GURPS Longevity and anagathic treatment in ancient times ( low TL )

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Solomon Draak

I like that answer! It's quite inspiring. Shamanic herbalistic research based on intuition...

To achieve a TL9 discovery, it would takes an Herbal Medicine skill at ( 45 for TL, 23 for Amazing complexity, 5 for totally new tech ) 73+, probably at least 80.

Now, an exceptionally bright australopitechus may develope an IQ of ( 20-4 ) 16, so to reach 80 in a Hard mental skill, we need more or less 260 character points. Not impossible to achieve with many years of study, altough it would be all self taught. Problem is, australopithecine mature at 10 and get old at 20, so time is at premium here.

Well, let's say our young australopitechus is either a respected shaman or has friends who share his dream, so he can dedicate himself to his research. A base of 12 hours of self-taught learning multiplied for 350 days / year ( two weeks a year wasted in necessary resting and unforeseen problems ) -> 4200 hours / year ( divided by 2 because self-taught ) -> 10 skill points / year. This way, it would takes 26 years or more to reach the necessary skill level, too much for our short lived primate.

Mabye there are ways to speed up the process.

No, it's unachievable in any sort of realistic setting. Realistically, once your skill gets high enough, raising it further should become much more difficult than the "[4] per +1 and 200 nominal hours per [1]" guidelines indicate. In a less realistic setting, if our genius precursor also has 4 levels in a relevant Talent, they'll be starting with an effective attribute of 20 and need only 60% as long to gain a character point in the relevant skill (in this case, Pharmacy (Herbal)). So getting to skill 80 would require [244], and with Talent 4 each point only takes 120 nominal hours, or 240 hours of self-teaching. Going with your 4200 hours per year (which will call for the character being supported by his or her village), that's 17.5 hours per year, and calls for 14 years of study. Note that gives the character an effective skill of only 7, so it will take a bit to come up with a working theory, and then many attempts to create a prototype from that working theory. Oh, and don't forget that an Amazing invention calls for a $500,000 facility, tripled for being 1 TL over current... which would work out to (following the pattern of 1-3-10-30) 30,000x cost, or $15,000,000,000. Which, hey, that's only around a third of the world's GDP back when GURPS 4e was released, so I'm certain your paleolithic culture could manage it without any issue!

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.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

The traditional view of medieval life was that it was "nasty, brutish, and short". If we assume that relates to an average lifespan of 40 years for those who survive infancy, the lord in his manor, who through healthy living practices, could reasonably expect to live to 70.

Nigh-doubling your life expectancy, from a certain point of view, would certainly seem like science-fiction style anagathics.

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.

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.

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Varyon

No, it's unachievable in any sort of realistic setting. Realistically, once your skill gets high enough, raising it further should become much more difficult than the "[4] per +1 and 200 nominal hours per [1]" guidelines indicate.

In part because after a certain level of skill, in a realistic setting more and more of the "study time" is actually spent maintaining the current level of skill.

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.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by WingedKagouti

In part because after a certain level of skill, in a realistic setting more and more of the "study time" is actually spent maintaining the current level of skill.

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.

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.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by WingedKagouti

In part because after a certain level of skill, in a realistic setting more and more of the "study time" is actually spent maintaining the current level of skill.

Indeed. Of course, the rules for this in GURPS is just needing to take an hour a day once you hit attribute+10 or need to roll against IQ to avoid losing a skill level, without any ramping up from there. A character with IQ 16 and Photographic Memory would be at effective IQ 26 (and if we're already giving her maximum IQ for her species*, Independent Income, a ridiculous level of Wealth, and Talent 4, tossing on Photographic Memory is hardly out of the scope), and I think many GM's would simply waive the roll... or at least allow a No Nuisance Rolls Perk.

Originally Posted by WingedKagouti

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.

TL 0 has Starting Wealth $250 - arguably that's more for mid-TL 0, and early Paleolithic would be lower, but we'll ignore that. Our genius precursor needs 60,000,000x this to have the necessary facilities; that calls for Multimillionaire 6 [200], which actually gives a starting total of 25,000,000,000 leaving her with $10,000,000,000 after paying for the facility.

*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.

[whswhs]

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.

[Solomon Draak]

Well, to clarify, the idea was indefinite longevity for a very small elite.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

And we know how to avoid all those early deaths from infectious diseases by low-tech means (sturdy smoke-free housing that separates people from animals, clean water, infection control measures around childbirth and some diseases, enough and reasonably varied food) the problem is that low-tech people are poor and its always tempting to steal from the masses. You can imagine a society without Electrical Age trappings which solved them pretty well.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Solomon Draak

Well, to clarify, the idea was indefinite longevity for a very small elite.

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).

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Solomon Draak

Well, to clarify, the idea was indefinite longevity for a very small elite.

That just implies an expensive process, or one that uses rare materials.

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.