I heard this sentence coming from the news this morning: “If you could take a test that would reveal how long you were going to live, would you do it?” Apparently, there’s an app for that. Well, a genetic test or something anyway. What puzzled me is how they’ve managed to unlock secrets like this through genetics.
So somehow, through some genetic test, they’ve been able to find out what kind of luck you will have, how irresponsible you might be, your environmental conditions, etc. Wow! So it really is all preprogrammed into our DNA! So that means stuff like whether or not you get hit by a bus, run over by a garbage truck, sucked up in a tornado, crushed by falling debris, exposed to second-hand smoke or asbestos, stabbed by a maniac, accidentally poisoned by Ebola, etc., is all predetermined by your DNA! Or maybe they were just showing images of people working in a genetics laboratory to misdirect us from the fact that the test is really done with palmistry. Oh, who can say?
Or perhaps what they meant was that the genetic test can give you some sort of ballpark estimate for how long you are supposed to be able to live under idealized conditions. So then it doesn’t take into account the element of luck, or whether you’ve offended any pagan gods, or whether you’re a responsible person or a terrible driver, or whether you exercise or eat right or smoke or shoot up heroin and crystal meth or whatever else might influence how long you live. So basically, they’re not really giving you any accurate information anyway, so what’s the point? I guess you could always try to live in some underground super-bunker to keep yourself protected, but what if an earthquake strikes and collapses the place with you in it, or the Mole Men attack?
All these issues are problematic, but I suppose the biggest threat of all would be how we reacted to such knowledge. Let’s say, for example, that you had the test done, and you found out that you’re supposed to live to be 100; would you just blow off everything you were going to do and be totally irresponsible, saying: “Hey man, I’m going to live to be 100! I can just party for 70 years and then get a job!” Or if you found out you were only going to live to be 45, would you run around so fast trying to accomplish all your dreams that you’d run across the street without looking both ways and get hit by a cab? Is this a curse or a blessing? Oh, science, why most you make everything so difficult for us?
Here’s the Earth-shaking news:
