The Future Of Life Extension
Categories: Vitamins and Other Food SupplementsSources: How And When To Be Your Own Doctor
I beg the readers indulgence for a bit of futurology about what
things may look like if the life extension movement continues to
develop.
Right now, a full vitamin and vitamin-like substance life extension
program costs between $50 and $100 dollars per month. However,
pharmaceutical researchers occasionally notice that drugs meant to
treat and cure diseases, when tested on lab animals for safety, make
these animals live quite a bit longer and function better. Though
the FDA doesn't allow any word of this to be printed in official
prescribing data, the word does get around to other researchers, to
gerontologists and eventually to that part of the public that is
eagerly looking for longer life. Today there are numerous people who
routinely take prescription medicines meant to cure a disease they
do not have and plan to take those medicines for the rest of their
long, long life.
These drugs being patented, the tariff gets a lot steeper compared
to taking vitamins. (Since they are naturally-occurring substances,
vitamins can't be patented and therefore, aren't big-profit items.
Perhaps that's one reason the FDA is so covertly opposed to
vitamins.) Right now it would be quite possible to spend many
hundred dollars per month on a life extension program that included
most of these potentially beneficent prescription drugs.
As more of life-extending substances are discovered, the cost of
participating in a maximally effective life extension program will
escalate. However, those who can afford chemically enhanced
functioning will enjoy certain side-benefits. Their productive,
enjoyable life spans may measure well over a century, perhaps
approaching two centuries or more. Some of these substances greatly
improve intelligence so they will become brighter and have faster
reaction times. With more time to accumulate more wisdom and
experience than "short livers" these folks will become wiser, too.
They will have more time to compound their investment assets and
thus will become far more wealthy. They will become an obvious and
recognizable aristocracy. This new upper class will immediately
recognize each other on the street because they will look entirely
different than the short-lived poorer folk and will probably run the
political economic system.
And this new aristocratic society I see coming may be far more
pleasant than the one dominated by the oligarchy we now have
covertly running things. For with greater age and experience does
really come greater wisdom. I have long felt that the biggest
problem with Earth is that we did not live long enough. As George
Bernard Shaw quipped when he was 90 (he lived to 96), "here I am, 90
years old, just getting out of my adolescence and getting some
sense, and my body is falling apart as fast as it can."
More
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