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Stanley Shostak, The Evolution of Death: Why We Are Living Longer

The Evolution of Death is about to change death from a dead subject into a vital one, burgeoning with those concepts and consequences that traditionally arouse curiosity and command attention about life. The problem is that death, like taxes (to take a page from Benjamin Franklin), is thought to be inevitable and unchanging. Remarkably, while belief in the inevitability of many things, such as war, poverty and crime, has slackened in the last few years, belief in the inevitability of death has remained unshaken.

For some evidence of how this is affecting our world, consider that when social security was passed in 1935, at that time the median life expectancy in the US was 54 for women and 46 for men. Now it is in the seventies. What happens medically, socially, institutionality if life expectancy extends to 150 years or perhaps 300?

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War, poverty and crime whilst not uniformally distributed across the population of our lovely green planet, are ubiquitous (if only in the sense of personal conflict), endemic and continual. To say that one has eradicated a pestilence by forcing it into someone else's lap is erroneous thinking. I am nearing 60 years of age and I cannot recall a time when these 3 things didn't exist on earth.

I have watched helplessly as "human beings" have taken the pristine, sylvan planet and turned it into what is rapidly becoming a toxic wasteland.

Children are being denied the left to a future (even in highly developed countries) see

to hear for yourself how one 13 yo from Canada feels about it all. During my own childhood I experience NONE of these worries.

In fact I think that there are more wars now than ever if only because we've stolen the resources necessary to hold them.

Poverty in developed countries is often hidden by public welfare which eliminates visible poverty but still does little to eliminate poverty per se. Poverty in 3rd world countries is a daily way of life, and all because the legitimate criminals of corrupt governments usurp more than a fair distribution of available wealth.

Stealing among the lower classes has become more difficult nowadays due to advances in surveillance technology and forensic science but drug production, drug vending and substance abuse have reached epidemic proportions.

Crime has spread. The organized criminals are now "legitimate" business and governments. Murder is no longer a shocking crime as we hear of so much of it that we have become desensitized.

Social security is a great step forward that is somewhat effective in developed countries but it's purpose is not necessarily to protect the poor as much as to shaw up the economy by eliminating beggars, stealing and political uprisings, all the while ensuring markets for producers. Remember that people receiving welfare payments spend their entire income, usually on the basics of food, shelter and clothing.

If a government wants to eradicate/ameliorate social unrest among the less fortunate, public welfare permits the government to place the less fortunate into a "comfort zone" that less fortunate persons are unlikely to forsake to persue political agitation regardless of their still present but albeit lessened economic hardship.

Furthermore, given the way we have destroyed our environment with poisons and over exploitation resulting in unusable basic natural resources and global warming, I will be very surprised if many persons within the coming millennia achieve an age more than 50 - 60 years what to speak of multiple centuries of life duration.

I'd hazard a guess to say that it would appear that we are currently at a peak.

cheers (ironically)

t3

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