Imagine a story set in a future of abundance, with flying cars and brain implants, yet people still casually die of smallpox. Or a tale of interstellar travel where characters don laser guns yet also call each other on wired telephones. When I read or watch stories taking place in high-tech futuristic societies with space travel and intelligent robots, and yet characters still age, it feels as if they could still catch smallpox. A cringe-inducing anachronism, like an astronaut on Mars listening to music from a cassette player. While aging is currently inevitable, advances in biomedical research and our understanding of aging processes point towards a future where we can design our own biology and define how long we live.
Aging Fast and Slow (and Not at All)
We can already slow the aging process in animals. For example, in the microscopic roundworm C. elegans, tweaking a single gene can extend its lifespan more than tenfold, allowing animals that normally only live for a few weeks to live for more than six months. If we could apply such discoveries to humans, it would mean people living for over one thousand years. Of course, worms are simple organisms whose adults are mostly composed of nondividing cells, yet scientists can also slow aging in more complex mammals. In the workhorse of biomedical research, the house mouse, dietary and genetic manipulations can extend lifespan by up to fifty percent, postponing age-related diseases and allowing animals to be healthier for longer.
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Interesting, but weirdly off with regards to the specific shared universes.
For star wars there are only six characters we see naturally age into an elderly state on a relatively normal scale–all of whom were either poor, deeply religious, or lived a life of considerable stress.
In star trek we have a lot of long-lived races, time travel shenanigans and the rest, but humans on earth are shown to age considerably slower than we do now. The recent Picard show had the best cohort, although that group also started with a cameo from the original series which established the longer lives.
It’s a rich area for speculative fiction, though. Especially if meaningful “upload” of human minds are ever possible.
