactly what this government is doing, its providing an environment that favours 'one' kind of person, because weather you create a system that weeds out the intelligent or the not so intelligent, your still ultimately engaging 'nudging' the selection criteria.
Now think about this for a moment, the only people that this 'financial' incentive will work on are people that would consider getting a $5,000 lump sum for taking on $500,000 in 'debt'.. and the governments system will selectively add MORE of these people into our gene pool, as anyone else would choose to have a kid on other reasons than a small one time bonus.
So what if you instead considered aging a disease? just because everyones born 'sick', an uncurable sickness with a 100% mortality rate makes it no less of a disease. It's caused by both evolution selecting for most offspring rather than longevity, along with many many minor failures in each successive duplication of cells, an interesting situation when you consider every cell in your body is guaranteed to be new every 7 years.
Scientists are constantly looking at new ways of extending life, and many believe that its fairly reasonable to expect that if your reading this about now (your 20-25 years old) you'll end up not aging as medical science continues to improve at a faster rate than your body breaks down..
Theres already a pill coming to market in the next couple of years that will simulate calorie deprivation, which counter intuitively puts cells to work at higher efficiency, and has so far lead to dramatic life extensions and quality of life, in particular middle life improvements in mammals it was tested on.
Its interesting, science says that this pill could extend the average life span by 9 years in humans if everyone took it, and to put this into perspective curing cancer completely with no side effects would only increase the average life span by 2 years..
So how about it? It would make sense both in a quality of life and economically if we tackled the aging population problem not with more kids, but with putting more and more work into removing age as a problem in the first place. Simply put, fighting a problem is very stupid if its feasible to remove the problem in the first place.
It would be easy to make a pill like this available for free through a government program, and extend the retirement age to 70. You could keep doing this while technology improves, and at the very least cushion the impact of our aging population.
Just think about it, a couple billion worth of funds that are already invested in the trillions of dollars in super anuation could do some pretty amazing stuff in this area.
Which when you think about it, is just a little bit stupid.. really, it costs about $500,000+ (amount does not include loss of productivity or time investment changing diapers etc) to bring up the average kid from 0-21, and the government pays people $5,000 as a 'bonus' for having a kid. If the pure idiocracy of this idea doesn't shine through straight away, all you have to do is to take a bus or a train ride through a dodgy neighbourhood enough times and you'll eventually see some meth addicted failure talking to another unwashed drug addicted social outcast about how they or one of their acquaintance's is having a kid merely to take advantage of the governments 'baby bonus'.
Eugenics has gotten a bit of a bad name for good reasons, yet this is exactly what this government is doing, its providing an environment that favours 'one' kind of person, because weather you create a system that weeds out the intelligent or the not so intelligent, your still ultimately engaging 'nudging' the selection criteria.
Now think about this for a moment, the only people that this 'financial' incentive will work on are people that would consider getting a $5,000 lump sum for taking on $500,000 in 'debt'.. and the governments system will selectively add MORE of these people into our gene pool, as anyone else would choose to have a kid on other reasons than a small one time bonus.
So what if you instead considered aging a disease? just because everyones born 'sick', an uncurable sickness with a 100% mortality rate makes it no less of a disease. It's caused by both evolution selecting for most offspring rather than longevity, along with many many minor failures in each successive duplication of cells, an interesting situation when you consider every cell in your body is guaranteed to be new every 7 years.
Scientists are constantly looking at new ways of extending life, and many believe that its fairly reasonable to expect that if your reading this about now (your 20-25 years old) you'll end up not aging as medical science continues to improve at a faster rate than your body breaks down..
Theres already a pill coming to market in the next couple of years that will simulate calorie deprivation, which counter intuitively puts cells to work at higher efficiency, and has so far lead to dramatic life extensions and quality of life, in particular middle life improvements in mammals it was tested on.
Its interesting, science says that this pill could extend the average life span by 9 years in humans if everyone took it, and to put this into perspective curing cancer completely with no side effects would only increase the average life span by 2 years..
So how about it? It would make sense both in a quality of life and economically if we tackled the aging population problem not with more kids, but with putting more and more work into removing age as a problem in the first place. Simply put, fighting a problem is very stupid if its feasible to remove the problem in the first place.
It would be easy to make a pill like this available for free through a government program, and extend the retirement age to 70. You could keep doing this while technology improves, and at the very least cushion the impact of our aging population.
Just think about it, a couple billion worth of funds that are already invested in the trillions of dollars in super anuation could do some pretty amazing stuff in this area.
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