On 28/3/23 02:29, Jim Vassilakos - jim.vassilakos at gmail.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> I'm specifically interested in stuff that won't kill you immediately,
> but it will kill you eventually or bring on other conditions that will
> kill you.
Such as the 1990s popular image of HIV infection?
>
> A friend of mine recently got diagnosed with some form of blood
> cancer. The mean life expectancy once a diagnosis is made is around
> eight years. So he could have more or he could have less. The
> condition is treatable (chemo & radiation) but not curable. Also, new
> treatments are under development (gene therapy, etc.). AI might come
> up with something entirely new. So it's sort of a death sentence, but
> he could also last long enough to die of something else non-related.
Nasty.  Bone marrow transplants not really viable?
>
> Anyway, you guys have basically come up with old age and various
> oddball viruses
> (https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Denebian_spotted_fever). But my guess
> is that if we can cure every long-term disease, including cancer in
> all its various forms, then we might also conquer aging itself. So
> this whole question is a bit of a quandary.
>
I was steering clear of _engineered_ bugs for some reason.  Maybe
something along the lines of spice from the Dune universe - a bug that
doesn't kill you _until your system clears it_?  I have no idea if
that's even possible.

How about something akin to sickle-cell anemia - in its element, an
evolutionary _advantage_ (malaria resistance, IIRC), but outside, a
_disadvantage_?

As you can see, I'm having problems here.

Or something that interacts wonkily with certain types of Jump travel
(namely, beyond 6 parsecs at a time - shame about hop drives) to start
some sort of countdown to the unfortunate's mind going _sproing_ and
thus a bowl of marbles short of a full bowl of marbles.  On the inside,
however, the unfortunate is fully sane, as telepathic as the average
half house brick, but has no mouth and cannot scream.  That might be
more body horror than you were aiming for.

At least in the GT-verse, top-end panimmunity seems to be widely
available (rendering the recipient strongly resistant to known
diseases.  If I've converted correctly, something like a +6 on 2d6 rolls
to resist infection) and routinely issued to Imperial (IN, IMF, IISS)
and subsector-level (Unified Armies) servicecritters. I'd presume other
polities have a similar setup.

As I said earlier, there are seven known categories of aging damage,
along with latter bounds on when they were elucidated as aging related
(dates are AD, not Imperial):

Amyloses - extracellular aggregates.  1907.

Intracellular aggregates.  1941.

Cell loss/tissue atrophy.  1955.

Malfunctioning apoptosis - death resistant cells.  1965

Mitochondrial mutations.  1972.

Extracellular matrix stiffening - eg arteriosclerosis (I _think_).  1981.

Oncogenesis - ie, cancer.  1982.

Curing cancer, like the old joke about 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of
Sydney Harbour, would be a bloody good start.

>
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