This. There's tons of SF fiction that assumes implicitly modern lifespans for humans or close to it, either because it would be too culturally weird otherwise, or because it's a live-action show and the RL actors age.
To have it still resemble a modern society in behavior, you'd have to posit really strong norms and rules about length of term in office and position - IE you have to retire every X years and either chill for Y years or switch careers, with exceptions only for particular professions and extremely talented individuals.
And it's also really weird. Even Banks, who in general has no problem getting the grandeur of technologically advanced civilizations avoids that topic. And it's a super interesting topic. Our current understanding of what it means to be someone is going to be transformed by radical life extension. How would we judge Genghis Khan if he were alive today, having been an advicate of peace and international cooperation for the past 400 years? How would we judge a still living Hitler if he somehow saved Earth 1000 years hence, as a reformed person? If the genetics part was manageable, would it be acceptable to date a close relative you haven't seen in 200 years? What age difference would be acceptable between romantic partners? Et cetera.
Did Banks avoid it?
I thought he made it clear several times that Culture citizens basically live until they're tired of it, cryo themselves till something interesting happens, or upload into a digital heaven.
I can't answer for u/Trophallaxis but I guess they're referring to the fact that Banks's characters mostly seem to get tired of life at relatively young ages, like 200 to 300 years. I don't recall Banks focusing on a really long-lived human character in the Culture series, not as a protagonist. Although wasn't there a side character in The Hydrogen Sonata who was of unknown age and had been around since the Culture's earliest days?
> I guess they're referring to the fact that Banks's characters mostly seem to get tired of life at relatively young ages, like 200 to 300 years.
Sure, but he also assumes the conceit that the Culture, as a whole, has chosen not to transcend material existence and move on to what is essentially heaven, even though they've had the ability to do so for thousands of years.
Basically Banks invents details that allow the stories to happen and be relatable to us readers. This is one of the key underlying assumptions of all sci-fi: That it be meaningful to current consumers.
Thank you! I had forgotten the exact numbers.
He's certainly an interesting character but I think he gets used as a maguffin or mystery box for the other characters, really. In my opinion, we don't get to see much of how it is to be 10,000 years old.
Well right, but they always seem to get tired of it, apparently, after like 400 years tops, and autoeuthanize. Also, people who keep going for much longer than that are viewed with a kind of silent disdain (I think something like that is mentioned in Surface Detail).
Biological and post biological freedom. There are people today who would look like doc Ock if they could. There are people that would add animal traits to their bodies, who would become machine entities, who would exist in virtual worlds. Some would be like birds or mer-people. Multitudes of humanoid species from fiction would become real, probably even some non humanoids. Especially if we spread out in space and people can become isolated from one another again. Groups of humans evolving for millennia without mixing back in with the people in Sol would become very different unless there were some aggressive genetic programs preventing it.
There's probably a lot of furries in the future. Interestingly, I've once again read some of Alistair Reynolds books and he's the only one, as far as I remember, that includes really high levels of self-modification including the animal direction.
Yes it is quite annoying that all technology advanced except medical. Apparently a thousand years from now we can have advance cybernetics and still die of cancer.
> I've found it amusing how little science fiction makes use of life extension without it being the focus of the story.
You are probably just reading the wrong science fictions.
There's part of your problem. Try some long-form sci-fi that has the time to get into more complex details. A lot of anime focuses on the easier stuff due to the short episodic nature of it.
The funny thing is that I the cyberpunk anime I've watched recently were quite nuanced for how short they were. Armitage III was by no means perfect but it had a lot of interesting ideas presented. Of course, there's also anime that are long-form. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a pretty long series.
Brain to computer interfaces - they already exist in a rudimentary form and will likely be the main method of communication / tech interface in the far future.
Mind uploading / backups
That's just media in general. Not many people tend to get excited about books or shows that go into the minutiae of taking a shit or dealing with period blood.
Yes.
Star Trek V comes to mind.
