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From: wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: (ReacTor) Over the Hill: Five Not-So-Youthful SFF Protagonists
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2024 22:13:11 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
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In article <v7c210$2jmsq$1@dont-email.me>,
William Hyde  <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

>Leaving out immortals or quasi/immortals:

In Julian May's Galactic Milieu, regeneration treatment seems to be
both reliable and commonplace, so humans only die of old age because
they've chosen not to undertake the treatment.  (Still plenty of other
causes of death, like physical trauma.)

In Saunders' Commonweal there are evidently a number of species that
do not senesce, which is distinguished from immortality in some
unexplained technical sense.  Other species have significantly
different-from-human-norm lifespans that have the same statistical
structure as ordinary-model humans but with different expected length.

It is notable that so many sff civilizations seem to be stuck in the
mode of "people live for 75 +/- 10 Earth years".  I suppose it's easy
enough to carry that assumption into your worldbuilding if that's not
something you expicitly set out to reconsider.

-GAWollman

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)