"The Time Patrol base would only remain for the hundred-odd years of inflow. During that while, few people other than scientists and maintenance crew would stay there for long at a stretch. Thus it was small, a lodge and a couple of service buildings, nearly lost in the land." (p. 113)
However, since Time Patrol members live for indefinitely extended lifespans, some of those scientists and crew could theoretically spend the entire hundred-odd years there. (It might be advisable to take an occasional break.) How long a Patrol agent can be expected to live is one of many unanswered questions. But, for a centenarian, a decade is a tenth of his total lifespan whereas, for a millennarian, a century is a tenth.
"'The secret of interstellar flight has been lost for nearly a century. We still have the first ship our ancestors flew in our museum; but the motor is a mystery. It doesn't seem to do anything.'
"Amalfi found himself thinking: Nearly a century? Is that supposed to be a long time? Or do the Utopians lack the anti-agathic drugs, too?"
-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 235-465 AT CHAPTER ONE, p.251.
What is it like to live that long? Long-livers like Poul Anderson's Hugh Valland and Hanno would come to regard centuries the way we regard decades, then the way we regard years...
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I remember Stirling commenting in the blog that our medical science may be able to seriously extend human life spans in a few more decades. Too late to do US any good! (Wry smile)
Ad astra! Sean
Indefinite life would affect your sense of time, but within limits -- the biology and nervous system would still be those of a human being, and the product of an evolution where a year was a fair chunk of time in the lifespan.
And if it included eternal -youth-, then that would be a counteracting factor; remember how long a summer seemed when you were a child?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
While I'm skeptical about the possibility of INDEFINITELY extended life spans, I can see it being possible to extend life spans to the length seen in Anderson's HARVEST OF STARS books, to about 130 for genetically unmodified humans (Lunarians could live to about age 140-50).
Yes, an extremely long period of de facto healthy "youth" would affect one's sense of time. And I do recall summers seeming a very long time as a boy!
But I seriously doubt any of this, even if a real possibility, will do US any personal good!
Ad astra! Sean
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