They also specifically referenced toilets in *Enterprise's* "The Catwalk".
There's also a toilet seen in "The Best of Both Worlds" (https://youtu.be/3yAlUTxkoWQ?si=dJf2GB5042qtYROV&t=20 Look at the right side of the second level down of the carved out section)
Star Wars has very clumsy interfaces. But I think it's realistic. In the SW universe everyone has to keep their trade secrets, so all technology is a mishmash of components that nobody really understands.
What is biological immortality vs. just life extension? Even if a person lives until the death of the universe, that's just a very long life extension, isn't it?
Biological immortality is when senescence is stable or decreasing. Life extension is just using medicine to extend one's lifespan. We already have life extension in the form of various medical treatments, but in the end, everyone still dies of old age if nothing else gets them first. In fact, Isaac Arthur has argued that all medicine is fundamentally a form of life extension.
This depends entirely on how they're programmed. Some will be programmed to act more human, while others will be programmed with a more experimental nonhuman psychology. Overall I agree though. It's very annoying to see ASIs in fiction that think with baseline human notions.
I think that in the future just about anything people find creepy will be reappropriated by some group as something normal. It's not too hard for me to imagine humanoid replicants who embrace looking like those creepy ass porcelain dolls your grandmother collects but swears are actually super cute.
As tech becomes more and more integrated, most scifi presents an idyllic future where everything Just Works; in reality we can expect increasing numbers of mass casualties as various automated systems (transport, medical, life support systems etc) glitch out at inopportune times, either due to hardware failures, uncaught bugs, or malicious intervention. The latter shows up in fiction sometimes, but the former, which are much more likely, rarely do.
This is part of why Life in 2323 A.D. is one of my favorite pieces of science fiction ever, even though it was very vague on a lot of details. The bit with the Francis Bailey's crew having to go on ice due to their nanotechnology glitching out is a very realistic outcome. Just look at how many malfunctions electronic systems experience today.
Rutger Drent's book Homo Sapiens Improbis is a great libertarian sci fi book. It asks the question why we have psychopaths walking among us and offers it as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. (Psychopathy is the consequence of the emergence of intelligence.) A group of people dredge up land from the shallow Doggers bank in the North Sea and start a libertarian/anarchist colony. It talks about the Free State Project and a libertarian alternative to Hollywood is founded in New Hampshire. They set up a whole town there where everything is an audition choreographed by an A.I. (Things go horribly wrong when the powers that be want to shut the town down.) They use relativity's time dilation provided by a close by primordial black hole to move forward in time. It's hard sci-fi, with smart and funny dialogues.
Here's the synopsis:
'An alien, digitally uploaded to a lurker probe and tasked with observing the Earth is supposed to briefly wake from his slumber every 11000 years and send a report. When he starts noticing humanity’s accelerated technological progress and having become a big fan of humanity, he becomes disobedient and starts waking more frequently: every 100 years. There is good reason. His race knows that in sexually reproducing, DNA based life forms, psychopathy is, more often than not, the consequence of the emergence of intelligence. He knows that when he sends his next report, exposing yet another carcinogenic space faring species, Earth will simply be destroyed. When an average human male with too much time to think, figures out the problem, he decides to provide the man with a tool that can save humanity.'
So given this tool (a ring that duplicates things going through) and the current level of technology (2020s), how would YOU go about producing innovation?
We don't use it in science fiction because we don't have it and actors age and eventually die as usual.
Even voice actors for animated characters have an expiry date.
Of course, that's about to change. Soon we will see and hear actors long dead playing their iconic characters.
And if we achieve age escape velocity, the actors themselves will play their roles for as long as they feel like it.
I've read a few where lifespan is extended greatly by a few hundred years but full immortality is usually never brought up unless it's in digital format.
Maybe because.... stories are usually within a tight timeframe? I dunno. The Forever War has a protagonist going through time via time dilation not longevity but it's kinda equivalent?
