Is This What the UK Will Be Like When We Finally Cure Cancer?

​This article originally appeared on VICE UK

We're all getting older. I'm getting older. You're getting older. Brad Friedel is definitely getting older.

We can run and row and eat raw fish, but we age every hour, every day. However much Oil of Olay you knead into your craggy face, those lines will harden and your tears will drain in new and different ways.  But I also mean this: we're all actually getting older. Thanks to better diets and better medicine, we're living into our seventies, eighties, and nineties. The British public is now an older collection of people than ever before.

In a previous life, I worked for a medical research charity whose stated aim is to rid the world of breast cancer. And they're doing a pretty good job of it, to the extent that they can claim to help make the disease a chronic, non-lethal condition within a couple of generations.

Despite all their valuable work, however, you have to be mindful of hubris. In 1971, an ailing and Vietnam-vexed Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, promising a cure for the disease within ten years. His intention was to generate public positivity around a highly ambitious project, in much the same way JFK had used his moon landing announcement in 1961.

But there is one difference between the two. Since the 60s, men have flown to space and returned with moon-dusted boots; more than 40 years after Nixon took up arms, millions still die from cancer every year. But that was the 60s, and half a century is a long time in science. Billions of dollars of investment and years of hard work have allowed us to understand a huge amount about how the machine of cancer operates. Such progress has seen death rates from the disease steadily decline since the mid-1990s, though much still remains to be done—lung and pancreatic cancers are two examples where survival rates remain particularly low.

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Of course, we should absolutely be proud of all the achievements we have made as pure human triumphs—if we can work out how to completely banish the Big C to history, then well done us. But when we finally elude a disease that has stalked us for as long as we've been on Earth, it makes sense to ask: what happens next? What happens to the growing mass of cancer-free OAPs all trying to cram onto the free bus to their boules club? What happens when the average Brit lives to 100?

Well, for one thing, rates of Alzheimer's disease will skyrocket.

Currently, one in three people over the age of 65 develop dementia, with Alzheimer's accounting for the majority of cases. As the over-65 bracket of the UK population swells, the numbers of people living with dementia will grow from around 800,000 today to  ​over 2 million by 2051.

Alzheimer's is an isolating, terrifying, and utterly draining condition for carers, relatives and sufferers. The disease roams around the brain, destroying first what makes us human—memory, judgment, and personality—and then what keeps us alive. Currently available drugs can alleviate some of the symptoms, but give no recourse to the neuronal decay that underpins the disease.

The gradual mental and physical deterioration takes an average of eight to ten years from diagnosis to death, with attendant healthcare requirements  ​costing the UK $36 billion a year. This figure will inevitably spiral as the disease grows more prevalent.

​Mind you, if we're thinking really long-term, then I reckon we'll eventually get over Alzheimer's, too. With cancer consigned to history, the great and good will snap up their tickets to the "Bye Bye Cancer Bash," glug a celebratory glass and slow dance to whoever fills Emeli Sandé's shoes decades from now. But then they'll get itchy feet and start to cast around for the next cause to devote themselves to. The cause they can run marathons, or grow beards, or jump out of planes for. And that cause will probably be Alzheimer's research.

Conveniently, the government are already on board. Earlier this year,  ​David Cameron promised increased focus on Alzheimer's in the coming years, going as far as to say: "We would like a cure to be available by 2025. It's a big, big ambition to have. If we don't aim for the stars we won't land on the moon."

Sound familiar? That wildly unrealistic timeline—and cynical plan to distract a public that largely don't like him very much—bears an eerie resemblance to Nixon's declaration of war on cancer decades before. Mind you, these platitudes, though irritating, will soon be backed up by serious injections of cash to support the very best scientific endeavor. And much like we have with cancer—understanding by increments what its causes are, where its weak points lie, and how these could be targeted with new drugs—we shall overcome Alzheimer's.

So what's after that? By this point, I'd say we've reached (at the very, very earliest) somewhere around 2100, meaning 3D-printing technology will likely be cheap enough for hospitals to invest in en masse, enabling them to pump out as many replacement hips and knees as it'll take to keep pensioners walking and wining until they just can't be fucked any more.

Freed of infirmity, there's a chance that our children's children's children will reach retirement and, instead of moving to Hastings, devote all their time, funds, and energy to, say, buying up graphic design offices and turning them back into derelict warehouses to throw parties in. Or starting graffiti clubs. Or getting into parkour.

Of course, it's likely they won't. Because it's a sad inevitability that, as we grow older—as we sit proudly in our hard-earned sofas and scoff at the limp mortgage-monster that our white-collar salary has slain, before standing up, groaning, and driving our money-sink teenagers to tennis lessons—the radicalism of our student days drains away. We take stock of what we have and come to realize that we'd very much like to keep it that way. We stop voting left and start voting right.

And as the average age continues to soar upwards, so too will the UK's base of right-wing voters.

A hundred years from now, we'll probably still have more than one political party, but they'll have upped sticks from the middle ground and fucked off to the right where the action is. Our growing army of active octogenarians, wanting to keep what they've earned over their long lives—wanting to spend it on going out and getting mullered in the Med—will vote (and they will vote, of course) for the parties that promise them what they want. And that'll leave a dirty great gap between the young, the poor, and everyone else. So a bit like what we have today, but worse.

I don't know what the answer to any of this is. We have to beat cancer, because it's there. And we have to beat Alzheimer's because it's there, too. We can't not. But when we do, we'd better get ready for a neo-Nigel Farage leading the most left-leaning party in the land, because that's what's coming.

Follow James on ​Twitter.