One of the big chips in the progress of the Human Species is medicine. With successful medicine comes an increase in the aged population of the planet. Everyone of these aged individuals takes up space. A lot of them have no useful productive use anymore. A lot of them require expensive nursing facilities to survive. A lot of them have aging diseases such as Alzheimer disease. All of them eat food until they eventually succumb to one disease or another. In effect, we all age, we all deteriorate, and eventually we all die. I don’t care if you are worth 2 cents or 200 billion dollars. The same rules apply to all of us.
How we handle this problem of aging populations is going to take genius level intelligence. Most likely that will not be found in government leadership. I refer to all government, not just the government here.
The maximum amount of time given us on this planet is very variable. I think the maximum age of any individual on this planet in modern times has been 126 years and that is not documented very well. The Bible says 120 years is the maximum and I believe that might be a better answer.
Industry generally gives up on people at the age of 62-70 years of age. Though a lot of modern companies try to get rid of their people at around the age of 50. These companies use a legal ploy of making people re-qualify for jobs they have done all their lives with additional qualifications thrown in to make sure they cannot qualify for the job they are actually doing.
This leaves us all with a huge social and financial problem of taking care of these individuals. It is illegal to discriminate against someone because of their age. So is traveling on an interstate at over 65 miles an hour. Neither law is very effective in doing its job.
Money talks. Companies have fleets of lawyers to protect them when they do something illegal.
Old people are discriminated against by modern companies. Until that changes, a lot of people are going to float until they reach minimum retirement age. There is a lot of talk in the Congress of increasing the minimum age for people to get Social Security. This will simply change the logistics of welfare. Translated: A whole lot of older people will have to resort to the welfare system to make it until they reach minimum age for a pension. A whole lot of people are going to be out of luck.
Medicine is holding out on the common person. There is medicine for the common people and then there is medicine for the rich. The medicine for the rich is often able to postpone the aging process if the rich participate in this medicine. It is not cheap.
What is aging? That is the question asked by people over the ages. Well, we now know a whole lot more about it than we did just 20 years ago.
We are all born with a clock in our cells. This clock contains an enormous amount of data about what makes us tick. From the time we are conceived until the time that we are born, we metabolize. In the various stages of pregnancy, a fetus resembles a whole lot of critters. In this process, there is a total of about 15,000 strands containing data about what makes you and I what we are at birth. It has been estimated that 10,000 of those strands go away between conception and birth. This is all hearsay on my part from papers I have read on this process. It is against my principles to use big words if small words will work. So I won’t go into the technical jargon used. I leave that to scientists and witch doctors, both of which try to mystify things with big words.
So, from the time we are born and until the time we die, we have approximately 5-6 thousand strands to work with. Each time a cell reproduces the number of these data strands decreases. Normally when we are left with 2,000 of these strands or less, we die.
I think this aging solution to old life is a mutation of some kind. If you had asked me just 2 weeks ago if it was universal, I would have said yes. Then I happened on a program on oceans and the life in them. Some Coral plants in our deep oceans, live to be 10,000 years or more. The scientists did not say why they lived that long but I can guess.
The oceans protect them against casual radiation in the environment.
They have resolved the strand elimination problem and reproduce with the same number of strands each time.
They have no natural enemies at that depth to kill them off.
The environment gives them some vital nutrition we do not get on the surface.
By coincidence, the ancient Indian documents describe Coral as the key to changing someone into an immortal. There are over 2,000 to 3,000 varieties of Coral on this planet. The medical society of ancient India kept it a deep dark secret which coral plant worked to retard aging. No one knows which one it was they used. We do know it involved a risky prescription that if it was off measure it killed the person instead of making them immortal. We may never know. All the immortals that took the medicine have been killed in our prehistory. They are all gone. Rumor is there was somekind of Nuclear War between China and India in the prehistory. So no one knows how to reproduce this medicine and make it work. Supposedly it had to be taken at puberty. That is in the documents we do have that science today ignores as superstition.
What we need is medicine that restores the quality of life. That means we need something that will keep us young and flexible even though we age. Then our experience will make us a better candidate for employment than the younger generation that is pushing us aside. The really old people don’t want to work anymore. They are too tired.
The real problem is that people lose their ability to change with aging. They are not able to keep up with the technologies and the new ways of doing things. So they lose to the up coming generation.
