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Wouldn't they also be required to remain inside within the Boundaries of CT forever, with no Traveling, no Space Exploration or anything? And if they stepped outside, the moment they did so, they'd immediately (and horribly quickly, rapidly) start aging again? 
In that case, I'm afraid I'd have to say no, thanks. Unfortunately, that'd get me labeled as a 'Terrorist'.
In that case, I'm afraid I'd have to say no, thanks. Unfortunately, that'd get me labeled as a 'Terrorist'.
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Wouldn't they also be required to remain inside the Boundaries of CT forever, with no Traveling, no Space Exploration or anything? And if they stepped outside, the moment they did so, they'd immediately (and horribly quickly) start aging again?
If space travel is common for people, or a possible career path, I'm assuming that you will be fine. As safe as rockets are I guess.
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MsImagination and Onuzim Ima
How would 1,000 years be boring? I'd estimate that's actually right about the sweet spot in an unaging body. It's long enough to observe certain celestial phenonena (at the bare minimum you'd get the chance to experience several total eclipses), do long-term studies, and develop the human lifetimes worth of skills needed to produce works of art, but short enough that you don't get the whole "everything old is new again."
Heck, I could spend 1,000 years alone playing video games and consuming media. I feel the existential dread of not getting any of my personal projects done with a fraction of the time.
If you're talking 100,000 or maybe even 10,000 years, then yeah, I can see where it would be annoying, because that would be long enough for major geological events to occur and either destroy your work, and the cyclical nature of the universe would start to reveal itself a prison.
But 1,000 years isn't that long when it comes to a human experience.
Heck, I could spend 1,000 years alone playing video games and consuming media. I feel the existential dread of not getting any of my personal projects done with a fraction of the time.
If you're talking 100,000 or maybe even 10,000 years, then yeah, I can see where it would be annoying, because that would be long enough for major geological events to occur and either destroy your work, and the cyclical nature of the universe would start to reveal itself a prison.
But 1,000 years isn't that long when it comes to a human experience.
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HappyMoon
A thousand years ago puts you in the era of King Canute who ruled Denmark, southern Sweden, England, southern Norway, the Venetian Republic taking shape, the Romans ruled from Campania to Armenia, you could see the Islamic Golden Age, you could see Great Zimbabwe, you could see Song dynasty China inventing gunpowder and protoindustrialization, and the middle of Heian Japan. Who knows what a thousand years in the other direction could get you.
Since your spouse can also live for a thousand years, you can still have only one spouse if both of you choose to. 
The thing about those events are that theyr're all around the world. Even with 1,000 year life span, by virtue of being human you are not going to experience all of that, but if you're lucky, just bits and pieces of it and only if you're in the right place at the right time. During that thousand years, most of the progress has been compressed in that past 500, with much of it exploding in the past 100 years. There is no guarantee this pace will continue over another 1,000 years.
It is also possible that long life spans would cause progress to come to a grinding halt. I personally believe the Black Moon Clan's raison d'etre in the manga is 100% correct; removing death as an obstacle would stagnate collective human progression severely since outside of those self-directed enough to achieve regardless of external circumstances, there would be no impetus to improve. (It's their horrid actions which render them irredeemable. Wanting to reintroduce a fear of mortality it no excuse for murder, terrorism, infiltration, and invasion.) So as a societal level, it might not be a good thing. That doesn't mean I don't want it for myself, though.
There're actually another big complication concerning this...your spouse might not have been born at the same time as you.
Imagine, for instance, that you are a Millennial, which means you'd have been at the peak romantically when Crystal Tokyo came about. So you're among the first "immortals."
Then the Gen Z/Zoomer crowd comes along. As a Millennial, you would normally see these people as your kids and the next generation...but all of a sudden, these are actually viable partners. While it may seem creepy at first, this really isn't too bad...out of 1,000 years a 20-40 year age gap isn't that bad.