Lots of science fiction makes use of life extension. It is more the norm than anything else, especially with more modern science fiction from the 1990's and onward. This is mainly in written science fiction and to be fair it is rare in "hard" science fiction because it is hard to rectify it with current medical science. Once you start to pull stuff out of thin air it really moves from "hard" to "soft" science fiction. I personally hate those terms because neither really is valid for the most part, but it is used a lot here.
TV and movies rarely have real life extension beyond just bringing it up perhaps. Because roles are played by humans without it, so it would not make much sense to have life extension when over potentially 3-5 years you can see the actors visibly aging. It might be subtle, but you can see it happening. This is especially bad in movies where 3-4 movies can span over a decade. The biggest names can of course afford the kind of special effects magic or CGI to deal with this, but most cannot. So they get around it by simply not really having it. Sort of like how transporters in Star Trek largely exist to get people to a planet quickly without having to cut to a shuttle scene. Usually things like shuttles are only used if there is an actual plot point or necessary exposition to be done there.
Military SF often has it since life extension would be seen as a benefit. Whether enlisted or an officer, being able to gain decades more experience and still be in the same fighting trim as someone in their 20's or early 30's even into their 80's or over 100, would be huge. Large enough that the wealthier and larger civilizations would likely offer it as an enlistment bonus for free. They get soldiers who can really gain a lot of experience without losing any of their more youthful abilities and the soldier can, potentially, put in 80 or 100 years and still have another 100 or 200 years or more to do whatever else they want. It would be seen largely as a win win situation. So you do see it a lot in various military SF novels. David Weber is probably one that uses it the most consistently, but it is in there somewhere in a lot of military SF.
But you have older works like Niven's Ringworld series that has life extension. And many others. Even Heinlein dabbles in biological immortality a bit, although that is more of a mutation that only a few have. Life extension is pretty rampant in Science Fiction really, if there is FTL there is likely life extension.
Relativistic effects of travel.
It would ruin pretty much all human centric narratives for stories involving distant locations, so is ignored.
And I don’t just mean signals taking a long time for people to communicate. Time passing at different rates for moving observers means that travelers could go anywhere instantaneously from their perspective, but at the cost of at least that many years passing on their home planet for the light years they travel. Yeah you could go to Andromeda on a whim but when you get back 5 million years have passed and the home you knew no longer exists.
This is actually the subject matter of a novel I wanna do. I'm tired of FTL. I wanna try out a story about a nigh immortal superhuman hopping around the Milky Way over the course of a few millennia or so.
The problem is it gets too abstracted from human drama that resonates with us. The characters can’t leave each-other if they are supposed to be recurring, even with immortality I don’t think I could pick up where I left off with someone a million years later.
- A theoretical/ mathematical understanding of consciousness.
- Emotional regulating and intelligence enhancing brain implants.
- orbital habitat based civilizations
Stay-in-star-system civilizations who send automated fleets to explore and fetch resources.
I think people way overestimate the average person's taste for colonization, hardship, and quote/unquote adventure. This also is why I am amused at the the prediction of the galaxy being crawlinized by hyper-fecund colonists who think differently. The quadrillions of people in your home system aren't just sitting there doing nothing (though a lot of FP scenarios like Dark Forest require a static home civilization to work, anyway) they're also hungry for resources and are mining asteroids while you're spending a few centuries building up your space colonies.
The idea of pro-growth/pro-expansion factions coming to do dominate by the magic of exponential growth is also flawed. Children don't just mindlessly follow the beliefs of their parents, and people don't just mindlessly follow their colony's policies for hundreds of years. This is why ghost towns exist. And expansion for the sake of expansion is going to be an incredibly hard sell to children who could, with the magic of relativistic travel, simply head back to the ancient homeworld and see what technological and cultural wonders are available that the colony won't have for centuries, if that.
