The point is - even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer. A good part of the cause of cancer are natural processes - errors in DNA replication, oxidative stress due to infection or hell, just plain metabolism. Then add on top all the genetic errors you inherited from your parents.
You could live in a bubble of pure clean air and only eat pure, clean organic food and get cancer.
The answer is to do the best you can, then live your life.
> even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer
That's like saying "even in the absence of lead poisoning, your child could still be retarded".
> You could live in a bubble
...they point is we do live in "a bubble", it's called Earth, and we can work to make this a cleaner and less toxic bubble.
I know perfectly well that cancer is a natural component of aging. And I also know that advances in anti-aging and regenerative medicine will make it possible to live longer and for this very reason cancer will be MORE of problem in the future and for future generations. Heck if modern medicine could enable my children to reach a theoretical max age of 250 years, I don't want them to only achieve let's say 50% of that achievable lifespan-increase because we've left them a "poisoned bubble" to live in.
It's amazing how little people want to pay attention to the environment and justify this by arguments of "but wrong thing X could still happen in regardless of environment" (ignoring that its probability would be 20% lower in a different environment). And when we do, we focus on fuzzy global properties of the environment that are hard to predict and have uncertain effects (eg. "global average temperature") instead of all the toxic stuff that can be easily traced and measured and where reduction would have impacts (measurable if people would be able to spend the money and relax some "ethical" rules to properly measure them...).
Not sure what your rant is getting at but my point stands - eliminate all pollution (even naturally occurring arsenic?) and you’d reduce cancer rates by maybe 30%.
Worthwhile? Of course? Going to get rid of cancer? No.
My rant was that we're incredibly far form "doing the best we can" with out environment, 30% is an insanely high amount of things left undone that we could do. Even 10% of that, 3% is a criminal improvement not to aim for. We're unimaginably incredibly sloppy and ineffective at managing what matters most of our environment and paying insane prices for it and that's what angers me...
"Then add on top all the genetic errors you inherited from your parents."
Some of those errors could be epigenetic from your parent's exposure.
Sure, there's stuff outside of our control. But with young adult cancer rates increasing 30% since the 70s, it seems there's an environmental or mass lifestyle factor involved that we should be looking to correct or mitigate.
You could live in a bubble of pure clean air and only eat pure, clean organic food and get cancer.
The answer is to do the best you can, then live your life.