Attacking the Baby Boomer Problem

The Baby-Boomer Conundrum

The baby-boomers are slowly moving into retirement. Instead of contributing to their retirement funds, they are beginning to make withdrawals to support themselves. As their minds and bodies age, they will utilize Medicare and their private insurance carriers to maintain their health and if they are not wealthy, they will depend upon Medicaid to pay for nursing home services as they become enfeebled and increasingly unable to care for themselves. Because of modern medicine, they will live longer than past generations and will therefore receive benefits for a longer period of time.

With the adaption of the modern living style, expenditures on medical treatment have skyrocketed, as disorders such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, depression, and inflammatory diseases have spread among the populations of developed nations. These degenerative diseases are the direct result of a fast food diet, a sedentary life and social isolation.

The world, as seen through the windows of retirement and nursing homes will be no picnic, either. There presently exists an overwhelming scientific consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are trapping heat from the sun and raising the average temperature of the Earth at an alarming rate. It this rise is not stopped, life on Earth will experience a dieoff that will dwarf previous extinctions. The scarcity in food and water that will result from this warming is likely to lead to thermonuclear war, as nations compete against each other for the diminishing supply of necessities. It is hardly necessary to mention the costal flooding that will result from the melting of Antarctic glaciers, as people can see the waters rising in front of their eyes. Millions, perhaps billions, of costal dwellers will become migrants seeking higher ground.

I’m a baby boomer, but I do not wish to be a victim of the coming catastrophe. My generation may have been criminally irresponsible, back in the ’80s and ’90s, when it failed to take seriously the warnings of knowledgeable scientists or to take ameliorative measures to retard the release of greenhouse gases. At the time, such action would have caused much roaring and screaming, but it would have been doable. Now, the task has become formidable indeed, for the temperature of the Earth is approaching the tipping point when the negative feedback processes that have sustained life on Earth will have become positive. The phenomenon is unique in human history, so we do not know exactly when that tipping point will occur. We will know when it happens. The phytoplankton in the oceans will quit changing CO2 into oxygen and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will start to climb, and as it climbs it will trap even more heat, making the temperature of the Earth rise faster. Surface ice will melt and seas will continue to rise. By some estimates, the seas could rise as much as ninety feet before land ice is all melted.

What will it look like then? Nobody knows for sure. With all the heat the Earth, and especially the oceans, have absorbed, there is a good possibility of continuous Katrina-sized storms sweeping over the earth with 300 mph winds. Farmlands will disappear and reappear elsewhere, depending upon air and ocean currents. Flora and fauna will evolve to survive in radically different environments.

It goes without saying that the capacity of the Earth to sustain human life, let alone civilization, will almost certainly shrink, with all the attendant suffering and death we can expect from such a cataclysm.

In spite of the probability of disaster, there are some things that we can do that are grounds for hope. Some may sound far-fetched, but they would help.

The simplest action we could take is to abstain from any foods made from animals and dairy products. Eat no animal protein or fat, in other words. I have been hearing recently that the raising and processing of beef is responsible for over half the greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere, but the better estimate is 18%.

An all-plant diet has several advantages over an animal diet:

• It’s safer as long as it’s organic (no pesticides);
• It’s safer because it’s not loaded with hormones and antibiotics that make the animals grow faster and less likely to get infections from crowded conditions;
• Food made from plants is almost always less costly. With animal-based foods, plants must be fed to animals, which must be cared for until maturity. The process is inherently inefficient.
• Eating plant-based food is much kinder to the land. “[W]ere we to eat soya, rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times[1].”
• Since so much less land must be cleared to yield the same level of nutrition, far less CO2-converting flora is destroyed;
• People who eat a plant-based diet lead healthier lives and are far less likely to develop chronic diseases we associate with aging. For extensive documentation, see NutritionFacts.org;
• By avoiding meat, you lessen the chance that you will contract an antibiotic-resistant superbug. Livestock, poultery, even farmed fish are administered powerful antibiotics to accellerate growth and prevent infection from unsanitary conditions under which the animals are raised. By doing so, the producers are assisting the bacteria to develop resistance to the antibiotics, some of which are what doctors call drugs of last resort.

If people are healthier and avoid chronic diseases, they will reduce their medical bills as well as their grocery bills. Most importantly, as they age they will reduce the burden upon the entire medical care system, including nursing homes.[2]

Staying healthy as one ages is a huge blessing. But eventually, no matter how hard we work to stave off the grim reaper, we will weaken, our thoughts will dim, and body parts will refuse to function as well as before. Sooner or later, we will be too weak to get out of bed or even straighten our sheets. Our spouse will be unable to help very much, as he or she is just as weak.

I hope I stay in good health long enough for humanoid robots to take over the heavy lifting: to lift me from my bed and gently place me in a bathtub, scrub, and then dry me, help me put on my pajamas and then place me in an easy chair. My wife, who by then will be in no condition to act as a traditional caregiver, sits in her chair and we chat pleasantly until the robot brings breakfast and stands next to me, ever vigilant. If I drop something, the robot catches it in midair and silently hands it to me.

With semi-intelligent machines, there is no need to hire a weight-lifting champion to lift me, wash me and walk me down the hall. If our weight-lifting champion wants to help, he can sit and visit, which is the one thing that a robot could never do convincingly, since it would have no feelings. I’m not sure feelings could ever be programmed into a robot, as the robot doesn’t have the same wild, utterly complex nervous system that makes humans the way they are.

I can’t decide whether I would prefer the robots to look just like humans or to look like machines. Imagine a humanoid robot that looks exactly like your mother when you were an infant. Would she be creepy or comforting? (What if she looked like one’s mother-in-law?)

Talking, empathizing, joking, laughing, crying — that’s what humans are for. Let the machines do the mechanical part of caregiving, and let the humans visit.

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1. Pregnant Silence by George Monbiot in The Guardian, November 19, 2015.  ↩
   
2. Currently, over 75% of the $2.8 trillion in health care costs are due to chronic diseases, such as coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes, that can be largely prevented by making comprehensive lifestyle changes. We don’t need to wait for a new drug or laser or high-tech breakthrough; we simply need to put into practice what we already know.
   Dean Ornish on CNN: Change your lifestyle, reverse your diseases  ↩