On 27Mar2023 1410, Jonathan Clark - jonathan at att.net (via tml list)
wrote:
> Jim Vassilakos asks:
>
>> What are some incurable illnesses that are likely to still exist even
>> at high tech levels?
>
> Ooh, excellent question. Some random thoughts from the top of my head...
>
> 1) Old age. IMTU Humans tend to live until around 120-150, with a very
> decent quality of life, until "a short while" before the end. "Short"
> might be weeks or years.
>
> 2) Serious (physical) injuries. For purely thematic reasons my
> auto-docs come with a dozen lights on them, each green/yellow/red.
> Recovery from three red lights (or some appropriate combination) is
> very very rare.
These are something that I assume can be pretty much completely repaired
at 'sufficient' tech levels. If all else fails they can just grew a
cloned replacement limb or organ and swap it in. The exception is major
CNS damage - drugs to encourage nerve regrowth plus lots of therapy will
*usually* bring back full function, but any memories or skills lost to
brain damage are gone - skill can be re-learned, but memories that are
gone, are gone.
>
> 3) Infection by 'hitherto unknown micro-organism" from
> "un-/under-explored planet X". Again, purely thematic.
>
> 4) Food poisoning. I'm thinking some equivalent of eating fugu
> (blowfish) in Japan. The locals can handle it but "innocent guy off
> newly arrived starship", who might have been hazed/goaded into trying
> it, cannot, with fatal results.
>
> 5) Excessive cold-sleep - let's say more than 10 years continuous
> (vary this number as you might think appropriate). Crews engaging in
> long-term repetitive cold-sleep will tend to 'be under' for (say)
> three months at a time, followed by 2 weeks fully awake, repeat as
> necessary. The higher the TL, the more the down-time can be extended.
I see it the other way - it's the freeze-down and warm-up processes that
put wear on the body, so it's better to leave people in for a long
single stretch than to cycle them over and over.

This is how travellers can survive mis-jumps to empty hexes. They put
the ship on course for the nearest inhabited system, set up a timer to
warm the ship and then them up at the predicted arrival time (possibly
with periodic reactor restarts to recharge batteries if required), and
then put the ship on absolutely minimal power consumption and hop in the
low berths. IMTU once a low berth is chilled down, it takes no power if
the ambient temperature is sufficiently low.

Often a ship doing this can't manage the timers, powering up, etc., so
like Ripley's in /Aliens/ it just drifts through the destination system
and the crew goes into the low berths hoping someone will see the
drifting ship and save them.
>
> 6) Some types of genetic fragility - I'm thinking of things which
> would express _in utero_, before it's possible to pop the foetus out
> and stick it into an auto-doc. After that things like CRISPR/Cas9 with
> a few thousand years development can take care of pretty much anything).
>
> My question: in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan" Universe there
> exist uterine replicators. AFAIK this do not exist in the OTU, but
> they do seem like a logical thing for someone to have come up with,
> especially at TL... (fill in your favourite number here). Has anyone
> ever thought about including these in their TU? I realize this is not
> a gearhead question, but I'm a story-telling GM :-)
I assume that high TL worlds have them, but they, plus the medical
support for them are expensive and thus they are a luxury that the
weatlhy enjoy, but not the general population on most worlds that have
them. Then you get those socialist hell-holes with fully socialised
health-care, but they're boring so Travellers don't go to those.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>