This could save more lives than a cure for cancer…?

What is it, you ask?
Well, I’ve gathered some figures from the Cancer.org website and used them to figure out the average number of years an average American loses from cancer. I share these figures below.
I also show some math I used to get to my final product: (if you’re not into math, just skip this section and go on to Analysis section.)

Chances of getting cancer about 40%
Chance of surviving cancer about 61%
61% of 40% is 24.4%
So chances of dying from cancer is 40% minus 24.4% which equals 15.6%.
77% develop cancer after age 55
Average life expectancy in the US: approximately 78 Years
12% lose 23 years of life or less from cancer
3.6% lose more than 23 years of life from cancer
(to make the statistics workable we will say that the 3.6% actually lose 78 years of their life, and the 12% lose the full 23 years of their life, which is obviously an exaggeration on both parts)
So if we say that 12% loses 23 years and that 3.6% loses 78 years we could say that the average American loses 5.6 years of life from cancer, if we multiply 12% times 23 years plus 3.6% times 78 years.

29% of our life spent sleeping
22.6 years of life spent sleeping

Average American person loses 5.6 years of life from cancer
Average American person loses 23 years of life from sleeping

ANALYSIS

We need a cure for sleeping! (Don’t take me too seriously. This is obviously not a reasonable conclusion for anything, but it is, however, a very interesting thought.)
We spend millions of dollars a year on cures for cancer, which are, very important I might add. However, I don’t believe that a cure for sleeping is on any of our priority lists. Why not? There is a 100% correlation between people who sleep and people who die. Not to mention that it steals 4 times more life than cancer.
You might say, “Well, sleeping is not a disease, sleeping is a natural process of a living human”. To that I would say a disease is defined as “any harmful, depraved, or morbid condition, as of the mind or society” and I would suggest that anything that is 4 times worse than cancer is quite harmful and rather morbid in its effect of human life. I can also say that cancer, as far as I know, is quite natural, just like sleep. Diseases have been a part of the human race for quite some time. To say that something that has been around for that long isn’t natural, then I don’t know what would be.
What we need is a pill or some sort of treatment so we don’t have to waste our lives sleeping. Sleep can become just a luxury, not a necessity as it is now. It’s nice to lie down after a long day or after working out at the gym, but it’s a pain to have to waste 29% of your life doing it. It’s inefficient, it’s unproductive… it’s just not American. It’s also a pain when you don’t get enough sleep, think of the other diseases that would be cured with a cure for sleep: insomnia, sleep apnea, along with 82 other known sleep disorders. Never have another bad dream again.
Also, think of the money you’ll save in beds. Good beds cost lots of money, and for a big family beds can get pretty expensive.
Come on people, we need to jump on this before other countries do it first. I think Japan is working on it right now actually, how else do they get their kids in school for 15 hours a day?Drugs, of course…Just think, that could be us.

Fairness is a lot like dinosaurs.

Let me explain.

1. Dinosaurs are extinct.

So is fairness. At one time the world was overwhelmed by giant lizards. There was also a time when the world had some sort of a moral compass. This was before this blurred sense of what fair really is came into being. This was before people sued for spilt hot coffee, or eating too much McDonalds, or psychological trauma bull-crap. This was before steroids were commonplace in baseball, and before celebrities were treated as exceptions (or maybe before celebrities altogether). Fairness no longer exists in its true form anymore.

2. We might think it would be awesome to have them back at first, but remember Jurassic Park.

Yeah, let’s bring back the dinosaurs. That would be so cool! Wait, isn’t that what they did in Jurassic Park? That didn’t work out that well.
Maybe we should also think about that before we start an ethical revolution. Yes, it is easy to see that our morals are lacking and something needs to change, but let’s keep in mind the things we might not be willing to change if things were truly fair. The speed limit would be the speed limit. 51 in a 50 would be against the law. If you copied a CD for a friend, you could be arrested, likewise with downloading free music. No one would be up for that. The reason that these things would be so hard to change is because everyone is so worried about everyone else’s justice. If someone else was driving 60 in a 50 and didn’t get a ticket, and you were driving 60 in a 50 and got pulled over, I guarantee your argument will focus on the fact that someone else could do it, so you should be able to, to make it “fair”. The truth is that if you are driving 46 in a 45 and you get pulled over, you were speeding. Period. But that’s just not how we see it, that’s why things will never change.

3. We would only want to pick certain dinosaurs to come back, definitely not all of them.

While we would certainly want the pterodactyls and the herbivore stegosaurus to come back, I think though, that we would be completely unwilling to have the t-rex and the velociraptors running around our neighborhood. Just like with fairness, we would love for people to not cheat in sports and not sue people for stupid things, but we don’t want to have to pay for a CD that our friend just paid for, and we aren’t willing to drive the speed limit. I’m pretty sure we can’t pick when we want fairness to apply, I think it’s all or nothing. I guess we’ll just have to dig up fossils of fairness and put them in some sort of Moral Museum, because I don’t see anything changing anytime soon.