"'Breeding for longevity in humans isn't practicable...'"
-James Blish, A Life For The Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CHAPTER FIVE, p. 74.
- a direct reply to Heinlein. Blish's characters seek the antitoxin to the death toxin present in all complex animals.
In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, an animal can live indefinitely only if it is sheltered from all radiation, therefore buried deep underground for its entire extended lifespan.
There are other such sf debates.
10 comments:
Breeding for longevity probably -would- be practical, since there are quite marked genetic variations resulting in faster or slower aging.
The problem is that long-term eugenics with human beings isn't generally practical because of things like human time-frames.
We can breed animals for certain traits because we control them over generational periods. Humans have long generations and are difficult to control, particularly in their reproductive behavior.
I wonder if the method used by the Howards would work: set up a fund to reward people financially if they married off a certain list, the names on the list all being people whose four grandparents were still alive when they (the people on the list) reach marriageable age?
It might work if you could a) keep it going long enough (it couldn't remain secret, for example and invites political/social blowback), and b) keep people from gaming the system.
I don't think either a) or b) is really practicable, given my feel for how human beings function.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I'm inclined to agree with you, for the reasons you gave, on why breeding for longevity would not be practical, if we tried doing it the way Heinlein had the Howard families doing it.
More likely, any truly effective prolongation of average human life spans will have to depend on slow, incremental advances in the medical and biological sciences. Which means WE are out so out of luck!
Ad astra! Sean
More generally, it's very difficult to keep anything involving more than a very few people secret, and it's gotten more and more difficult as the last few centuries have passed.
"Someone always talks."
As a historical aside, this is why there was only ever one successful(*) slave revolt in the history of the human race, that we know of. (Haiti).
Revolutions that do succeed don't do so because of vast, well-organized underground conspiracies -- Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100", to take an egregious fictional example.
They succeed because some opportunistic group takes advantage of circumstances, like a lost war or some other massive screwup or miscalculation on the part of the authorities.(**)
Frex, prior to 1914 the Czar's secret police had the revolutionary groups deeply infiltrated (Stalin may well have been an Okhrana informer) and pretty much paralyzed; they were actually running the Socialist Revolutionaries' "Fighting Groups", which was the largest underground force, and using them to eliminate their own political enemies in the Czarist government.
But they warned the government that in the event of a prolonged war, things might well become uncontrollable -- and then subversive groups, previously weak and of negligible threat potential, would be able to take advantage of spontaneous outbreaks.
(*) successful in the sense of overthrowing the system.
(**) the USSR might well have blundered on for decades if Gorbachev hadn't tried to reform it.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree that secrets are notoriously hard to keep. SOMEONE always talks or at least leaks classified information.
I agree, I simply can't see Lenin and his cronies ever being able to take over Russia except for WW I breaking out in 1914 and then both the Tsarist gov't and the Provisional Gov't persistently mucking up things.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn seems to have been convinced Stalin was an Okhrana agent in NOVEMBER 1916. And other Bolsheviks may have been double agents working for the Okhrana.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the man producing the Bolsheviks' underground newspaper was definitely an Okhrana mole, for example.
From his own viepoint, the Czar should have made a separate peace in 1916 -- von Falkenhayn definitely -wanted- to do that and they could have gotten reasonable terms.
Oddly enough, a sense of honor seems to have been a major reason he didn't; followed by lack of rationality in appraising the evidence he was getting.
Continuities: the Okhrana was the only organization in the Czarist government that actually worked fairly well.
Likewise, by the late 1980's, the KGB was an enclave of (relative) efficiency in a government apparatus increasingly dysfunctional and corrupt.
Russians seem to be good at secret police and espionage as a cultural 'tick'.
There's an old Russian saying, from the 19th century: "When three men sit down at a table to discuss politics, two are fools -- the third is a spy for the secret police."
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
My contempt and loathing for Lenin and his Bolsheviks is so strong that my first reaction here was: "Serves them right for being such fools as to let the Okhrana so thoroughly infiltrate them!" My second was regret that either Nicholas II or the Provisional Gov't didn't shoot Lenin and his hencemen.
I agree, Nicholas II should have made peace with the Central Powers in 1916, esp. if they were willing to offer reasonable peace terms. Say, not much more than the loss of Russian Poland. And with no demands for "reparations" or extortionate economic concessions.
Yes, it was misguided loyalty to the alliance with France and the UK which stopped Nicholas from seizing this heaven sent opportunity of extricating Russia from the bear trap! And I agree the Tsar was simply not analyzing the situation he was in rationally.
The KGB was "relatively" efficient compared to the rest of the Soviet regime by the 1980's? Well, I can see that, but that does not make me LIKE the Chekists! They were still callous and ruthless brutes, as Putin, himself ex-KGB, shows.
Russians certainly seem addicted to the thrill of intrigue and espionage! The complexities of which must be a lot like those of chess.
Ad astra! Sean
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