Well if we just have the right idiots in the White House, it could be just another 30 minutes...
Globally, it is a statistic that can be dented by another Boxing Day Tsunami, where an estimated quarter of a million or more people stopped living with just a few minutes or days left on their personal clocks.
Under more ordinary American circumstances, a lot of things shape that curve from medical advice, to pharma driven and funded studies, to what appears to be a flawed medical establishment, bent on treating symptoms without addressing causes.
At some point quality of life becomes a factor, too. I don't want to be left drooling in some cot, wheeled around and just consuming without being able to give back to the family that I have helped support to varying degrees over generations.
That doesn't mean it all has to be spent doing the things I know how to do if I can pass on the knowledge and skills and let younger backs do the lifting, but I at least want to be capable of that. I'd love to be in my early 20s knowing what I know now, but that isn't happening, nor do I anticipate I could ever be in that good shape again.
It has not been uncommon that those who survived through their 20s here lived to be 80, 90, or older, but there was a different gene pool here before the latest oil boom, primarily the children of the surviving children of the children who survived growing up on a prairie farm or ranch in the late 1800s through the depression--a hardy lot, of European stock (Norwegian, Icelandic, German and Ukrainian), who survived a challenging climate and often austere conditions with limited health care and no antibiotics until their advent. Good genetics make a difference, we'll see what the boom brought in.