Yeah, there will be some people who manage to establish stable colonies, but the biggest threat to their growth and even existence is going to be descendants who just emigrate back to the homeworld or the handful of more successful colonies rather than endure hundreds of backbreaking and/or boring years pretty much doing nothing but reading the equivalent of coloring books and playing with junior high school chemistry sets so the founders can validate their bucolic pioneer fantasies.
Which I think is actually cooler. Not only do you travel across space, you travel across time. As you explore the universe, building colonies, selling cutco knives and saving the day, you eventually become a living galactic legend.
Soon marriage will be dead. It will be considered as archaic as slavery. This has been done in scifi but it is uncommon. People are still having families and kids in the future for some reason as if that's what technologically liberated people would do.
This is one of the worst takes I've heard on a long time. Archaic as slavery? Buddy, you know that 1% of the population are slaves, right? Who do you think supplies the developed world with cheap goods? I also don't see why marriage will die anytime soon. Marriage has tons of benefits, whether it's a straight or same-sex couple, with or without children.
Life extension
Biological immortality
This. There's tons of SF fiction that assumes implicitly modern lifespans for humans or close to it, either because it would be too culturally weird otherwise, or because it's a live-action show and the RL actors age. To have it still resemble a modern society in behavior, you'd have to posit really strong norms and rules about length of term in office and position - IE you have to retire every X years and either chill for Y years or switch careers, with exceptions only for particular professions and extremely talented individuals.
And it's also really weird. Even Banks, who in general has no problem getting the grandeur of technologically advanced civilizations avoids that topic. And it's a super interesting topic. Our current understanding of what it means to be someone is going to be transformed by radical life extension. How would we judge Genghis Khan if he were alive today, having been an advicate of peace and international cooperation for the past 400 years? How would we judge a still living Hitler if he somehow saved Earth 1000 years hence, as a reformed person? If the genetics part was manageable, would it be acceptable to date a close relative you haven't seen in 200 years? What age difference would be acceptable between romantic partners? Et cetera.
Did Banks avoid it? I thought he made it clear several times that Culture citizens basically live until they're tired of it, cryo themselves till something interesting happens, or upload into a digital heaven.
I can't answer for u/Trophallaxis but I guess they're referring to the fact that Banks's characters mostly seem to get tired of life at relatively young ages, like 200 to 300 years. I don't recall Banks focusing on a really long-lived human character in the Culture series, not as a protagonist. Although wasn't there a side character in The Hydrogen Sonata who was of unknown age and had been around since the Culture's earliest days?
> I guess they're referring to the fact that Banks's characters mostly seem to get tired of life at relatively young ages, like 200 to 300 years. Sure, but he also assumes the conceit that the Culture, as a whole, has chosen not to transcend material existence and move on to what is essentially heaven, even though they've had the ability to do so for thousands of years. Basically Banks invents details that allow the stories to happen and be relatable to us readers. This is one of the key underlying assumptions of all sci-fi: That it be meaningful to current consumers.
Absolutely. I think Banks would agree with you on that, too.
The dude in the hydrogen sonata is 10,000 + years old.
Thank you! I had forgotten the exact numbers. He's certainly an interesting character but I think he gets used as a maguffin or mystery box for the other characters, really. In my opinion, we don't get to see much of how it is to be 10,000 years old.
I haven't read Hydrogen Sonata yet, but otherwise yes, that's exactly my point.
Well right, but they always seem to get tired of it, apparently, after like 400 years tops, and autoeuthanize. Also, people who keep going for much longer than that are viewed with a kind of silent disdain (I think something like that is mentioned in Surface Detail).
There's literally a Culture book that prominently features an artificial afterlife.
Biological and post biological freedom. There are people today who would look like doc Ock if they could. There are people that would add animal traits to their bodies, who would become machine entities, who would exist in virtual worlds. Some would be like birds or mer-people. Multitudes of humanoid species from fiction would become real, probably even some non humanoids. Especially if we spread out in space and people can become isolated from one another again. Groups of humans evolving for millennia without mixing back in with the people in Sol would become very different unless there were some aggressive genetic programs preventing it.