But then eventually, you find yourself single for a 150 years and BAM! You meet a perfect partner. The problem? The partner was born about 100 years after the founding of Crystal Tokyo. (Let's assume the immortality begins at 20 so we don't have 30 year old babies and such). That's nice....except you can only spend 850 years together. It's not that bad of a deal...except some people could conceivably end up getting married or remarried several hundred years into their lifespans with people whose lifespans are significantly longer or shorter.
As I wrote in the other thread, the big romantic problem isn't going to be cheating or necessarily opening up relationships because there's a perverse incentive to not fool around. No, the threat of death to relationships is now increased substantially, since you have people who could die in decades or less pairing with people who won't die for centuries. That means having one spouse will only be reserved for people who are lucky enough to fall in love with people in their relative age group.
It is also possible that long life spans would cause progress to come to a grinding halt. I personally believe the Black Moon Clan's raison d'etre in the manga is 100% correct; removing death as an obstacle would stagnate collective human progression severely since outside of those self-directed enough to achieve regardless of external circumstances, there would be no impetus to improve. (It's their horrid actions which render them irredeemable. Wanting to reintroduce a fear of mortality it no excuse for murder, terrorism, infiltration, and invasion.) So as a societal level, it might not be a good thing. That doesn't mean I don't want it for myself, though.
Since your spouse can also live for a thousand years, you can still have only one spouse if both of you choose to.
Imagine, for instance, that you are a Millennial, which means you'd have been at the peak romantically when Crystal Tokyo came about. So you're among the first "immortals."
Then the Gen Z/Zoomer crowd comes along. As a Millennial, you would normally see these people as your kids and the next generation...but all of a sudden, these are actually viable partners. While it may seem creepy at first, this really isn't too bad...out of 1,000 years a 20-40 year age gap isn't that bad.
But then eventually, you find yourself single for a 150 years and BAM! You meet a perfect partner. The problem? The partner was born about 100 years after the founding of Crystal Tokyo. (Let's assume the immortality begins at 20 so we don't have 30 year old babies and such). That's nice....except you can only spend 850 years together. It's not that bad of a deal...except some people could conceivably end up getting married or remarried several hundred years into their lifespans with people whose lifespans are significantly longer or shorter.
As I wrote in the other thread, the big romantic problem isn't going to be cheating or necessarily opening up relationships because there's a perverse incentive to not fool around. No, the threat of death to relationships is now increased substantially, since you have people who could die in decades or less pairing with people who won't die for centuries. That means having one spouse will only be reserved for people who are lucky enough to fall in love with people in their relative age group.
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Age gaps are mostly weird to us because A, power dynamics, and B, shared life experiences. A 20 year old who dates a 40 year old won´t have many shared life experiences, a small fraction of their formative interests will be held in common. But if you are 110 years old and dating a person at 90, same gap, but they are likely to share at least 75 years of history together, that they will have a common events they have lived through. Hum, 75 years is only about 2/3 of the life of a 110 year old. Hum, weird. I made a quick excel sheet with this idea in mind, and a person who is 200 dating a 180 year old will have the younger person being 90% the age of the older person. The returns diminish every year you add onto this, you reach 50% by the time the people are 40 and 20 in this example, but it takes 400 years for it to get to 95%.
Power dynamic also adjust, where both people are likely to have similar amounts of life experience by the time each gets to be something like this order of magnitude, have had secure employment (if France complains about pensions at 62, imagine what they would do at 620) and other securities in life like access to a network of good friends or whatever else.
Tom Scott did a video where he talked about risk and immortality, and he calculated a one in 2500 chance of dying in each year from an accident. Sounds not too bad right? Well, remember, you roll those odds every year, and to live you must not roll that 1 in any of the years. That is 2499/2500 raised in the exponent to the number of years lived (to get percentage of how many people survive, multiply this by 100). He said that one in five people don´t live to 500, one in three don´t live to 1000. You can calculate this yourself on your computer with the x raised to the y button, and it is indeed true based on that risk of dying each year from accidents. And that´s not including suicides or murders I might add, which I actually think might along with those accidents be the leading cause of death in some places as a result of this if epidemic disease and age related problems go away (it already is the leading cause of death in young people in some countries who don´t really have to worry about either if they have decent vaccines).
