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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Heap Thaumaturgist" data-source="post: 248366" data-attributes="member: 4516">Normal humans with greatly extended lives would take over the entire planet in short order and then populate themselves into a war of extinction shortly thereafter.I mean ... what do you want?  You can't really change only -one- variable in the equation of life and expect nothing else to change.People who lived for 500-1000 years would have a social structure nothing like normal humans, also in short order.  When you -know- you're going to live for five hundred years ... what possible reason is there for you to boink out a kid every year and a half?  What reason is there for normal human relationships or marriage structures?  Would you really want to have a hundred kids if you had to keep raising the little brats?  What joy is there watching yet another progeny grow when you could be doing -anything- with your greatly extended lifetime?Our productive life spans are really rather short ... today's productive span is what, about 40 years or so? And you extend it by ten times or more?  Ten career lifetimes.Ignorance, poverty, the vast uselessness of humanity would become obsolete.  The ignorant would remain ignorant, those who wish to learn would have decades and decades to do so ... to plot, to plan, to manipulate societal structures to their own device, to create new ideas that lead to the death of the ignorant.  Ignorance and breeding is powerful, but really only in a short-term society.  As we create longer lifespans, you'll notice that less and less power is placed with the few who have greater physical strength.  Harsh oppressive systems tend to come to an end ... at least harsh, oppressive systems the way they functioned in the middle ages ... instead you have oppressive systems like capitalism, that functions on knowledge base and manipulation of underlying cultural structures as opposed to fear and terror.  If you attempted to terrorize a people that had 500 years to hang out and think about ways to get out from under it, you'd have a few uprisings that would get farther and farther apart, better and better planned, more and more complete until they succeeded.I'd say, then, that a country like that wouldn't survive the first 300 years.  Within two or three generations the old guard would be done away with and new structures would begin forming.  I'm not saying that a longer life would lead to a grand peaceful eutopia, but you wouldn't have a medieval structure full of people that live 500 years.  Those structures existed at a time in which people were lucky to live to 40.  These people would expand until they came into conflict with surrounding peoples, and then would no doubt stop.  And, I'd imagine, instead of taking the brute strength route that 25 years of productive life leaves you, they would stop, step back for about 200 years to think about the problem from every possible angle, and then do something about it ... be it somehow encorporate their neighbors into a new, larger governmental and societal structure, or war.No doubt after about 10 generations and having the time to hang out and contemplate the reasons and reactions for their problems, these people would also find a correlation between overpopulation of a long-lived people and suffering caused by lack of room and resources.All signs I've seen or heard about point to a culture undergoing a change if the lifespan suddenly increases, especially to extreme proportions like that.--HT</blockquote>

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