Is aging meant to disappear? Here’s what I found
What is aging and how do we deal with it?
If three things are guaranteed in this life, they are: to be born, die, and pay taxes. The last one may not be so serious from an evolutionary perspective, but you get it. With time comes changes: changes in the way we dress, the way we interact, the way we think, and mainly in the way we look and feel. As a 25-year-old male, the first felt changes come with the famous puberty, where the final development of secondary reproductive characteristics takes precedence. Although I recognize my youth, I am no exception when I think about aging and how it impacts myself, my loved ones, and society as a whole.
This article tries to tackle three relevant questions:
What is aging?
Can we control aging?
Can we eradicate aging?
What is aging?
Aging can be described as “a persistent decline in the age-specific fitness components of an organism due to internal physiological deterioration”. In a population, aging is an important factor. Generally, the physiological changes brought about by aging allow an individual to guarantee reproduction, establish itself in the group hierarchy, access resources, and thus form relationships within its environment.
In our social life, aging sets trends, ways of communicating, social hierarchies, and different activities attributable to that population group although I can admit that the swing can be quite entertaining). Of course, there are contradictions. Our perception of something being for “old or young people” depends mostly on the culture you live in, if not search for what is popular among adults in South Korea or Japan, show it to your parents/grandparents, and tell me later…
Aging refers not to a social concept of how we are perceived by others, but fundamentally to the process of change marked over time, responsible for physiological changes, mediated in large part by hormonal variations. Aging might be best conceived as a facet of adaptation, specifically its de-tuning during the first part of adulthood. These facets do not necessarily, mean that we live in a constant internal deterioration, some functional declines of physiological characters continue into late-lite, with some of them even accelerating, whereas other function declines come to a halt. Thus, there it no scientific justification for assuming that every type of physiological deterioration that has been associated with aging must continue without remit throughout late adult life.
Can we control aging?
Aging is not regulated solely by genes, so within a population not everyone ages in the same way or at the same rate. External factors such as food, diseases, the environment, and your lifestyle (sedentary of active), are also highly influential in regulating gene expression.
Focusing only on Homo sapiens, what we this of as aging has been drastically modified across centuries. Until the beginning of the XX century, global life expectancy, a rather questionable metric considering the state of the vast majority of the population at that time excluding the central countries, was only 30 years. By 2021, this metric has risen to 71 years. The large reduction in child mortality has played a crucial role in increasing life expectancy, leading to an increase not only on this group, but also for adults and the elderly.
The control of aging, being in this case the conscious increase or decrease by humans, occurred because of technological advances in the last decades in the areas of medicine, nutrition, potable water, sanitation, infant care, antibiotics, vaccines, and many more, which consequently increased life expectancy.
Clearly, the current system of social relations in which we live generates an increase in life expectancy, but in an unequal manner. For example, countries such as Japan (85), Australia (84), Singapore (83), Spain (83) or Sweden (83), are some examples of countries with higher life expectancy. However, if we look at the general level, Nigeria (55), South Sudan (58), Somalia (58), the Democratic Republic of Congo (62) or Haiti (65) do not have the same results.
This inequality is embodied by the decline in the determining factors that increase life expectancy of all mankind. This topic deserves a separate article, but the difference between the global north (I know Australia is in the south but again, you get it) and the global south is rather significant, to say the least.
Can we eradicate aging?
So, we know what it is, and we know that we can control it through technological development and taking care of your country's population, factors intrinsically related to the prosperity of a country, but… can we eradicate it?
For this last section, I will look for inspiration from two great books: Sapiens and Homo Deus, both by the same author Yuval Noah Harari.
Human history can be understood as a great contradiction; we are a social species, forming groups and achieving enormous communal progress among individuals within these groups. Nevertheless, it is a history marked by constant conflicts, either for resources, territories, driven by religious beliefs, or by messages to manufacture consent (Chomsky reference) so that the current dominant class perpetuates power.
Nowadays, if there is one thing that we all agree on, is that advances in medicine are not going backward, but rather we can be sure that we don’t know the ceiling of them and that they are going to happen fast.
If there is one thing that I, as a 25-year-old white male from a Latin American country, am used to, it is that medicine is taken as a business model, a business model that deliberately benefits one social class, with leftovers “spilling over” every now and then to the majorities. “f you can’t afford it, don’t do it, it’s simple!”, I read every now and then, the problem with this claim is that it hides the consequences of the monetary limits
Advances in biotechnology, bioengineering and AI, allow humanity to start asking questions that were only possible to delve into through religious books or philosophy: Can we live forever? Personally, that question doesn’t make much sense, as we have seen in fiction how living forever can result in the greatest of tortures. One possibility I see is that we can eradicate aging, but it will be expensive.
Homo deus is the concept where, through the modifications generated by technological advances in bioengineering, we could be in the presence of a new species, physically, intellectually and even behaviorally superior to our own. Again, this difference will be determined not by our ability to adapt to the barriers that nature puts in front of us, but by how many dollars we have in the bank.
To conclude this rather , aging is a problem that has kept humanity on alert since its beginnings. Currently, we can say that science is capable of drastically increasing life expectancy through technological advances. What must be taken into account is whether these advances will be oriented to benefit a social class, while the dispossessed majorities continue to be H. sapiens and we begin to see the H. deus as the gods we always pray to.
To conclude, aging is a problem that has kept humanity on alert since its beginnings. Currently, we can say that science is capable of drastically increasing life expectancy through technological advances. What must be taken into account is whether these advances will be oriented to benefit a social class, while the dispossessed majorities continue to be H. sapiens and we begin to see H. deus as the gods we always pray to. Hollywood warned us.
