The world seen at 130 years old

They say that we can live to be one hundred and thirty years old.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
02 June 2022 Thursday 16:39
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The world seen at 130 years old

They say that we can live to be one hundred and thirty years old. People who know it say so: for example, Corina Amor, a Spanish immunologist who runs her own research group in a prestigious New York laboratory. With the modification of the white blood cells, Corina Amor and her team have already managed to defeat certain varieties of lymphomas and leukemias, and the mice with which she has experimented in the laboratory have come to live up to 36% more years than the rest of mice. This suggests that you, the readers, and I could easily go from one hundred years old to even one hundred and thirty. How strange would it be if there were clams in Iceland that have lived for more than five hundred years?

I would love to live many, many years, even being the first person to attain immortality, but, given my choice, I would rather live eighty years as a human being than live five hundred years as a human being. clam. But that is not the point. The thing is, if Corina Amor is right, the fourteen million Spanish baby boomers, who have long since seen less of a path ahead than behind, would not really have reached the equator of our existence. I, who felt close to the fateful moment of changing bathtub for shower tray, would still have seven long decades of life ahead of me! I don't dislike the life plan at all: rested readings, late walks, two or three weekly outings to the movies or exhibitions, a little writing if the inspiration isn't completely exhausted ..., and so on. for the next seventy years.

All I want is to know how much time I have left. They explain that the gods of antiquity, angry with the human being, punished him by depriving him of immortality, but then decided to soften the sentence by hiding the date of his death. I love it more, frankly. I don't even want to think about what life would be like if from the beginning it was considered a long countdown: I have seven years, two months and three days left, I have ... As long as the doctor doesn't say otherwise, we insist on considering death a remote hypothesis and to continue living as if we should never really die. From another prestigious Spanish scientist, María Blasco, we know that our life expectancy depends on telomeres, which are something like chromosome cues. If you have long telomeres, you will live many years. If you are short of them, you will have a serious upset any day. Can we tell if our telomeres are short or long? I do not care. I don't want to know. I've already said that the last thing I want to know is how much time I have left to live.

Now comes the bad news. The treatments being developed by teams of scientists such as Corina Amor are individualized. The patient's cells need to be isolated, modified, re-injected ... The process is so complex that it is beyond the reach of most pockets. The bottom line is that while millionaires can live to be one hundred and thirty years old, the rest of us will continue to die at the same age. What if we suddenly discovered a cheap, effective, universally applied treatment that would allow us all to reach one hundred and thirty years of age? That this would be a mess, the system would collapse and we would end up killing each other on the streets, like Diario de la guerra del cerdo, the exciting customary dystopia of Adolfo Bioy Casares, in which gangs of assassins of old people acting with impunity in Buenos Aires, while the city is filled with old people with dyed white hair and make-up wrinkles who don't want to be taken for old ... But to get there, it's still a long time. I suppose we will first know a world in which the right to longevity will be reserved for a few, the richest, who will refuse to share this privilege with others. The very idea of ​​such a world seems so appalling to us that our brain refuses to accept it. However, that world already exists, and it is none other than this, our world: as the life expectancy of a man in Hong Kong approaches eighty-three years, that of a man in Chad it barely reaches fifty-three.