I did some quick math, and with 464 thousand murders in 2017 (that is a scary number, wonder how Death Note would react to that) and 8 billion people, assuming 1000 year survival period, and that means that one in seventeen people would die of homicide before reaching 1001. Hum. Japan does better, but even that is more than one in every 400.
I also was thinking, how long can people really stand to live with one person? How long before they get uninterested just because love´s hormones fade? How would people react to the idea of marrying someone for quite literally a thousand years or promising to do so as young people? Normal people expect to die around the age of 70-90, few expect to go above 100, and it becomes plausible to remain together for 40-70 years. But what about ten or twenty times that duration? Hum...
Also something that disturbs me now that I think about it. The lifespan of a parent and a child are almost equal. They have very similar chances of dying at any point. I think that it will be much more common for a parent to bury at least one of their children before they die. That is a phenomenon none of us want to bring back.
Power dynamic also adjust, where both people are likely to have similar amounts of life experience by the time each gets to be something like this order of magnitude, have had secure employment (if France complains about pensions at 62, imagine what they would do at 620) and other securities in life like access to a network of good friends or whatever else.
Tom Scott did a video where he talked about risk and immortality, and he calculated a one in 2500 chance of dying in each year from an accident. Sounds not too bad right? Well, remember, you roll those odds every year, and to live you must not roll that 1 in any of the years. That is 2499/2500 raised in the exponent to the number of years lived (to get percentage of how many people survive, multiply this by 100). He said that one in five people don´t live to 500, one in three don´t live to 1000. You can calculate this yourself on your computer with the x raised to the y button, and it is indeed true based on that risk of dying each year from accidents. And that´s not including suicides or murders I might add, which I actually think might along with those accidents be the leading cause of death in some places as a result of this if epidemic disease and age related problems go away (it already is the leading cause of death in young people in some countries who don´t really have to worry about either if they have decent vaccines).
I did some quick math, and with 464 thousand murders in 2017 (that is a scary number, wonder how Death Note would react to that) and 8 billion people, assuming 1000 year survival period, and that means that one in seventeen people would die of homicide before reaching 1001. Hum. Japan does better, but even that is more than one in every 400.
I also was thinking, how long can people really stand to live with one person? How long before they get uninterested just because love´s hormones fade? How would people react to the idea of marrying someone for quite literally a thousand years or promising to do so as young people? Normal people expect to die around the age of 70-90, few expect to go above 100, and it becomes plausible to remain together for 40-70 years. But what about ten or twenty times that duration? Hum...
Also something that disturbs me now that I think about it. The lifespan of a parent and a child are almost equal. They have very similar chances of dying at any point. I think that it will be much more common for a parent to bury at least one of their children before they die. That is a phenomenon none of us want to bring back.
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Nadia
I agree....but I think I didn't state my point clearly enough.
The older your get, the harder it is to find a companion. While this is largely due to the short lives we live and the need to reproduce, it's likely this will be a holdover from the pre-Crystal Tokyo days, at least for the first and second generations. If you think dating in your 40s is bad, try dating in your 400s.
However, even with a likely baby crunch, there are going to people born hundreds of years later who won't be able to find a partner their age. So they enter a May-December romance. Even if the relationship works out and is "true love" of the lifelong monogamous kind, the uncomfortable reality is the end of the year comes in January, so what is May going to do for all the rest of those months. And what if May ends up being the December in someone else's romance?
People have wide disparities in experiences with the short lives we lead now. I have no network of friends despite the fact that most people of my age do. These disparities only magnify with a long life.
That 1/2500 figure is kind of high, and it's not considering the mitigating effects of the Silver Crystal and Neo-Queen Serenity's rule (if she bans all cars, for instance, that alone makes the accident rate plummet). It is horribly unclear if Serenity's increased lifespan imparts a limited healing factor and increased durability, and the failure rate of technology would plummet if it were replaced by magic (or Silver Millennium Magitek) that was more reliable. That's not even accounting for the social aspects.
