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Old 01-31-2023, 11:08 AM   #21
Prince Charon
 
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
I doubt that a TL0 society can even have a god-king. Cultures such as the Maya or the Inca may not have had bronze, but they had cities and extensive agriculture and record-keeping; GURPS classes them as TL1 (retarded in metallurgy). You can have powerful chieftains in settings like the Pacific Northwest, but a chiefdom doesn't have that many people and isn't likely to build cities.
That probably depends on how you're defining a city, or indeed a god-king. A Neolithic culture could certainly have a large settlement that dominates and gets food from nearby settlements, as a proto city-state (town-state?), and still just be mature TL0; I think that may even have been the case in some of the late-Neolithic cultures that the Chalcolithic cultures developed from. You could likewise have a powerful chieftain who is basically worshiped as a god. Also, it seems to be an option to have a culture that's accurately described as something like 'TL0, advanced in social organization.'

I think part of the problem is that GURPS treats the whole Stone Age as one technology level, when really it's somewhere between three and a dozen. This affects how we think and talk about TL0 cultures, groups, and characters on this forum.
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Last edited by Prince Charon; 01-31-2023 at 11:11 AM.
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Old 01-31-2023, 11:29 AM   #22
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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Monks were relatively well known for longevity - it seems the Rule of Benedict was, when practiced in earnest, conducive to a healthy diet and exercise and hygiene and seems to have lead to some very elderly monks.
Monks were wealthy: they lived in stone buildings with clean water and enough to eat and did not have to do back-breaking labour (the honest ones did not spent a lot on horses or silver or servants, but just having a stone building, clean water, and a good diet is a better than average low-tech standard of living. That said, people of similar wealth who ate lots of meat, drank lots of wine, fought, and fornicated would probably have a lower life expectancy.
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Old 01-31-2023, 11:51 AM   #23
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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That just implies an expensive process, or one that uses rare materials.
Secrecy could also keep it limited to an elite few - and if OP wants to have this group surviving into higher TL's, secrecy will likely be necessary to prevent other groups from making use of the common ingredients.

If going with my plant idea, it might be that the plant (initially) only exists* in a certain region. Once its miraculous capabilities are discovered and exploited, it would be encouraged to spread - and would certainly be protected. If it relies on specific conditions to grow (or to produce the special anagathic component), that would explain it being limited to a small area, with whoever controls that being the one with the immortality... but if word gets out basically everyone is going to come demanding some ambrosia of their own.


*My mind started brainstorming up a story of how the anagathic treatment was developed, largely on its own. What it ultimately settled on was a tribe that considered a certain species of animal to be sacred to the gods, blessed with both remarkable resilience and recovery ("You can nearly see the wound knitting itself back together!"), and with the gods striking whoever slew one (and their immediate family) with sickness. A foreign hunter arrived asking for help, struck with said sickness. They took him in and chastised him for slaying a sacred animal - which shocked him, as his own tribe had hunted that same animal normally, with no ill effects (and was also shocked to learn of the beasts' legendary resilience, as the ones he was familiar with had nothing of that). He became obsessed with finding out why the animal here was different, and found it regularly consumed a plant that he had never seen before; trying it himself, he fell sick the same way as when he had slain one of the sacred animals. Making the intuitive leap that the animal gained its special traits from this plant, he tried to find some way to make the plant consumable; either he or one of his descendants eventually figured it out. Being "struck with sickness by the gods" was basically the consequence of eating fat from the animal, into which the plant's toxins had been sequestered. Whether the animal was simply naturally immune to the toxins, or the rest of its diet happened to counteract the poison, I leave up to your own judgement (note the latter would make it more feasible to find the recipe within a generation).
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Old 01-31-2023, 12:40 PM   #24
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

It's been so many years since I read Tom Robbins's novel Jitterbug Perfume, but if I recall correctly, that book had a secret TL0 formula for immortality that was a combination of bathing and sexual practices, beets, and ... perfume? Something like that. It was a fun book. Worth a read.
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Old 01-31-2023, 12:48 PM   #25
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

People are looking at the search for immortality through a distinctly Western lens.

