Living Forever is a Benefit and a Curse

by Roberta Ness

So say Elves

Welcome! Hope you don’t mind the company - I’ve invited a couple of Lord of the Rings Elves to share with us warm slices of Mom’s apple pie. Crispy crumble topping, heaps of sugary thick-cut apples, fresh out of my oven. Yum! I’m serving it up with a dollop of history and a shake of statistics.

Last week, we played “Truth or Fiction” with headlines like, “eat a low fat diet to extend life” versus “make sure you get at least a pint of olive oil in your diet every week.” So, if you follow my advice, I’m predicting you’ll live a healthier and longer life. By the end of this week, I want you to see if you consider immortality unarguably good. I’ve just asked the elves and they don’t think so. Really?

First things first - switching from Just You to You and the Other 8 billion Yous.

The science of body counts, the basis for how we think about living and dying on a population level, began with a water pump. One of my heroes, Dr. John Snow, a London physician, noticed in the 1850’s that deaths clustered in neighborhoods. Armed with nothing but a map and a notebook, he realized that among London victims, addresses bunched around Broad Street where all the nearby folk got their water. Although his contemporaries thought all disease was spread by air vapors, the Victorian authorities tested his crazy theory and screwed off the pump handle. And voila – people stopped dying…