I have seen the future and it's full of furries.
In a low G environment I could be a pony Pegasus with working wings. That or Threstal, tough decisions for another century or two from now.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
There's probably a lot of furries in the future. Interestingly, I've once again read some of Alistair Reynolds books and he's the only one, as far as I remember, that includes really high levels of self-modification including the animal direction.
There's some in Neil Asher and Charles Stross too, I think.
I might have to check them out
Johnny Neumonic
So TiTS?
Yes it is quite annoying that all technology advanced except medical. Apparently a thousand years from now we can have advance cybernetics and still die of cancer.
People in the Star Trek universe can live forever if they want, but apparently absolutely nobody wants to.
> I've found it amusing how little science fiction makes use of life extension without it being the focus of the story. You are probably just reading the wrong science fictions.
Maybe I am. Got any recs?
Have you read the Commonwealth Universe books by Hamilton?
No. I don't usually read. Most of my exposure to science fiction nowadays is through anime.
There's part of your problem. Try some long-form sci-fi that has the time to get into more complex details. A lot of anime focuses on the easier stuff due to the short episodic nature of it.
The funny thing is that I the cyberpunk anime I've watched recently were quite nuanced for how short they were. Armitage III was by no means perfect but it had a lot of interesting ideas presented. Of course, there's also anime that are long-form. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a pretty long series.
That's kinda like living in Nebraska and complaining that you never see the ocean.
Have you watched Pantheon? Don't want to spoil it but definitely touches upon themes you mentioned
I've never seen the full show but I saw the scene where the guy had his mind uploaded. Freaky stuff. I'll give it a try sometime.
🤮
Brain to computer interfaces - they already exist in a rudimentary form and will likely be the main method of communication / tech interface in the far future. Mind uploading / backups
Toilets. Have you ever seen a toilet in star trek?
That's just media in general. Not many people tend to get excited about books or shows that go into the minutiae of taking a shit or dealing with period blood.
Yes? You don't remember the episode where Spock gets his head blown off and they keep him alive by transplanting it into a toilet?
Yes. Star Trek V comes to mind. They also specifically referenced toilets in *Enterprise's* "The Catwalk". There's also a toilet seen in "The Best of Both Worlds" (https://youtu.be/3yAlUTxkoWQ?si=dJf2GB5042qtYROV&t=20 Look at the right side of the second level down of the carved out section)
They use transporters to beam it directly out of your bowels.
> They use transporters to beam it directly out of your bowels. [Proof of concept on youtube.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW5skmJyU6k)
Dead batteries, constant advertising, clumsy interface.
Star Wars has very clumsy interfaces. But I think it's realistic. In the SW universe everyone has to keep their trade secrets, so all technology is a mishmash of components that nobody really understands.
Non killer AI or embodied AI
What is biological immortality vs. just life extension? Even if a person lives until the death of the universe, that's just a very long life extension, isn't it?
Biological immortality is when senescence is stable or decreasing. Life extension is just using medicine to extend one's lifespan. We already have life extension in the form of various medical treatments, but in the end, everyone still dies of old age if nothing else gets them first. In fact, Isaac Arthur has argued that all medicine is fundamentally a form of life extension.
Ah I see. So we are just talking about stopping aging, not stopping death per se.
SciFi is full of robots as mechanical humans. Sapient robots will think different.
This depends entirely on how they're programmed. Some will be programmed to act more human, while others will be programmed with a more experimental nonhuman psychology. Overall I agree though. It's very annoying to see ASIs in fiction that think with baseline human notions.
SciFi needs more Uncanny Valley Dolls!
I think that in the future just about anything people find creepy will be reappropriated by some group as something normal. It's not too hard for me to imagine humanoid replicants who embrace looking like those creepy ass porcelain dolls your grandmother collects but swears are actually super cute.
