Training for Senescence

The Hail Mary is not having to pass through it.

Barring that, we look at what we can do now, every little bit helps. So, organizing the risks to one’s life, personally, reasonably is a very hopeful goal. We look at the Top Ten causes of death among the aging. That list is pretty well known, but just to have a real world anchor here it is.

• Heart Disease...
• Cancer. ...
• Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) ...
• Cerebrovascular Disease (Stroke) ...
• Alzheimers. ...
• Diabetes. ...
• Pneumonia and Influenza. ...
• Accidents.
• Nephritis (Kidney Disease)
• Septicemia - blood poisoning

Breaking it down, it seems that smoking is the easiest preventable condition, followed by all diseases related to animal products in the diet (cardiovascular and cancer), alcohol, sugar, etc.

Notably absent on this list is medical error/accidents, particularly with the elderly. Also, does a death from a specific kind of cancer, misdiagnosed, fall into the 'cancer' bin or the 'accident' bin?

Once we get a handle on most of the genetic conditions that threaten our lives, the behavioral becomes an area where gamification has to take over. P-Go alone has contributed to a wealth of data on motivating people to do things that are healthy. Imagine when a consortium of medical agencies, .gov, insurance agencies, et al decide that people could actively participate in their own health, in the most proactive ways, and get a financial reward. At the very least they can limit their exposure to morbidity and mortality significantly and with ever increasing returns.

The coda on this is that we would get a much smoother overall ROI with in-game coverage of the Top Ten, perhaps even the Top One Hundred causes of death. Yeah!

Anyone have a clue why there isn’t a Billion Dollars on the table right now with a project like this?

Imagine a world where we routinely live for very long times (even up to thousands of years). As in views of life from poverty v prosperity, the psychology of life is very different. In poverty, behavior is motivated by what will get you through the night, how you can survive, eat, be safe today, maybe tomorrow or days and weeks into the future. The prosperous act on conditions that take them two or three generations into the future. In a life of three score and ten, hitting the personal and professional milestones on time or a little ahead of one's peers have a lot of angst baked into them. In a virtually unlimited lifespan, one can do anything anytime. We take for granted the thought that we could have unlimited experiences but that time is the only thing we don't have more of.

Relatively unlimited time means we can have peace now, we don't have to delay that ephemeral goal until we 'have enough'. Life would be much more like, 'All I need is enough to tide me over until I get more.'