Historical Summer 2008 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
What if you could learn in advance when you were going to die? Would you want to know this? Life is fleeting. We’re here and, gulp, we’re gone.
The king is dead; long live the king. None of us are indispensable; few of us are memorable. Oh, we’re remembered fondly and toasted for a year or maybe a score, but then time passes.
The memories grow faint; those remembering are few and then fewer; long live the king. Not too long ago, I was wandering through a cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia.
The tombstones were old and weathered.
Most of the tombstones appeared to signify lives that ceased near the end of the 16th century.
On many of them, it was impossible to discern any of the words that were carved to preserve and salute the memory.
I could make out a letter or two, and sometimes guess a word, but that was it.
These people were presumably vibrant, had families, laughed and cried, and hopefully worked to make the world a bit better, but now they’re gone and this is what’s left. May they rest in peace. What were they like? How long did they live? Chances are that today they would be considered young at the time of their deaths, but many of them probably died of “old age” back then.
They may have felt old and been old compared to the norms of their time, but old is relative. Life expectancy has increased a great deal.
It was supposedly about 3035 years at the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago.
As public health improved – it’s just amazing what washing hands and taking a daily aspirin can accomplish – people live longer. Today in the U.S., the lifespan is 73 years for men and 79 years for women. (I’ll resist the temptation to speculate on why men’s life spans are shorter than women’s.
I think that is pretty obvious.) The current world average life span is 67 years.
The longest longevity (that was fun to write) is Australia at age 81, and the lowest is 32.6 years in Swaziland. That world average of 67 years equal 24,455 days.
On one hand, 24,455 sunsets, Egg McMuffins, and editions of the New York Times is a lot.
On the other hand, the younger hand, it is but a teeny tiny drop in an infinitely humongous bucket. Our Earth is 4.3 billion years old. That equals 1,569,500,000,000 days; think a quadrillion and a half. We’re not here for a hiccup. Not even a hic, nor an h. Advances in public health seem to be the main contributor to increased life spans. It’s good not to have streets filled with fecal matter from horses or their riders. Cleanliness may not be next to Godliness but clean is much better than dirty.
When did you last wash your hands? Stopping the bloodletting was beneficial, and penicillin is a good thing.
While new maladies crop up now and then, they are more than offset by medical advances which produce net gains in how long we live. Believe me, I know. Yours truly is the lucky recipient of some major medical advances and he, I mean I, lived to write about them. About a year ago I underwent major heart surgery, and here I am. (Is that redundant?
I mean, could there be minor heart surgery?) And did I tell you that I wear glasses and have hearing aids?
A future article will talk about my tooth implant. “What’s real?” has become a much harder question to answer when I look in the mirror, and it will only get worse. Or will it only get better? Looking ahead, WebMD says that the number of Americans over 65 will double by the year 2030. (Yep, now is a good time to buy stock in hearing aid firms and prosthetic companies.) We are going to live longer, no doubt about it; the most important question centers around how we define we.
In fact, there is some speculation whether or not there will be a limit to future life spans.
While flesh has its limits (believe me, my pulled hamstring and I know this to be the case all too well), future generations will probably be flesh computer hybrids. Think Prius! Ray Kurzweil, the MIT professor and author, has written about this next evolutionary step quite extensively (check out The Age of Spiritual Machines).
He maintains that computers and flesh will be integrated on a routine basis, and it will be done so effectively that we won’t know what’s us and what’s not.
In the future, in the near future, we won’t be fully sure whether we’re having a conversation or a date or, ahem, a relationship with a computer or a human. (My thinking is that if we can’t tell, what does it matter?) Outlandish as this might seem, Kurzweil makes a convincing case that the technology that is required for this to happen is readily available now. So, class, to review, what do we know? Simple: Life spans have increased over time, they are increasing today, and they will increase at an even greater rate in the future. Technological advances will result in humans having more and more supplemental aids and replacement parts, further extending life spans. It’s already begun and will only increase.
After all, if you can simply buy a new leg, cornea, or heart, well, why not?
But when do I become an it?
This increased technologically driven life span will have lots of implications.
First, it’s going to be crowded just about everywhere, not just at Starbucks and Straub’s. Old people (by definition, that means anyone older than I am) will live on and on and on. And on some more. Senior citizens, those aged 120 or older, will cruise the shopping malls on weekend eves, moving in packs in their mechanized wheelchairs. Steak Shake will place glasses of Ensure on the table instead of water.
The AARP minimum age will be 100.
The frailties of the human body with which we live today will be seen as quaint and as an artifact of the past. “That’s the way people used to be” will become a common line, “can you believe it?” As flesh becomes comprised of cells and circuits and as we learn more about computer genetics, we’ll become fully programmed (even if we’re the ones doing the programming). We’ll be able to determine in advance what we’re going to do and how long we want to do it. And we’ll get to know the date and time of our death far in advance of the actual transition. No surprise: It will be programmed. Suppose you knew that you had 10 years to live? What about 25 years. Or maybe it’s only 3. Or what if you knew that you wouldn’t see another full moon?
The clock ticks for all of us, and there’s no holding it back.
If we knew that date, how would it affect our behavior? Would we strive to do every good deed we can before our final bell is rung? Or would be become a true hedonist and leave our jobs to join the circus? (Circuses aren’t what they’re made to appear, of course. Still, they do offer a chance to see the world, or at least our portion of it. Water For Elephants is a good read.) But back to you: Do you want to know your ending date? Do you want to know when you’ll die? What if the date was 40 years from now? That would probably be OK because 40 years is a long time. I’ll guarantee you, though, that you’d begin the countdown fairly early. You’d not only be a basket case in year 40, my guess is that it would always be an issue, increasingly so with each passing day.
In fact, and if there’s a point to this column, this is it, so write it down, we should all live each day and week and year as if it was going to be our last. Because it might be.
We can’t look at the average 73 years and subtract our age and wait. That may be the way to proceed statistically, but it’s not what we should do in the real world.
After all, 73 is an average: For every 83, there’s a 63.
We just might be here tomorrow and, well, we just might not be here tomorrow. So dear reader, what are you going to do? Your clock is ticking but you don’t know how many ticks are left or the speed of the pendulum. Think of those tombstones, so worn from the wind and rain that it was hard to make out the names or dates. That’s what will be left to present us in a couple of centuries.
We and all of our loved ones will be gone, long gone. Oh, our hybrid may be here and something that even looks like us may be hopping on the rocket ship to go to the Kayak’s on Mars.
But we’ll, the real we, will be gone. Done and gone. So on that happy note, enjoy your day, enjoy your week, and enjoy your year. That’s the goal: Make every day count because, well, because every day does count. Peace to you.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Summer 2008.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Source prints lifespan 3035 years, Alexandria tombstones from 16 th century, and equates 1569500000000 days to quadrillion and half; original historical/statistical claims retained, not endorsed or silently recalculated.
Original source: SD_Times2008_06.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