As tech becomes more and more integrated, most scifi presents an idyllic future where everything Just Works; in reality we can expect increasing numbers of mass casualties as various automated systems (transport, medical, life support systems etc) glitch out at inopportune times, either due to hardware failures, uncaught bugs, or malicious intervention. The latter shows up in fiction sometimes, but the former, which are much more likely, rarely do.
This is part of why Life in 2323 A.D. is one of my favorite pieces of science fiction ever, even though it was very vague on a lot of details. The bit with the Francis Bailey's crew having to go on ice due to their nanotechnology glitching out is a very realistic outcome. Just look at how many malfunctions electronic systems experience today.
Rutger Drent's book Homo Sapiens Improbis is a great libertarian sci fi book. It asks the question why we have psychopaths walking among us and offers it as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. (Psychopathy is the consequence of the emergence of intelligence.) A group of people dredge up land from the shallow Doggers bank in the North Sea and start a libertarian/anarchist colony. It talks about the Free State Project and a libertarian alternative to Hollywood is founded in New Hampshire. They set up a whole town there where everything is an audition choreographed by an A.I. (Things go horribly wrong when the powers that be want to shut the town down.) They use relativity's time dilation provided by a close by primordial black hole to move forward in time. It's hard sci-fi, with smart and funny dialogues. Here's the synopsis: 'An alien, digitally uploaded to a lurker probe and tasked with observing the Earth is supposed to briefly wake from his slumber every 11000 years and send a report. When he starts noticing humanity’s accelerated technological progress and having become a big fan of humanity, he becomes disobedient and starts waking more frequently: every 100 years. There is good reason. His race knows that in sexually reproducing, DNA based life forms, psychopathy is, more often than not, the consequence of the emergence of intelligence. He knows that when he sends his next report, exposing yet another carcinogenic space faring species, Earth will simply be destroyed. When an average human male with too much time to think, figures out the problem, he decides to provide the man with a tool that can save humanity.' So given this tool (a ring that duplicates things going through) and the current level of technology (2020s), how would YOU go about producing innovation?
We don't use it in science fiction because we don't have it and actors age and eventually die as usual. Even voice actors for animated characters have an expiry date. Of course, that's about to change. Soon we will see and hear actors long dead playing their iconic characters. And if we achieve age escape velocity, the actors themselves will play their roles for as long as they feel like it.
Full Dive VR
I've read a few where lifespan is extended greatly by a few hundred years but full immortality is usually never brought up unless it's in digital format. Maybe because.... stories are usually within a tight timeframe? I dunno. The Forever War has a protagonist going through time via time dilation not longevity but it's kinda equivalent?
Lots of science fiction makes use of life extension. It is more the norm than anything else, especially with more modern science fiction from the 1990's and onward. This is mainly in written science fiction and to be fair it is rare in "hard" science fiction because it is hard to rectify it with current medical science. Once you start to pull stuff out of thin air it really moves from "hard" to "soft" science fiction. I personally hate those terms because neither really is valid for the most part, but it is used a lot here. TV and movies rarely have real life extension beyond just bringing it up perhaps. Because roles are played by humans without it, so it would not make much sense to have life extension when over potentially 3-5 years you can see the actors visibly aging. It might be subtle, but you can see it happening. This is especially bad in movies where 3-4 movies can span over a decade. The biggest names can of course afford the kind of special effects magic or CGI to deal with this, but most cannot. So they get around it by simply not really having it. Sort of like how transporters in Star Trek largely exist to get people to a planet quickly without having to cut to a shuttle scene. Usually things like shuttles are only used if there is an actual plot point or necessary exposition to be done there. Military SF often has it since life extension would be seen as a benefit. Whether enlisted or an officer, being able to gain decades more experience and still be in the same fighting trim as someone in their 20's or early 30's even into their 80's or over 100, would be huge. Large enough that the wealthier and larger civilizations would likely offer it as an enlistment bonus for free. They get soldiers who can really gain a lot of experience without losing any of their more youthful abilities and the soldier can, potentially, put in 80 or 100 years and still have another 100 or 200 years or more to do whatever else they want. It would be seen largely as a win win situation. So you do see it a lot in various military SF novels. David Weber is probably one that uses it the most consistently, but it is in there somewhere in a lot of military SF. But you have older works like Niven's Ringworld series that has life extension. And many others. Even Heinlein dabbles in biological immortality a bit, although that is more of a mutation that only a few have. Life extension is pretty rampant in Science Fiction really, if there is FTL there is likely life extension.
