Member-only story
Imagine how long our lifespans would be if…
We could find a way to equitably share resources.
I remember as a kid in history class hearing that the average human life expectancy was only 30 years during whatever historical period. At the time I thought that sounded pretty old anyway. Hard to imagine being 30 when you haven’t even gone through puberty. Doesn’t sound very old now.
I didn’t fully understand what ‘average’ meant yet so I didn’t picture anyone older than their 30s. But really what changed between then and now is more people survive childhood. There’s always been people who made it to old age.
With all our technological advances it shouldn’t be hard to dramatically increase the average human life expectancy again. I feel like the main thing holding us back, the main thing that kills people, is how we’ve organized ourselves largely based on money.
We could have housing, healthy food, healthcare, clean water for everyone if we wanted to.
We can build skyscrapers. We can grow large amounts of food. We’ve invented medicines and techniques for cleaning water. We have the internet which makes communication a lot simpler. We have airplanes that can move people and things way more efficiently than in the olden days.
