I'd assume that they pay more to senior employees because the senior employees are worth more. If they weren't, they wouldn't pay them more (or they'd fire them and hire younger people).

I don't think the corps would pay for it, I think that corps would be willing to loan money to get the therapies. If someone had to borrow 70,000 to live another 3 decades, then everyone wins, because that money can easily be paid back over those three decades - and after three decades, I'd imagine that the age rejuvenation therapies will have gone down in price or would have improved to add much more than 3 decades to expected lifespans.

What I meant for me, personally, was not treatments to extend my senior years, but treatments to expand my middle-age years. If the length of 'middle age' can be medically extended faster than I age, I should never have to actually get older.

you are going to need more than 2million if you are planning to retire for 40 years.

I've always thought that overpopulation was a birthrate problem, not a deathrate problem.

As well, as technology expands, resources go up. There's an infinite amount of resources in the universe, if we learn to tap it.

Overpopulation is a problem of the birth rate being higher than the death rate. It can be solved by lowering one or increasing the other to set them equal. Even if thre is a tiny inequality in the birth rate per unit of time and the death rate per unit time this inequality will cause the population to increase or decrease without bounds as time aproaches infinity.

The assertion that there is an infinite ammount of resources in the universe is incorrect.
While the volume of the universe is infinite (increases without bounds) that is just a bunch of empty space that makes it more difficult to get to new resources over time. The amount of resources in the universe (raw matter and energy) is finite due to the conservation of matter/energy. They never increase or decrease but they due become unusable due to entropy which inevitably leads to the heat death of the universe (or a big crunch in the unlikely event that gravity wins) either way one cannot be immortal because, by definition, one cannot survive the death of the universe.

Know that every time you take a bath, use a computer, eat, breath, sleep, move, bark like a dog, cook toast, or do absolutly anything you are not only hastening your own inevitable death you are also hastening the inevitable death of everything that is, was, and ever will be.


Of course, there are ways to find pseudo immortality in Shadowrun. In fact, there are pseudoimmportals in Shadowrun canon. The easiest method of gaining immortality is to be born with it, of course. There are immortal elves but being born one is impractical for most people. The most practical solution for humans and orks is to become infected with HMHVV-1. You'll stop aging and gain regeneration. Dwarves, Trolls, and elves get the short end of the stick here since they tend to lose their minds.
Gene therapy and drugs can possibly simulate the effects of being an immortal elf or of being a vampire without any of the annoying side effects sometime in the future. But magic is the tried and true way to become immortal.

By ED canon magic can extend one's life indefinatly and even cure death. In fact, one particular horror power could cure throwing yourself into a sea of magma out of hopeless despair. If Shadowrun magicians could rediscover that little gem it would be worth a fortune.

Assuming you can get 6% interest...

2 million means that you're getting 120k a year. Even if taxes take half that... I think I could handle living on 60k a year. The trick to making it last is to not take out the core, only interest.

The entropy I cause is a minor portion of the sun's entropy, really. I may be destroying chemical bonds, but in the current scheme of the things, the sun is pumping out vast amounts of energy that I can do anything I want with. My conserving fuel does not significantly change the effective lifespan of the sun.

If I endeavour to capture and use the sun's entropy, it's no different than if I never captured the entropy in the first place.

Nearly. It's a problem if we grow faster than new resources become available (because the per capita wealth/resources/food goes down). But if new resources/wealth/food grow FASTER than the growth curve, then the per capita resources increases even with the growth rate.

So, if over population bothers you, you have three choices:
- encourage the deaths of old people
- encourage the reduction of the birth rate
- encourage the discovery of new resources, or more efficient uses of current resources.

When put like that, one option seems much more moral than the other.

I am sure that it will be soon where anyone can become a ghost in the machine.
that will be the next leap for Otaku (Otaku-Prime), they will exist purely in the matrix.

The problem is that if you get crashed in there ... game's over bud. Don't get caught in a system that is shutting down, But I am sure they will have some kind of nexus protocol.

If you are pulling 6% you are doing well.

Over all inflation rounds out at 2.5-3% a year, some years are more some are less. You have to make sure that your base pool increases by at least this amount in order to not run out of money. Sure in 40 years you will draw 60K, but that will be like drawing 10K now. Money is designed to devalue.

Allowing yourself to die is a heckuva lot different than being forced to die, though. Curing aging isn't immortality, it's just reducing one of the risks that could lead to your death. As well, if YOU have the cure, you should be able to get all your loved ones a cure too (unless they were going to die earlier than you anyway).

1 million is not too much of a debt when you get an additional 60 years to work it off. By the time a person is in his 60s, he should have pretty good earning power. As well, while it seems there's room for only a limited number of treatments (one essence or bioindex), you've got to remember that's the price in ~2060ish. Think how much technology advances every year. In 60 more years the treatments would be absolutely different.

Over time, the price of a medical intervention goes down - unless the intervention is drastically improved and then you're getting more value for the same dollar. AIDS medications have gone down in price, heart surgery hasn't (but has gotten a lot more effective)

1. The generic, ass-covering warning on all investment company also applies here. "Performance data reflects past performance and is not indicative of future results."

2) Life Expectancy is an arithmetic mean (average) and therefore you should expect it to lie to you if you ask it the wrong questions.

c] Things wears out, and eventually Theseus' ship pulls into port.