What is happening to old people will happen to young people in time. That is what most of these bright young executives seem to over look. What happens now to us, happens down the road to them.
We all think the rules do not apply to us. That is until it catches up with us. So if you are a bright young congress person, realize that it will catch up with you eventually. Though the age of the Congress in power on critical committees seems to be old people. The same goes for all executives in our Corporations as a lot of middle managers have all ready found out.
One of the critical problems with us is we are constantly bombarded by radiation of various types. None of which is critical radiation poisoning in the short term. But in the long term it is all accumulative and it catches up with us.
If you are old, take off your clothes in a bathroom mirror and check your skin. Which skin on your body is all wrinkled and old? Is it the skin you cover with clothing? Or the skin that is constantly exposed? Or both?
We know what we know about aging more by accident than by purpose. It was a cloned sheep that taught us about the clock. The sheep rapidly aged to the age of the cell it was cloned from. Then it aged naturally. So scientists took the cells from the clone and figured out the difference was the strands.
Oxygen is necessary for our life. It also rusts the body out. So things that slow that process down should slow down the aging process itself. We now have chemicals to do that.
Nature provides for slowing the aging process by slowing the reproduction of cells. Resvertal is one such chemical that slows the aging process in people. Calorie restriction has proven to slow aging.
Our glands slowly quit working the way they should. A lot of people have thyroid problems. The master gland is in the brain. It sends DHEA messages to the rest of the endoctrinal glands. It dramatically stops working around the age of 32. From then on it is down hill and a lot of aging occurs because that message center quits working right. This is a very slow process and goes unnoticed by most medical doctors because it is a normal aging process. The companies figure it has gotten terminal at age 50. That is why they want to get rid of experienced help at that age.
From 50 to 70 it is all down hill.
We all have a complete record of our strands built into our reproductive parts. That is why the clock starts over again when a baby is conceived. It gains a reshuffling of the data with the combination of the two people involved. But it does start over with a complete set of data. What if we could reset the clock on those strands to an earlier age?
Cancer is the great age mystery. You see when a cell becomes cancerous it often becomes immortal. The problem is in the process of no longer aging, the cancer cell loses its ability to function in the body. So eventually the cancer causes whatever organs it is part of to quit functioning which in turn causes the body to die. But what if we could retain the ability to function as part of the whole body with cancer cells without the cells continuing to age? It is not uncommon in tissue cultures for a cancer to live 12-14 times as long as a normal cell from the original animal.
The problem is what to do with all these old people? When they do figure out how to increase longevity of people as we have done in the last century of medical progress, our society has to come up with better answers than we have now. The current answer is to pension them off and let them rot. Eventually the problem goes away as we increase the mortality rate by simply letting them age until they die.
The Ponzi scheme called Social Security hasn’t worked for a while now. You see for every old person that lived past the qualifying age of 65, most people died shortly thereafter. Modern medicine has changed those statistics. A lot of people now live up into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s. Some even make it to 110. The Ponzi scheme only worked when the majority of people did not collect it for very long. Our government spent the money for their pensions elsewhere. Now it is coming home and they have to explain why they do not have the money to support the old people that paid into it all their lives.
Lot of luck Congress, with explaining why you cannot support them . . . And it is not just Social Security anymore. All of the pension schemes are in trouble.
Right now if you go into any major retail chain with guards at the door, half of them will be retirees trying to supplement the pitiful amount of pension benefits they get.
With the progress that medicine is making in old age medicine, we are going to have to make a major adjustment in the way we treat old people.
No longer can old people fail to keep up with the technology and our times. That means new ways of teaching aimed at people that are not able to learn at the same rate as the young. It means a different attitude from everyone. It means giving people the opportunity to stay employed.
But even before we can do that, we have to bring all those jobs home that have left our shores. If our Congress had paid attention to the older generation they wouldn’t be in the fix they are in today.
It means giving respect for the wisdom of those that came before us and learning the many things they might be able to teach us.
It means making our old people feel needed and useful.
More important it means going back to the ways that worked in generations past. It means being aware that giving away our country’s wealth to other countries for short term gain has not worked.
We have an important turning of our economy if we are going to survive the coming economic destruction. A lot of our old people lived through it during the great depression of the 30s. They might have a lot to teach the younger generation about how to cope with it.