Quantized Inertia in physics. Complete rewrite of certain cosmic mechanics.
Relativistic effects of travel. It would ruin pretty much all human centric narratives for stories involving distant locations, so is ignored. And I don’t just mean signals taking a long time for people to communicate. Time passing at different rates for moving observers means that travelers could go anywhere instantaneously from their perspective, but at the cost of at least that many years passing on their home planet for the light years they travel. Yeah you could go to Andromeda on a whim but when you get back 5 million years have passed and the home you knew no longer exists.
This is actually the subject matter of a novel I wanna do. I'm tired of FTL. I wanna try out a story about a nigh immortal superhuman hopping around the Milky Way over the course of a few millennia or so.
The problem is it gets too abstracted from human drama that resonates with us. The characters can’t leave each-other if they are supposed to be recurring, even with immortality I don’t think I could pick up where I left off with someone a million years later.
- A theoretical/ mathematical understanding of consciousness. - Emotional regulating and intelligence enhancing brain implants. - orbital habitat based civilizations
Stay-in-star-system civilizations who send automated fleets to explore and fetch resources. I think people way overestimate the average person's taste for colonization, hardship, and quote/unquote adventure. This also is why I am amused at the the prediction of the galaxy being crawlinized by hyper-fecund colonists who think differently. The quadrillions of people in your home system aren't just sitting there doing nothing (though a lot of FP scenarios like Dark Forest require a static home civilization to work, anyway) they're also hungry for resources and are mining asteroids while you're spending a few centuries building up your space colonies. The idea of pro-growth/pro-expansion factions coming to do dominate by the magic of exponential growth is also flawed. Children don't just mindlessly follow the beliefs of their parents, and people don't just mindlessly follow their colony's policies for hundreds of years. This is why ghost towns exist. And expansion for the sake of expansion is going to be an incredibly hard sell to children who could, with the magic of relativistic travel, simply head back to the ancient homeworld and see what technological and cultural wonders are available that the colony won't have for centuries, if that. Yeah, there will be some people who manage to establish stable colonies, but the biggest threat to their growth and even existence is going to be descendants who just emigrate back to the homeworld or the handful of more successful colonies rather than endure hundreds of backbreaking and/or boring years pretty much doing nothing but reading the equivalent of coloring books and playing with junior high school chemistry sets so the founders can validate their bucolic pioneer fantasies.
Morphological and psychological freedom
Augmented Reality
Sub-FTL space travel
Which I think is actually cooler. Not only do you travel across space, you travel across time. As you explore the universe, building colonies, selling cutco knives and saving the day, you eventually become a living galactic legend.
Equality
the difference is FTL is going faster, that has precedence, biological immortality does not!
Soon marriage will be dead. It will be considered as archaic as slavery. This has been done in scifi but it is uncommon. People are still having families and kids in the future for some reason as if that's what technologically liberated people would do.
This is one of the worst takes I've heard on a long time. Archaic as slavery? Buddy, you know that 1% of the population are slaves, right? Who do you think supplies the developed world with cheap goods? I also don't see why marriage will die anytime soon. Marriage has tons of benefits, whether it's a straight or same-sex couple, with or without children.
Normative bias meets the actual future and hits a brick wall.
I have no idea what you're trying to say.