We may be closing in on a “cure” for ageing. That it, at least, according to David A. Sinclair, who is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and who, like many gerontologists like him, are now thinking of age as a disease that needs to be cured.
But even if we never get around to curing ageing entirely, our lifespans are increasing markedly. It is believed that 1 in 3 children born today will live past 100, and the first 150-year-old may already have been born. This new golden age of longevity will impact the future workforce, global healthcare, and the very fabric of our moral universe.
Imagine a world without ageing, and without old-age death. It might be impossible, and worse, it might be a negative picture: one with a planet ravaged by overconsumption and overpopulation. The argument you are about to read is not a negative one. It is one about faith in humanity and its ingenuity.
Here are the problems — and solutions, that tomorrow’s forever young might have to face:
Out of room?
In 1800 the population of London in Great Britain stood at around one million people. Sixty years later, the population had tripled. Such a quick explosion turned London into a ghoulish place littered with horse manure, rotting food, and cigar ends. The air was thick with soot and soot-drenched fog in winter. Cholera outbreaks spread like wildfire in the masses, with one outbreak claiming more than 30,000 lives in 1853 alone.
The choice to Londoners of the nineteenth century was clear: adapt or perish. Today, after a series of public initiatives, reforms, and enquiries that started back in the Victorian era, London now hosts nearly nine million people. And of those nine million, lifespans have almost doubled. A vision of London today would have far surpassed even the Victorians’ most sanguine utopian dreams. It was technological innovation in the face of dire threats, that completely reversed London’s predicament.
Out of food?
A United Nations Environment Programme report once pegged the planet’s carrying capacity at eight billion people — or where we are now. But environmental scientist Erle C. Ellis thinks any limit is, as he put it, “nonsense”.
Ellis, writing in The New York Times, wrote: “Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits”, and that if there was anything like a “natural limit” then humankind surpassed it with the invention of agriculture, thousands of years ago.
So the question is not whether the natural or unnatural bounties of our Earth can sustain 8, 16, or 20 billion people. The question is whether humans can continue to develop the technologies that will permit us to stay ahead of the curve in the face of population growth.
A population explosion?
In his book Factfulness, Hans Rosling made a remarkable observation. The average number of children a citizen on Earth has is 2. That’s below the replacement rate (albeit just about). Sure, there are countries in Saharan Africa where the women still have very large families, but they are a relatively tiny minority of the global population.
The population is rising and is expected to plateau around 11 billion, but that is due to a combination of factors — including a decrease in child mortality. But the number of children being born has stabilised. The growth we are seeing today is the equivalent of water that has already left the tap after the tap was shut off filling up the bathtub.
If we were to stop all deaths from happening, that would add 150,000 people to the planet each day. That would be 55 million people each year. That might sound like a lot, but it would be less than a single percentage point. At that rate, we would add a billion people to the planet every 18 years, which is considerably slower than the rate at which the last few billion have come along — and will easily be countered by the below-the-replacement rate global population we are currently seeing.
It would still be an increase, but not the sort of exponential growth many people worry about when they first encounter the idea of stopping ageing.
Out of jobs?
The economy isn’t a pizza with a limited number of slices. Each of us can have a slice. In fact, a labour force filled with increasingly older men and women might be the antidote to the concerns that our social security programs could bankrupt us.
The answer here is not to force people to work, but allowing them to do so. Even as it stands, most Americans and Brits plan to work beyond the traditional age of retirement, at least on a part-time basis.
When people choose to keep working for 80, 90, or 100 years, it will fundamentally change the way our economy works. All that retirement money will be spent, perhaps on fulfilling a dream, or innovating, or starting a new business. If our lifespans are significantly increased, spending a bit more might not feel like such a risk at all.
Unleashing the army
There is a big difference between extending lives and extending healthy lives. As it stands, aging presents a double economic problem — because adults who get sick stop making money and contributing to society and, at the same time, start costing a lot to live.
According to research by Dana Goldman in Perspectives in Medicine, if we can delay ageing, then “all fatal and disabling disease risks would be lowered simultaneously”. This could allow people to live longer, use fewer health care resources, and continue to give back through volunteering, mentorship, and other forms of service.
In fact, Goldman estimated that the potential economic benefits of delayed ageing would add up to more than $7 trillion in the United States alone.
And with active people over 70 still in the workforce, imagine the experiences that could be shared, the institutional knowledge that could be relied upon, and the wizened leadership that would emerge. Problems that seem insurmountable today will look very different when met by the tremendous economic and intellectual resources offered by prolonged human vitality.
So — enough with the negative news. A cure for ageing, or delayed ageing, might be the wonderful revolution we’ve all been waiting for.
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Ben Fielding is a contributor writing on behalf of GBS Clinic Ltd, which also goes by the name of Your Comprehensive Breast Clinic — it is a surgical practice and breast augmentation clinic based in Dublin, Ireland.