If you had to decide right now how many years you'd be alive, what number would you choose?
This is the question that came up in conversation with a friend of mine while he was visiting from California last month. We'd been talking about an article he'd read about slowing the aging process, and the discussion naturally turned to what we would do if we could choose how long to be alive.
This is the question that came up in conversation with a friend of mine while he was visiting from California last month. We'd been talking about an article he'd read about slowing the aging process, and the discussion naturally turned to what we would do if we could choose how long to be alive.
To me this question would be very interesting to explore in a book. Various interpretations of it have been addressed in some of the novels I've read, but the particular situation I'd enjoy writing about would be this:
Imagine that humanity has developed a one-time treatment to slow aging, the effectiveness of which depends on the age of the patient at the moment the treatment is administered. If performed on a newborn, the treatment causes the patient to age so slowly that a normal lifespan lasts for centuries, with the length of each stage of life proportional to the current standard. If performed on someone over the age of 80 it has little effect. The efficacy of the treatment decreases rapidly, so around the age of 18 the treatment would increase life expectancy by only double.
A lot of legal and ethical questions come out of this kind of situation. For example, given these conditions, who gets to decide if and when a child receives the treatment?
On the one hand, I don't believe anyone has the right to make that choice for someone else. Some people would not want to change the natural order of their lives. And just consider this: the longer a person lives, the higher the odds that their life is cut short by a tragic accident instead of natural causes. I would personally much prefer to be an 80-year-old woman dying of cancer after a full life than an 80-year-old toddler dying before I've learned to talk.
On the other hand, would an 18-year-old have good reason to sue her parents because they didn't give her the treatment as a child and thus severely limited her potential life span?
And when would a child be old enough to make that decision for herself?
All of these questions intrigue me, and I think they would be fun to think about further in working on a book, though I don't really have a plot that fits with this setting.
What are your thoughts? What part of this hypothetical situation intrigues you most?
