The cordial questions asked during Prime Minister’s Question Time yesterday proved that this has been an interesting few decades. For the first time in almost 30 years the first hint of raw criticism has emerged again.

With the eco-wars of 2020 now a distant memory, their impact continues to be felt even though the slide in life expectancy has been halted. The flu epidemics that hit world populations in the immediate aftermath decimated 90% of all those over the age of 40 and many infants.

Since then we have seen an average decline in life expectancy of more than two years every year. It seems as if the genetic changes caused by the flu epidemic shortened telomeres in the human genome by more than 50% – drastically decreasing average life expectancy.

The front-benchers asking the questions of the Prime Minister are now an average age of 18. Brent Crude, the recently-elected Labour Prime Minister, himself celebrated his 21st birthday yesterday.

Due to short spans of adult life, everything has been telescoped. Elections are now scheduled every year. A politician’s tenure is no more than 12 months.

CEOs of Britain’s major corporations now can retire at 25, if they should live that long. The school-leaving age is now discretionary, but typically a university entrant is around 10 years old and starts a formal career at around 13.

Marriage seems to have fallen out of favor as short-term relationships have become the accepted norm throughout life.

The influence of mediocre television and media has increased exponentially. Almost all of it is user-generated or manipulated.

ANALYSIS >> SYNTHESIS: How this scenario came to be

Telomere
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

A telomere is a region of highly repetitive DNA at the end of a linear chromosome that functions as a disposable buffer. Every time linear chromosomes are replicated during late S phase, the DNA polymerase complex is incapable of replicating all the way to the end of the chromosome; if it were not for telomeres, this would quickly result in the loss of vital genetic information, which is needed to sustain a cell’s activities. Every time a cell with linear chromosomes divides, it will lose a small piece of one of its strands of DNA. This process has been referred to by James Watson and Alexei Olovnikov as the “end replication problem” (1971). It is believed that telomeres have a function in the ageing process.