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The quest for immortality is now so common and mundane within the culture that as well as preoccupying some of the most powerful and brightest scientific minds around its also the fare of day time tv talk shows with audiences being asked ' How would you like to live to be 150? because pretty soon that's going to be a possibility ' and of course it soon will be but only for a very select few. It costs money for people to grow old and although the average life expectancy in industrialised countries is 80 and rising people are finding it increasingly difficult to get by, to maintain a semblance of a decent standard of living, to afford good healthcare and maintain quality of life . By the year 2050 there will be 35 million people over the age of 85 in the US and a great many of them living on the breadline. In stark contrast, the average life expectancy in developing countries is 40 and falling so we know the coming new age of Methuselah is not for the poor. If we seriously wanted to extend human life we could near double the lives of those in the developing world just by ensuring that they had access to clean water, food and basic medicines. We also know that the increasing demands placed upon society by our ageing populations are already triggering policy changes which look set to plunge more and more of the elderly into poverty.They already have to compete with youth for jobs in a rapidly changing marketplace which offers no long term job security for anyone but demands constant career change and self re-invention . What age are the elderly going to be expected to keep working to in future? At what age will we allow people who fix cars, flip burgers and pump gas for a living to retire at when they naturally live into their 90's and 100's , a situation that will come about even without ageing process delaying technologies, in just a few decades time. What pospects are being held out here to the countless millions still stuck in the Age of Hunger? Who will reconcile the awkward economic tensions between the young and the old as they compete forthe planets already over stretched and ever shrinking resources? Staying alive is becoming a rich man's game, maybe it always has been and in the new age of Methuselah money is really going to come into its own as the deciding factor and an awful lot of people are going to be better off dead.
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