01-31-2023, 06:17 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
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Yeah, no. You aren't making a TL 9 invention at TL 0. You'll have to rely on something already existing that gets you 99% of the way there already, and the resulting technology will be TL 0 or maybe TL 0+1 (possibly with a ^, depending on particulars). EDIT: Also, Rubismith reported as spam. After I stopped laughing about the hilarity of a TL 0 laptop, anyway.
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01-31-2023, 06:35 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
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Any actual anti-agathics are going to require alchemy or something at low TL. Or a serious ^ on the TL. Much like the TL0 laptop.* *we need to make that a meme, like the latoka katana. |
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01-31-2023, 06:51 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Oct 2007
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
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And as far as the cost of the facility to research the invention, even a $500,000 facility is more or less the pinnacle of what a large TL0 society can offer a God-King equivalent if the entire society puts all their labour into it over a decade or more. |
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01-31-2023, 06:59 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
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01-31-2023, 07:34 AM | #15 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
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*Arguably, rather than treating the maximum as +10, an argument could be made for maximum IQ being x2, or 12 for Australopithecus. That calls for another [16] in Pharmacy (Herbal), which in turn needs 3,840 hours of self-study, tacking on a bit less than one additional year to the necessary study time. Note this is all pretty ridiculous, and nowhere in the general vicinity of actually-realistic. But I figure, rather than giving Alonsua the boot again, might as well entertain the idea.
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01-31-2023, 07:55 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
I think it makes a slight difference what sort of "anti-aging" you're thinking of. Is it your goal to enable most people to reach old age as commonly understood, the traditional "threescore years and ten"? Or to enable most people to get past a century, perhaps reaching the 120 that seems to be the approximate human upper limit? Or perhaps to do away with human upper limits on age entirely?
I think you can get the first if you have decent diet and exercise, and avoid contagion (which is going to mean avoiding cities and perhaps avoiding most animal domestication---a lot of human diseases come from swine and domestic fowl, and cities have traditionally not replaced their own populations, but depended on young people from the country), and perhaps have a peaceful society with good midwifery. The second is imaginable as attainable a TL or two past ours, but you would have to get people past not only infectious diseases, but also diseases of the post-reproductive years such as most cancers and dementia; you're going to have to imagine super healing herbs or something. (You could look at the urban legends about remote societies where everyone lives past a century, if you want a cinematic rather than realistic version.) If you want the third, we don't know how to do that now, and we certainly can't imagine a way to do it at TL0! Two notes on social implications: The short average lifespans of a lot of low-tech societies don't entirely reflect adults dying young. They come partly from averaging in high infant mortality. If two out of three children die in their first year, and the third lives to seventy, the average lifespan is (1+1+70)/3 = 24 years, which looks very short; but the children who live through that first year have decent longevity. It's not that cut and dried, of course, but the effect is substantial. The other side of this is that if you do get the average longevity up to 70 years, say, then the fraction of the population that dies in a given year will be much lower: 4.17% with 24-year lifespans, but 1.43% with 70-year lifespans. Either you have to have decreased births—whether through celibacy for many people, late marriage, nonprocreative sex, prolonged nursing, the perfect contraceptive herbs that people tell stories about, or some combination—or you're going to have a huge population explosion (the doubling time is about a quarter century!), famine, and high mortality. If you do cut down fertility, your society is going to have a much more vertical age pyramid than real low-tech societies have.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
01-31-2023, 10:31 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Jan 2023
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
Well, to clarify, the idea was indefinite longevity for a very small elite.
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01-31-2023, 10:33 AM | #18 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature |
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01-31-2023, 10:37 AM | #19 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
There is no method of giving mammals indefinite longevity. There are no plausible theories for how they could be given this (but an endless series of crank theories and gurus selling promises as far back as we have records). So what are you asking? A speculative version is just as speculative at any TL, it would be like FTL communications or mind-reading, just use the appropriate flavour text (teleport spell vs. matter transporter vs. being picked up by a goddess and carried to safety in a cloud; magical ritual v. psi v. neural integrator).
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature Last edited by Polydamas; 01-31-2023 at 10:49 AM. |
01-31-2023, 10:50 AM | #20 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )
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If there were a natural source of anagathic materials that didn't require too much processing, a low tech society could take advantage of it. That's not true in the real world, and it's a pretty implausible coincidence in a setting, but it's not impossible. The more plausible option is just lying. A group can claim to have secret techniques and do a decent job of keeping up the pretense. |
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