Life Extension
Life extension in human society, also known as anti-senescence, is the pursuit of extending one’s lifespan. It is considered to be a key tenet of transhumanism. The technology spanned over five different generations of increasing capability, culminating in effective immortality.
Generations
First generation
The first generation of anti-senescence treatments began to emerge throughout the mid-to-late 21st century, as experimental drug cocktails available only to billionaires and politicians. Many bioscience corporations would attempt their development, but BioCorp above all became the most successful. These cocktails targeted the most common factors resulting in natural death, including cardiovascular atherosclerosis and amyloidosis, stroke, chronic respiratory disease, neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic decline, and zombie cells. These treatments would primarily serve to treat the symptoms of aging, and would act as a delay, not a cure. Combined, they could extend one’s lifespan from 80-90 to around 140-150 years, depending on one’s luckiness in the cancer lottery.
Second generation
The second generation of treatments began to be developed in the early-to-mid 22nd century, and focused on active repair of DNA damage, the renewal of telomeres, the suppression of epigenetic drift, and the total cure of most cancers. Clare Biomedical would enter the picture and compete heavily with BioCorp in the race to develop the first second-generation treatments, and Clare would succeed after developing advanced gene editing and heuristic DNA technology that allowed human genetic code to be fully controlled and understood. As second generation trials commenced, the first generation would finally begin mass production and become available to individuals worldwide; this would result in a gradual population explosion towards the end of the century as deaths in first-world countries slowed drastically. The second generation of treatments would increase one’s lifespan by another 60-70 years.
Third generation
The third generation of treatments began to emerge in the late 22nd and early 23rd centuries, and focused on the active renewal of tissues that would never naturally self-repair and accumulate wear, including proteins that make up collagen in tendons, cartilages, and organs; cells that are never replaced, including those in the inner ear, kidneys, and brain; as well as accumulations of toxic chemicals and heavy metals in bones, kidneys, and other organs. BioCorp would regain its leading position with the development of Spatial Cell Control, a technology that allowed placing tissue in stasis for precise, molecule-level control over cellular material. The technology itself was gated by the development of forcefields, which only became possible thanks to the emergence of the exophysics industry. These treatments would effectively render a human lifespan near-indefinite, requiring only regular treatments every fifty years to sweep the body of accumulative damage.
Fourth generation
The fourth generation of treatments were conceived in the mid-to-late 23rd century. Owing to the successful development of sapient artificial intelligences as part of the FRACTAL and PRISM programs, the fourth generation proposed a different approach: uploading one’s mind to a SI core and replacing a human body with a synthetic frame. Demand for this technology was initially not as high as previous generations, as the third generation was almost completely effective, but the fourth generation began to be marketed as not only a significant improvement in the reliability of one’s body, but also making oneself more resilient to environmental factors that might result in death from non-natural causes, including death as a result of a disaster or calamity, which would quickly rise to become the leading cause of death worldwide after natural death effectively stopped.
Fifth generation
The fifth generation of anti-senescence would not begin to be widely available until the 25th century, and involved the treatment of decoherence, not a property of the physical body but an immutable property of evolved organic minds, causing slow, dementia-like cognitive decline for minds past the 250-years mark. This became a far more difficult problem to solve as it required the use of reality modification through substratics, and although many organisations including the Aegis Institute, Dreams Intelligence, and Raven attempted and succeeded in secret to solve it, the dangers involved in the treatment and the nature of the difficulty of accessing Precursor technology rendered it unsolved for a long period of time, and it would eventually become the leading cause of death.
Eventually, from the fact that minds didn’t accumulate damage while unconscious, it was realised that it would be possible to place individuals in a connected simulated reality with the aid of duty cycles, waking their minds up only every few minutes to run the simulation; damage would only accumulate with subjective experience, allowing time for a cure to be developed. The Coalition started what became known as the Consciousness Retention Program (CRP) based on technology co-developed by Q Labs, Sektor Aerospace, and Black Research. Originally the plan was to place individuals’ bodies en masse in massive cryonic storage facilities; this quickly proved impractical due to the sheer number of people, and instead it was decided that individuals would be transferred to SI cores instead. Hundreds of Consciousness Vaults would be constructed for the CRP and linked together in a vast interplanetary network; some solar-powered orbital stations, some deep underground facilities supplied by geothermal systems. This network would become known as “the Fabric” or just “the Simulation”.
Communication can occur between the real world and the Fabric; however, it is asynchronous due to the duty cycling. It is also possible for one to request their SI core be removed from the vault and placed in a synthetic body to allow for them to rejoin the real world; however, this results in losing one’s slot and returning would mean rejoining the waitlist for decoherence patients if one wanted to later reenter, and it also requires a multi-year recovery period due to the neural reconfiguration required for one to learn how to control a new synthetic body. In theory, SI cores of healthy synths can also be slotted into a Fabric rack to participate in the simulation, but this is rarely performed.