Mariner found the article below in an old Time magazine. Currently, scientists anticipate 20 billion living humans by the end of the century. If they all live forever and each couple continues having two children, what a fine thing that will be???
Is an Anti-Aging Pill on the Horizon?
By Alexandra Sifferlin
“NAD+ is the closest we’ve gotten to a fountain of youth,” says David Sinclair, co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. “It’s one of the most important molecules for life to exist, and without it, you’re dead in 30 seconds.”
NAD+ is a molecule found in all living cells and is critical for regulating cellular aging and maintaining proper function of the whole body. Levels of NAD+ in people and animals diminish significantly over time, and researchers have found that re-upping NAD+ in older mice causes them to look and act younger, as well as live longer than expected. In a March 2017 study published in the journal Science, Sinclair and his colleagues put drops of a compound known to raise levels of NAD+ into the water for a group of mice.
Within a couple hours, the NAD+ levels in the mice had risen significantly. In about a week, signs of aging in the tissue and muscles of the older mice reversed to the point that researchers could no longer tell the difference between the tissues of a 2-year-old mouse and those of a 4-month-old one.
Now scientists are trying to achieve similar results in humans…[1]
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The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “Change is the only constant in life.” Indeed so as we enter what looks like it will be civilization’s most disruptive century since the Black Plague. Consider this list:
Climate change – coastal cities around the world will be flooded; much of the temperate zone will become tropical; ocean life will dwindle to a serious degree; penguins and polar bears will be homeless and hungry; environmental stresses will interfere with war; the travesty of climate destruction will test the strongest economies.
Artificial Intelligence – already reducing major job markets and soon will displace many lawyers, family care physicians, financial advisors, mortgage brokers and everyone who performs data entry tasks; public transportation including trains, planes, cars and 18-wheelers will drive themselves (this likely may require making human drivers illegal); AI will interfere with cultural policies about race and religious segregation – simply because identity politics won’t be affordable.
Banking and Finance – Artificial intelligence also will affect the way we relate to income and assets; economies will be influenced by increasingly socialist solutions to solve problems too large and diverse to be addressed by individual national economies or corporations; individual families may not own much directly but will participate in largescale consortiums (think something like Amazon.Com); salaries will be separated from most jobs and distributed directly to citizens. [Yes, this may sound blasphemous to fiscal conservatives but mariner draws this opinion from existing evidence that banks, corporations and governments are thinking about how to manage a future where everyone around the world has instant contact with everyone else and personal assets are managed electronically; ways to bundle housing, payroll, transportation and accessories as a single package; ways to bundle services like health care and education.]
Mariner is concerned that we may simply turn over to others our privacy, independent choices in our lives, even our choice of taste in clothing and other daily interests. Both the book 1984 and the movie Matrix loom as literary shadows if we do not move into this century level-headed and wisely.[2]
Ancient Mariner
[1] http://time.com/5159879/is-an-anti-aging-pill-on-the-horizon/
[2] For someone who has given the immediate future great thought, buy the book, We’re doomed, Now what?: Essays on war and Climate Change. by Roy Scranton.