WHY WE GROW OLD                                               Thanksgiving – 2009

If people weren’t supposed to get old and die then they wouldn’t.

Maybe like in the Bible,  people did live hundreds of years, as things didn’t change much and the things on one day were the same as they had been hundreds of years before. New inventions were rare.  Life never changed.  All those years of experience were still valid.

As change accelerated, innovation became more important and experience became less important and the balance of the two that produced the most efficiency became the life span.

At some point the old bastards are so stuck in their ways                                                  that they just need to get out of the way.

Nature takes care of that for us.

Medicine does some stupid tweeking  and puts on the big freak show of heart transplants and eight kids born at once, but when the tissues wear out,  we have not evolved a mechanism to renew them because this other system works better.

The other system is the b.1. – Reproduction.   It is the way of the multi-cellular form.                 Replacement with a new modified version is better than repairing the old.

Stars radiate themselves to space to provide the matter for new stars.                                  You can be sure that if that system wasn’t the best it wouldn’t be here.

The people turn over rate has suddenly gotten behind the curve of change.   We are handling exponential growth badly.

Can we get out of this mess?

I read that the Earth’s population doubled between 1700 and 1900                                        and it doubled again between 1900 and 1960 to three billion                                            and it doubled again between 1960 and 1996 to six billon

so the next double will be from1996 to 20XX to twelve billion.

With the stress on the system that we see at present,                                                             is there any chance that we will see the next double?                                                        I  I   I can’t see it.                                                                                                                          Maybe I’m too old and deteriorated.

Something is going to change.

Big Time,

but I don’t know what’s next,                                                                                                  my past is too great and takes up to much space on my hard drive.                                       The amount of information that seems relevant is overwhelming                                        and I just want to go hoe and plant and harvest.

But while the a.1, the a.2 and the b.1 will always rule,                                                         there is a question…….

What did we leave for the next generation?