I recently saw a news piece about longevity research. In it, a researcher bubbled that we could find ways to extend life so people would live to be 150 or even 200 by the year 2030.

Great. Just what we need when Social Security is about to go completely bust: a way to have people live longer.

We’d have a dilemma, for sure. First of all, not everyone would be able to afford treatments for age-related diseases, so we’d have rich people live on while the po’ folks keep dying as usual. Just our luck, we’ve got enough rich people in the USA so that our average lifespan would increase, just like our average GDP increases. The poor will be poor and dead as usual, while the rich will be richer and longer-lived than ever before.

And if we should have the anti-aging stuff available to one and all, then we’ll have to modify that retirement age. In a world where the average life expectancy is around 150, we’d have to set the retirement age at around 145. Beautiful. That means we all get to work for EIGHTY MORE YEARS. Ugh. No thanks.

Entry-level jobs would be that much harder to get, what with a vastly more experienced workforce. The PhD would become the new high school diploma. We’d have to stay in school until the 24th grade before going on to college. That means grade school and living with mom and dad until you’re 30. Forget about getting out of the home when you’re 18: you’ll have 12 more years to go!

And even if we finish schooling around age 40 for most folks, that still means over a century in the workforce. Even with career changes breaking up the monotony, that’s one hundred years plus doing the eight to five thing. If you take a military career and enlist when you’re 30, you’ll serve for 50 years before being eligible for retirement and a new career in the civilian workforce. You’ll still be young at 80… with 65 more productive years ahead of you…

Wanting to live is natural. I do want to live. I love my life and the people I get to meet in it. But I also look forward to when I rest my body and take up a different existence beyond this one. I really wouldn’t want to live on another 70-80 years, working most of them. That’s too much of this world.

We can medically eliminate the symptoms of aging, but there’s nothing we can do to take out the pains of regret or longing for those that died prematurely. In my scenario of primary and secondary education up to age 30, it’s entirely possible for people to have been married, divorced, and remarried by the time they graduate… or to be grandparents on the eve of their college matriculation. That’s a lot of living, with a lot more yet to come. If we eliminate barriers to longevity, will dying of a broken heart become the new leading cause of death?

Robert Fisk is a great journalist. He won’t last forever, so I’ll enjoy him while I can. While most of his stuff is pretty grim due to the fact his beat is the Middle East and he pulls no punches, this article is a jolly nice bit of history with a rather low body count to it. It’s all about how tea helped sober up England and the rest of Europe so it could go on to have an industrial revolution.

As a historian, I like the fact that it’s an example of how China helped civilize Europe. Too often, people that teach world history fail to look much beyond Europe and North America, except when Europeans and North Americans showed up to colonize or otherwise muscle in on the locals. The fact is that, for much of its history, Europe was an uncivilized backwater with little to offer the rest of the world. All the swingin’ civilizations were around the Mediterranean, in India, and in China. The civilizations in Central and South America seem to have come along much later, but archaeology there is so difficult that we’re only beginning to realize that there’s a big possibility there was much more going on there much earlier than we ever expected.

Global contacts have existed for centuries. They have gotten more frequent and faster, especially in the last few years, but we’d all do well to recognize that no civilization is an island. No civilization is better or worse, just different. When we appreciate the differences, we prosper in so many ways.

With the new webhost, it’s about time I got a new blog system. Hello, WordPress. This thing’s got features.