Plus, the chance of death does not remain constant over one's life, but if we're "frozen" in our prime, where our chance of death is low, there's no reason to believe that it would be that 1/2500 figure.
Here's the thing. We know in the manga that murder is just so rare that when it happens, the murderer, Death Phantom, gets a ticket into space for killing. That alone suggests that murder is not a constant or major threat.
As I've said in that other thread, what will likely happen is marriage will be a renewable contract after a certain number of years (likely several decades so that if any children are born/adopted between the couples they can be strongly encouraged to raise them). It would be unreasonable for anyone to be locked into marriage for hundreds of years, but making marriage renewable would give people that option to actively choose it for themselves.
I'll take that and raise that to another level of creepiness. The people any CT-era resident is likely to have the most shared life experience with are their parents and siblings, especially the first generations where parents and kids are given these extended lifespans. Also consider the increasing difficulty for older people to find companionship. Who do you think the perpetually single and desperate are going to latch onto when repeated romantic efforts fail outside of the family? In many cases, even aversion is not going to overrule the fact that the only people you can relate to are the ones you're related to.
The older your get, the harder it is to find a companion. While this is largely due to the short lives we live and the need to reproduce, it's likely this will be a holdover from the pre-Crystal Tokyo days, at least for the first and second generations. If you think dating in your 40s is bad, try dating in your 400s.
However, even with a likely baby crunch, there are going to people born hundreds of years later who won't be able to find a partner their age. So they enter a May-December romance. Even if the relationship works out and is "true love" of the lifelong monogamous kind, the uncomfortable reality is the end of the year comes in January, so what is May going to do for all the rest of those months. And what if May ends up being the December in someone else's romance?
People have wide disparities in experiences with the short lives we lead now. I have no network of friends despite the fact that most people of my age do. These disparities only magnify with a long life.
That 1/2500 figure is kind of high, and it's not considering the mitigating effects of the Silver Crystal and Neo-Queen Serenity's rule (if she bans all cars, for instance, that alone makes the accident rate plummet). It is horribly unclear if Serenity's increased lifespan imparts a limited healing factor and increased durability, and the failure rate of technology would plummet if it were replaced by magic (or Silver Millennium Magitek) that was more reliable. That's not even accounting for the social aspects.
Plus, the chance of death does not remain constant over one's life, but if we're "frozen" in our prime, where our chance of death is low, there's no reason to believe that it would be that 1/2500 figure.
Here's the thing. We know in the manga that murder is just so rare that when it happens, the murderer, Death Phantom, gets a ticket into space for killing. That alone suggests that murder is not a constant or major threat.
As I've said in that other thread, what will likely happen is marriage will be a renewable contract after a certain number of years (likely several decades so that if any children are born/adopted between the couples they can be strongly encouraged to raise them). It would be unreasonable for anyone to be locked into marriage for hundreds of years, but making marriage renewable would give people that option to actively choose it for themselves.
I'll take that and raise that to another level of creepiness. The people any CT-era resident is likely to have the most shared life experience with are their parents and siblings, especially the first generations where parents and kids are given these extended lifespans. Also consider the increasing difficulty for older people to find companionship. Who do you think the perpetually single and desperate are going to latch onto when repeated romantic efforts fail outside of the family? In many cases, even aversion is not going to overrule the fact that the only people you can relate to are the ones you're related to.
Even taking a 1 in 5000 chance per year, one in five people won´t live to see their 1000th birthday due to those accidents. A one in ten thousand chance is a ten percent chance after a thousand years. One in twenty thousand is a 5% chance. What would be the acceptable risk I wonder people would be willing to take if they are naturally immortal? It could lead to a very interesting society to see based on what people see is acceptable risk.
