Memories of the 28th Century

Hoping your prognosis is bright. At FHE last night I confided to a few 'sisters' that I know my demise will be from a physical fall as I'm prone to do on occasion. Perhaps I truly do not know, so it was kind of silly to say, but I suffer from neuropathy, have bad ankles, and am a bit large and on the tall side so falls seem to take forever and, well, F=MA.

I've lost loved ones to cancer and my daughter's mother-in-law (m-i-l) is in stage-4 even now. To add insult to injury m-i-l last week was throwing her purse into her car when her arm broke from the action revealing that her cancer had further metastasized to her bones and weakened them.

I've often pondered the random events from stray celestial particles which are always passing through us, remnants from dying stars perhaps, dinging an atomic particle within our bodies' DNA here and there. I think of sunbathing as the worst folly (with a similar bane on tanning booths).

There's radioactive stuff all around us too on the terrestrial scale - argon, for example, can build up beneath buildings including homes. Who knows what stray radium/uranium/etc. we get exposed to. Radium cures were even touted in the not too distant past.

Then war, mayhem, accidents, illnesses, etc...

So, it's best just to live our lives the best we can and accept and deal with the consequences of our follies and general randomness that is life. I choose an eternal perspective for it suits my sensibilities best.

Be well.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

Here's a reference re: Radium as a cure from the past that I recalled from the count-down game: https://cppdigitallibrary.org/exhibi...cine/item/6771

I recently wrote a story about my demise. It is scheduled for October 12, 3808, and the cause of death will be heart failure while I will be on the table for repair of a heart valve. I 3ill publish the story somewhere. The one person who read it said that it was good and comforting.

There is something at once admirable and faintly defiant in this insistence that age itself is not the culprit—that somewhere, behind every failing organ and faltering limb, there lurks a specific assailant that might, in principle, be named, confronted, and perhaps even defeated. It has the tone of a man unwilling to grant time the dignity of being an executioner, preferring instead to imagine it as merely the stage upon which lesser villains—cancer, mutation, mischance—strut and do their damage.

And yet, one is tempted to say: this is both correct and not quite true enough.

Of course it is right, in the most material and scientific sense, that nothing “just happens.” There is no mystical force called “aging” that reaches into the body like a Dickensian reaper and loosens the bolts. Every tumor has a cellular lineage, every aneurysm a history written in pressure and tissue fatigue, every failure a chain of causes stretching back through chemistry, behavior, and blind molecular error. To say that someone “died of old age” is, in strict terms, a kind of intellectual laziness—an evasion of the actual mechanism.

But—and here is where the argument begins to strain under its own optimism—time is not merely a passive container in which these insults occur. It is their great accomplice.

To live longer is not simply to give more opportunities for discrete, unrelated things to go wrong. It is to exist within a system that accumulates imperfection. The body is not a machine that can be indefinitely maintained by replacing faulty parts with the calm assurance of a mechanic. It is a dynamic, self-repairing organism whose very processes of repair degrade over time. DNA is copied, but not perfectly; proteins fold, but not always correctly; immune systems surveil, but with diminishing vigilance. One does not need to invoke anything mystical to say that aging has a causal role—only to recognize that the probability of error compounds, and that the systems designed to correct those errors themselves erode.

In that sense, to say “aging does not cause disease” is a bit like saying that rust does not cause the bridge to collapse—only the failure of particular bolts and joints. True enough, but it misses the cumulative condition that makes those failures not only possible, but increasingly likely.

There is also, if one may say so, a slightly heroic—and very human—desire in the argument to keep the universe negotiable. If every ailment has a specific cause, then perhaps every ailment has a specific remedy. If deterioration is not inherent but contingent, then perhaps it can be indefinitely postponed, managed, outwitted. The idea that telomeres might be stabilized, that random mutation might be tamed, that we might one day die only of accident or violence—this is not merely a scientific hypothesis; it is a quiet rebellion against the ancient verdict that life is a losing game played on a fixed clock.

But here one must be careful not to smuggle in hope as if it were evidence.

Even if one could eliminate certain categories of disease, others would emerge. The very complexity of the organism ensures that failure modes are not finite. Extend life long enough and you do not approach a serene plateau of stability—you approach new frontiers of fragility. The insurance companies, one suspects, would find their problems not eliminated but merely transformed.

And yet—and this is where the piece has its real strength—the refusal to surrender to vague notions of “wearing out” has moral and practical force. It is, in its way, an argument for vigilance. If what afflicts us is not an abstract destiny but a series of identifiable processes, then there is sense in confronting them early, aggressively, rationally. To treat symptoms as inevitable is to concede too much. To investigate causes is, at the very least, to keep the conversation open between ourselves and the indifferent machinery of nature.

Still, one cannot quite escape the final irony. The very act of living long enough to identify, monitor, and attempt to correct these “random problems” is itself what makes their accumulation unavoidable. We become, in effect, curators of our own gradual undoing—patching, adjusting, surveilling—aware that the system we are preserving is not designed for permanence.

So yes, your friend did not die of “age” in any mystical sense. He died of cancer, which had its own causes, its own timeline, its own missed opportunities for intervention. But it is also true that he lived long enough for those causes to take hold, long enough for the silent processes to mature into something fatal.

And that, perhaps, is the more sobering formulation:

We do not fall apart because of age.
We fall apart within it—and because we cannot step outside of it, the distinction, while intellectually satisfying, offers only limited comfort.

In the end, the determination to push back—to monitor, to treat, to delay—is not foolish. It is, in fact, the only rational posture available. But it should be accompanied by a certain clarity: we are not negotiating with a series of isolated enemies, but with a system whose very persistence guarantees eventual failure.

The remarkable thing is not that we deteriorate.
It is how long we manage not to.

Originally Posted by tonywalt

We do not fall apart because of age.
We fall apart within it—and because we cannot step outside of it, the distinction, while intellectually satisfying, offers only limited comfort.

I find your analogy with rust causing a bridge to collapse, but you mistook my point. When the rust replaces the steel, the bridge becomse too weak to stand, but the rust is nor caused by time. The rust is a chemical reaction that inserts oxygen into the structure os the steel. Similarly, in humans death is not caused by time; it is caused by something damaging the body such that it can't live.
While some problems appear in people who are older, it is not the age that causes those problems.
Even the deterioration of telomers is not caused by time, but it is a result of repeated cell replication, and it can be prevented or reversed.
But probability suggests that even if all physical maladies are overcome, people will die from muder or accident. That is matter of probability not of time or age; although probabilitied become more probable over time.

I believe that practical time travel will be available soon, so wil will be able to get outside of time. You should read my novels: Harry's Time Tours and Paradoxes and Contradictions.