Welp, you fucked up the LARP, bud.
How so?
Well, if you're going to cure cancer you're pretty much wasting your time and resources, which could instead be allotted to reversing aging.
See, if we cure cancer populations of nursing homes will swell. This will cause staggering needs, which can't possibly be met, for geriatrics. And here we have the one fatal flaw of curing cancer: they just get older while gaining no productivity.
Not knowing much about biology sucks, doesn't it?
Of course, I could aways be wrong. With all of the things I've had the pleasure of learning over the last few years, I wouldn't exactly be surprised if I was wrong as hell and you were in fact from the future and they did cure cancer even though there's no way there'd be that many available hands to help without another baby boom literally tomorrow.
Still, there's much more impactful possibilities that frighten me if it's true that I'm not just crazy or that I'm a self absorbed and naive child.
People work full time jobs up to their late 70s now. We haven't just improved lifespan, we've improved quality of life. You ever hear of "assisted living communities?"
Well almost two decades ago a bunch of states went on a tear making 'integrated communities' programs, in part because a lot of bureaucrats were out of jobs and state and federal funding needed new horsearmor projects to stuff these guys somewhere and grab up the free expertise and political capital. It didn't work out for the bureaucrats mostly because of pushback from the public, but the result was that many nursing homes went out of business.
Other nursing home businesses started buying apartments in new development blocks, scattershot. What they did was pepper the elderly throughout communities, the same was the pre 2020s government used HUD and section 8 housing to demographically blockbust nice neighborhoods. What we found was, with the right demographic mix people tended to take care of each other, which today isn't hard thanks to the proliferation of automation. Healthcare isn't huge today because of the need to take care of all the elderly,no, the elderly are healthy enough that they live on their own, and by the time they can't, they tend to live in places with neighbors that look out for them on the occasion the bots can't.
Speaking of too many people, fertility is another problem entirely though even thats largely been solved. And on the same topic did you know you can now pay for growing and reattaching a new foreskin?
The gist of the breakthrough we made on health is 'young organs and young blood improve resistance to aging.' Which is why the industry went the organ printing route.
For the same reason that researchers 50 years ago thought certain sweetners (that caused bladder cancer in mice) were carcinogenic, much of the 'reversing' and 'anti-aging' research will be shown to be ineffective and non-reproducible in humans. But thats research for the late 2020s.
Aging research was over-hyped.
We have machines now that custom tailor entire treatment plans from a massive palette of proven methodologies. It's a five minute test to decide what the patient needs. Only three percent of cancers are incurable for a variety of reasons.
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