If you want serious low-tech attempts to achieve longevity or immortality, take a look at the Ancient Chinese. They had all sorts of potions, techniques, and materials which were supposed to achieve these goals.

The fact that archeologist keep finding things like jade and "immortality potions" in tombs belies their effectiveness, but perhaps someone did hit upon the perfect mix of ingredients and lifestyle habits to allow extreme longevity or even immortality.

If you want a more Judeo-Christian element, the patriarchs mentioned in Genesis had fantastically long lifespans. Perhaps, other than being seriously favored by G*d and having numerology-obsessed biographers who weren't real great with chronology, they were really on to something. The secret plant/potion/spring/religious rite/whatever could have been passed down through the (long) generations or hidden away for sufficiently worthy future generations to find.
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Old 01-31-2023, 01:42 PM   #26
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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People are looking at the search for immortality through a distinctly Western lens.

If you want serious low-tech attempts to achieve longevity or immortality, take a look at the Ancient Chinese. They had all sorts of potions, techniques, and materials which were supposed to achieve these goals.
All of those things are similar to Western pursuits of things like the Philosopher's Stone. Schemes to live forever are universal. It's just that them failing to work is also universal.
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Old 01-31-2023, 01:55 PM   #27
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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If you want to decide that there are ahistorical TL0/TL0+1 alternate technologies that could be effective, that's certainly your prerogative as a setting builder, but people may find it odd to portray that as 'almost realistic'.
+1 ... quite aside from that I seriously doubt that anyone on this forum has the expertise to give you a more authoritative answer than "Beats the hell out of me" or "Of course not."

If you want there to be, in your setting, go for it; I expect anything you can spitball yourself can come off just as plausible-sounding than anything we can invent.
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Old 01-31-2023, 02:39 PM   #28
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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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?

Just asking for ideas and reasonements. I got many from this thread and I'd like to thank everyone for this.
The search for eternal life is - in my opinion - a truly fascinating topic.

Beside, there is no method... so far.
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Old 01-31-2023, 02:44 PM   #29
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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Just asking for ideas and reasonements. I got many from this thread and I'd like to thank everyone for this.
The search for eternal life is - in my opinion - a truly fascinating topic.

Beside, there is no method... so far.
There will never be a method of attaining eternal life. You might imaginably attain eternal youthful vigor and freedom from disease. But there will remain accidents, suicide, and violence. The probability of death can't be lowered to zero.

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Old 01-31-2023, 02:54 PM   #30
Solomon Draak
 
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Default Re: GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

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There will never be a method of attaining eternal life. You might imaginably attain eternal youthful vigor and freedom from disease. But there will remain accidents, suicide, and violence. The probability of death can't be lowered to zero.

Bill Stoddard

"I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice."
— CEO Nwabudike Morgan, MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview, "Longevity Vaccine," Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri


Seriously, just indefinite longevity would be such a solace. Knowing that you no longer have to die in a meagre couple of decades or even less. The problem of mortality isn't exactly the same of the problem of true eternal life.


There's a plant, Galega officinalis, which seems to contain an active principle very similar to the one employed by the drug called Metformin.
Metformin is mabye the first truly promising anti-aging drug that we stumbled upon, so far.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4772077/

The active principle of aspirine can be found in weeping willow bark ( salicylate.... I think. Sorry, english is not my native language. ) and it's quite effective in preventing both cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

Herbalism is not a small thing... there are treasures hidden in plants, barks and flowers. If those empirical knowledges could be synthesized into a omnicomprehensive treatment, I think the ageing process could be at least slowed down.

I find funny and oddly stimulating the idea of a pre-human, truly starting from scratch, fighting the greatest challenge armed with empiric science and raw intuition.

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