In the debate of whether to use faster than light (FTL) travel or just ordinary travel in a sci-fi story, there is another technology that allows for slower travel speeds without entirely disrupting the timeline, and that is life extension.
Today, the healthy lifespan of a human being is around 70 years. That is, you can be active and working for at least 70 years of your life. However, just around the corner is a set of breakthroughs in anti-aging that can easily increase the healthy lifespan of humans to 110+ years.
Some of these technologies involve gene therapy, some use stem cells, some use epigenetic supplements that turns on/off genes for aging. Even within the lifetime of most people on this site we will see a dramatic increase in healthy lifespan. This isn’t even sci-fi but emerging/leading edge technologies.
Now, move 100-200 years into the future. By then it is reasonable to assume that the healthy lifespan of a human being can be extended to 200 years or longer. This opens up a number of story doors that were previously closed.
1) longer travel times
Since people live longer they can now also “afford” to spend more time traveling to get to a remote destination and expect people to still be alive at the other end.
2) connection to the past
If a story is set far into the future, say 2787, only some THREE lifespans separate them from our current age. This means that a character’s grandfather could have been alive today. This allows for a much more proufound connection across the eons.
2 replies on “The New Worlds part 7: Life extension”
I’ll add one more thing that this life extension technology could influence: government control of people. It is bad enough contemplating a combination of CCP Social Credit style “loyalty ratings” or “useful citizen ratings” or such combined with Socialized Medicine and Death Panels to determine who will get priority on medical treatments. Now imagine a world where you can live to be 200 or 300 years old… as long as you continue to please the state. But if your social credit score goes down (Karen in HR says she heard you use the last year’s term for rainbow persons that we all understand now to be socially unacceptable… I’m afraid that drops you just below the Patriot Score needed for this year’s anagathic’s treatment).
Also consider what it could be like if the secret ingredient to allow the Right People to live productively decades longer was something that had to be harvested from other living human beings. Worse, if it was something that was preferentially released when the person’s fight or flight reflexes were engaged or they were in pain or something. So not only would there be a huge motive to kill a lot of humans, but to do so in a terrifying and/or painful way. Like cutting up newborn infants a piece at a time, or something else unthinkable.
These are interesting ideas that can make for good context and sub-plots.