10 Mindblowing Things That Happen As You Age

A headline like this will do the rounds every few years or so, often coinciding with the latest scientific leap, and the number is invariably different.

The world's population is an ageing one, largely due to advancements in medicine and sanitation, people just don't die like they used to. The average life expectancy in the UK has risen from 71 years to 81 years since 1960 and it's still on the up.

It has become a near certainty that many people who are currently in their 20s and 30s will live well into their hundreds, perhaps even to 150, and some are even hypothesising that the first person to live to 1,000 years old has already been born. Logically, the older we can cling on, the better our chances of hitting that target as medical science will hopefully only continue to improve over those years.

It is thought that the relatively new field of gene therapy thought could be our saviour (or doom, depending on how you look at it), either through therapeutic treatments to help us fight disease or bring about improvements in our bodies' functionality or through the genetic engineering of our future children to ensure they are stronger, healthier and disease-free.

There are problems with this eternal youth, however, as a practically immortal population would have an utterly devastating effect on the environment, which indeed it already is. Unless we can figure out a way to cater for an ever-expanding population of geriatrics, people are going to have to die eventually for humanity to survive.