Okay, let's extrapolate that logic. Why do you think that you can stand 10 more years of regrets (I'm assuming that you plan on being alive in ten years)? Do you think you'll be able to stand 20 more years? Why do you suspect that in ten more years, you won't be able to stand another ten years?

1. True. But we can reasonably expect that the medical technologies will continue to improve - especially if we take steps to encourage them to improve. In SR, I'm sure that the leonization process will be much more efficient in 60 more years. If they improve fast enough in the real world, the same scenario would apply
2. Yeah, I get that. I don't intend to mislead, but I might be explaining poorly.
3. My atoms and cells and memories change constantly. I'm still 'me'. Theseus's ship may be a philosophical muddle, but you have no trouble determining that your food is 'not you' and your sloughed off skin is 'not you', but that both will be integrated into the 'you' at some point in time.

The simple solution to this is to be an insensitive apethetic jerkoff bastard asshole.

Who sais I haven't all ready Apathy is nothing more the the lack of showing feelings that and I've stoped worring about other ppl as well and dont consurn my self with there problems. As to regrets the few ppl aquier in there short life time are barable but whould they be so after 200 years of life I tend to think not look at the number of ppl that kill them selfs or others becuse they couldn't handle what has happend in there life up to that point. Even more simply shut out the world or go insane in other ways for the same resions. Besides I still dont see any real advantage to exstending ones life by 60+ years.

Think about it this way. You take up striking and grappling when you're 15 and practice till you're old. Then you get the treatment. You have a lifetime of experience but your body is all youthful again. You spend another lifetime. Do it again. Do it like 3 times so you'll have lived like 400 years or so and still have 3 points of Essence.

You'd have such a breadth of experience and refined skill that you could go and kick everyone's ass. Think of how much fun it would be just to be the mischevious 400 year old asskicker of the sprawl. 400 years of hurt contained in one unimposing recycled package.

Apathy isn't the lack of showing feelings. Apathy is the complete lack of caring. Period.
If you don't care then it doesn't matter if your friends die. You might even be the one to kill them yourself for fun and for profit.

Some people would love to be marked by the Barkerish monstrosity known as Chantrel's Horror.

Why can we "reasonably" expect that? Because it gets a lot of press? Sorry to dissapoint but a lot of that is because cheating death stories sell, almost as well as sex stories.

It isn't just that. The basic assumption that crappy life expectancy ment shorter lives for the longer living people is off. In truth for example in medevial times once you made it past age 20, barring the black plague or the off chance you ended up on the wrong end of a war, you could generally expect to live well into your 60's and 70's. So while average life expectancy has risen a lot, the upper range and ceiling has raised relatively less dramatically for the vast majority of long lifetime people.

Sure there is the physical reworking, transplants, non-biological implants, etc. that very longterm sustaining could involve. But I was thinking more about the mental aspects, and how memory is going to go. We haven't seen anyone out past about 120 yet, we don't know yet what would happen to the contents of a mind over say a period of 200 years. If I'm relying on outside feedback to bring back in the old memories then how much different is that really than our current stab at immortality; having a kid and telling them a story?

THURSDAY IS SOYLENT GREEN DAY!

Population growth nowadays is already a problem, regardless of the death rate. Our civilization can handle a certain growth rate, but the technologies that increase sustainability will only grow so quickly (they will grow more quickly if people make an effort to increase them). I'm quite sure we're above the 'survivable' growth rate right now. Which means that birthrates will have to come down, regardless.

Here's a question for you, though. Suppose there was an anti-aging treatment - how many children would you have? Would you take any steps to make the world more sustainable, long term? Would you take steps to reduce the growth rate?

Why assume that everyone who would get the treatment wouldn't have the same logic process you do? If you never age, all that you need to do to 'balance' the growth rate is to not have as many children, only have children when you know the species can afford them (which is tied to when you can afford them). What's the 'resource competition' difference between you being around in 200 years or your offspring being around in 200 years? Not much.

The population growth rate needs to come down. In first world countries, we have tied wealth directly to not reproducing, and so increasing this trend in the world will have a similar effect. The alternative is advocating genocide of older people, and that's not morally acceptable.

I'd have as many as I could pop out (wives permitting). Then I'd teach them how to eat other peoples' children. Eventually I'll have my perfect army of cannibalistic nezumis!

Only when I'm old. Otherwise it's fine.


Truthfully, the problem isn't keeping down the birth date, it's either keeping down the population GROWTH rate, decreasing the resource USE rate or increasing the efficiency of resource GATHERING.

So some simple solutions:

1) Higher infant mortality rate among children other than mine
2) Stop wasting resources like we're all stupid, wasteful Americans. Kill people who buy SUVs and eat them first. Stuff more people into apartments instead of huge town houses and stop buying random trash all the time.
3) Continue advancing technology so our agricultural and power production yields continue to grow at a rate higher than our consumption (this has been going on for the last hundred years or so. We've outgrown our 1950's agricultural production yields without increasing our exports or farmland, for instance.)


These problems are really quite simple to solve once you just stop and think about them a little.

Usually it is the poor people are the victims of genocide before old people.

The population will level out, nature has its ways, disease, famine, wars. (well war is really human "nature")

Even if people live to be really old, they have a limited procreation cycle. The number of people will strike a balance.