Was cancer less likely in a pre-industrial world?

As for the far future, maybe we will lie in a tank somewhere, have a cord attached to our brain and control robots that are in the dangerous environments for us. At least the people who can afford such a life style. It would also mean that we don't have to do shorter trips to visit someone or some place as you could just use avatars that are already present. Only for larger distances will ping delays become significant (thousands of km). It also means that we don't need breathable atmospheres or livable temperatures any more. Terraforming Mars would be a waste of time, as would be living down a gravity well. Maybe even the robots would be a waste if we can just live in simulated worlds instead. Already now there is a large gamer population. If you extrapolate the growing segment, we might end in a world where people spend their entire lives in simulated environments.

So we start with one indicator of bone cancer that is well-established: bone lesions. This indicator shows a significant rise from medieval to current times.

Now we use another, less established indicator (ct scan results) and find... a number consistent with the first result.

Finally, we make some "extrapolations" about the rate of undetectable cancer based on our observations and lots of assumptions.

In the end, we show that our extrapolated(!) cancer rate is higher than expected and does not show as much of a difference between medieval and modern times.

None of this explained the significant rise in the first indicator. Also, even if you liberally pad your data with extrapolations, wouldn't you have to apply the same formula to the indicators of cancer in modern-day individuals?

By the way, the modern-day cancer rate is still ~3x higher than even the extrapolated rate (15% vs 50%) - yet, the article goes one step further than the study and frames this as a finding that the cancer rate didn't grow at all.

> Just the pandemic should've given you a hint that people at large don't like being confined to their homes and living in a virtual world.

This might be true for the majority of the society, but not everyone. Personally, i enjoy isolation from others for the most part due to my personality being rather introverted. This is also why i'm okay with remote work and prefer it to being in the office. There are certainly other people who wouldn't mind doing their jobs remotely and even if not everyone needs to do that, the technologies that would be developed around this concept would most certainly be useful in some way, like remote surgery: https://fortune.com/2020/02/11/tele-robotics-surgery-5g-heal...

Even if the things above are somewhat feasonable (with technologies like VRChat becoming an interesting way of socializing for some, as well as communities on Discord and Reddit, as well as social media in general), as for the "brain jar" scenario, i think you are mostly correct. I doubt that we'd be able to tackle the more "sci-fi" topics that concern our biology. For example, even if one could maintain a brain within some sort of a container, we know way too little about what exactly it'd need to remain healthy, as well as how we'd connect all of the nerve endings. Essentially, i think that we need to study our bodies more, since there's probably a link even between our gut bacteria and the functioning of our brains, as well as all of the hormones etc.: https://www.daimanuel.com/2020/11/17/how-your-gut-health-aff...

That's not to say that we shouldn't explore new possibilities and research longetivity or even the mechanisms that control the functioning of our bodies, though. That sort of research would at the very least decrease the health spending in the elderly and would help them enjoy their later years more fully. I think it's worth pursuing without going into either of the two extremes - full trans humanism or total denial.