Fact vs fiction: Aging in sci-fi and fantasy
By WiC Staff
Guinan — (Star Trek) — 600 years old
Guinan is a character from the popular TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation, portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg. Guinan comes from an unspecified world, though the name of her species is known: El-Aurian. Supposedly, El-Aurians have a deep awareness and understanding of time,
not dissimilar to time lords in Doctor Who.
El-Aurians can easily surpass the age of 500 humans years, which Guinan does. Guinan is said to be around 600 years old (and has been married a staggering 23 times — eat your heart out, Henry VIII.)
The bowhead whale is among the oldest living mammals on the planet, but some species can live to be much older, like the Ocean Quahog Clam. The oldest recorded Quahog Clam was named Ming the Mollusc, and lived to be 507 years old. (Ming’s death was somewhat ironic, in that he died at the hands of scientists trying to establish his age.)
But what about humans living past 200 years old or even as old as Guinan herself? Could this ever be possible?
Well, it’s clearly impossible by today’s standards and can only be hypothesized on as something which could happen in the future.
For a lot of recorded history, the average age of death in humans was around 40 years old. After the industrial revolution and into the 20th century, people started to live far longer because child mortality rates declined. This was all possible because infectious diseases, which used to be the single biggest killer of humans, were studied and effective treatment options became possible. If we were able to find “cures” for some of the biggest killers by today’s standards, one of which being cardiovascular disease (which includes a broad spectrum of conditions), there’s no telling how long we could live for.
There are some hypothetical methods which could, technically, increase human lifespan — these includes mainly anecdotal things like “freezing” the dead to be reanimated in future, transplants of the head and “uploading” the human conscience into computers. But it’s difficult to tell science and science-fiction apart here. Real research into these possibilities is still extremely preliminary.
