#Adds thirty years to my already shortened lifespan | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tarysande · 7 years

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I think by turians and humans having a lifespan of 150 years, they mean a maximum of 150 years. The oldest woman who ever lived was 122 and sure there's still quite a number of years until 150 but I think what they were getting at was given their advanced healthcare, humans in the years around 2100+ CAN live to 150 years. That's not to say they will though and that goes for turians too. So everything would still be the same. 18 for us is still 18 for them.

I see what you’re saying. I think I just have a different interpretation of the lore, maybe. In the wiki (which was backed up by an old forum post that’s no longer around) it says: “Humans can live to about 150 years, and recent medical advances have eradicated almost all known diseases that afflict them. However, as humans only emerged on the galactic stage within the last thirty years, it is highly likely that the introduction of new technology into their society will greatly increase their average lifespan.” To me that implies advancement even past the 150 noted there.

Now, if you were to say to Random Average Dude on the street right now: “How long do humans live?” that guy probably wouldn’t say “120.″ Right now, those extremely long-lived humans are the exception, not the rule.

Considering how vastly science and medicine have improved in our last 150-200 years (and how meteoric that rise has been), and how much that’s affected the average human lifespan in that same time, I don’t see the current “18-as-adult” thing staying static just because that’s the way it is now. Was 18 defacto adulthood 200 years ago? I mean, we are already seeing the effects of this kind of thing now: if a person lives to 85 or 90 or 100 (my own grandparents are in their 90s), they simply don’t have enough money to live on if they worked their requisite years and retired at 65. That’s going to continue to change as medicine allows us to live longer. Living to 90 is going to place a burden on your earning years. How much more so would living to 120 or 130 or 150? A lot happens in 10 years, no matter what age those 10 years happen at--adding 20, 30, 40? It’s going to have a huge effect. Especially if there are fewer diseases to knock us out young.

If we jump ahead almost 200 years, it seems far more likely to me that we’ll be living longer--we’ll be healthier longer--and likely things like childhood or educational years will be extended. Think about how many people now don’t catch their professional stride until their thirties. What an interesting thought experiment it is to think about how we, as the human race, might allow children to get enough sleep, shorten their educational day, and let them stay in school longer (in terms of years) instead of pushing teenagers at the height of hormonal changes etc into making Big Life Decisions via choice of career, schooling, etc? I mean, there’s an increasing body of research coming out right now indicating that kids at 18 may be physically developed (though that’s not guaranteed either) but still have mental and emotional development to do. (In fifty years I think we’ll look back at the amount of stress and strain we put 15-25-year-olds through and shudder. People shouldn’t be having breakdowns over high school and college. There, I said it.)

And, hey, if parents are living longer, they’ll have more time to save so that a longer childhood for their children is more financially feasible.

How great would it be if a woman no longer had to consider stopping/pausing herself just as her career was taking off to consider procreation?

I mean, to each their own interpretation and headcanon, but I think science and medicine are already getting us a lot closer to these possibilities. Add 200 years, and I don’t think we, as a species, are going to be locked into the same things we think of as “normal” now. And since Mass Effect is science fiction, I think there’s just a really great opportunity to think about these kinds of changes (and possible improvements!) on a medical/scientific/community/societal level, and it’s one that’s been kind of underutilized (in my opinion), since the groundwork was already laid in their own lore.

#asks and answers #Anonymous #mass effect meta #ages and lifespans and medicine oh my #mass effect #thinky thoughts #and like i said #this is me thinking aloud #not dictating #so if your headcanon's different? that's totally fine

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