King Endymion said that the average life expectancy is 1000 years. Assuming that people don´t just stop their immunity from age and epidemic problems at that point for some reason, then something has to be killing them. There is no such thing as dying of old age itself, but things like cancer or a heart attack. If the average is 1000 years, what is the standard deviation (a question I know Ami would love to do math over)?
And yeah, good point with the family being the people who know you most.
King Endymion said that the average life expectancy is 1000 years. Assuming that people don´t just stop their immunity from age and epidemic problems at that point for some reason, then something has to be killing them. There is no such thing as dying of old age itself, but things like cancer or a heart attack. If the average is 1000 years, what is the standard deviation (a question I know Ami would love to do math over)?
And yeah, good point with the family being the people who know you most.
As for murder ticket, I don´t see it that way. You could try imprisoning someone accused of murder, and some places do have decent success with a substantial number of people convicted of murder to make them be ordinary people again. Others might just hang or shoot or electrocute or poison them, which is socially acceptable in Japan, something like 80% of them accept it as a possible penalty for homicide and it isn´t unreasonable to think that several and maybe even a majority or all of the senshi do too for at least some kind of criminals, but who knows whether the planet as a whole does in the future. Or you could exile them somewhere to live on their own, far from sight, the British did this in Australia of course.
Imagine all those Amazon warehouse workers and Walmart cashiers who were saving up money to enjoy their long delayed Hawaii vacation after retiring. But then Crystal Tokyo comes and NQS signs a pension reform into law, increasing retirement age to 990 years. I wonder how the French would react.
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HappyMoon
Luckily, there are no Walmarts in France 
Actually now that I think of it, the JCP is a legitimate party in Japan and gets about 10% of the votes in the Diet, and often more in regional elections if the other parties are backing an independent endorsed usually by the LDP and the JCP backs their main rival, so many Japanese people have heard of the idea in a serious political debate and some of their candidates stand a chance. Rei´s father probably knows MPs from that party.
France is a capitalist country with social policies (not to be confused with communism).
This means:
The French government proposed a measure to increase the retiring age from 62 to 64 and we are witnessing a lot of protests on the streets right now.
Here in the U.S., in comparison, we have to be 65 to receive Medicare coverage and 67 to receive Social Security benefits.
This means:
- Universal health care.
- Free K-12 education.
- University tuition subsidized by the government.
- Unemployment benefits for those unable to work.
The French government proposed a measure to increase the retiring age from 62 to 64 and we are witnessing a lot of protests on the streets right now.
Here in the U.S., in comparison, we have to be 65 to receive Medicare coverage and 67 to receive Social Security benefits.
I wonder how in general can adapt to such long lifespans in certain important elements, like how tens of thousands of people at least would be related to single individuals who are still alive, whereas today even a great grandparent probably won´t be related to more than 100 or 120, just based on the math of human reproduction and families. Inheritance is a major part of wealth distribution and breaking it up over generations or in some kinds of systems, sometimes concentrating it in other ways such as the Spartan Heiresses. If only accidents, murders, and suicides are the things that really kill people, then a typical city is capable of listing every single death in detail as significant news, with New York City having 18 per day on average, the entire Netherlands at 30 per day roughly.
Given that medical care spending is largely tilted towards the old and the extremely young, education spending is obviously tilted towards children, and pensions would make less sense if people do live this long, and there appears to be global peace, (children would be a smaller and smaller fraction of society), I think that government spending goes down quite a lot as a fraction of GDP unless they increase it in other ways. How do elections change so as to unify people who grew up in such vastly time periods if today we already struggle to keep people born 20 years apart on the same page? The young typically have the most differences at first when they vote but they would be a tiny fraction of the population by the 30th century.
Of course Usagi and co aren´t the only ones who have ideas, the world as a whole would be responsible for coming up with the solutions, but we today are plausibly close to an average lifespan in some countries of 90 years and by the end of the century might get decades on top of that with the best science, where retiring is what you do just over halfway through your life if you do so at 65 rather than the last 15% of it. Some of this has some real application.
Given that medical care spending is largely tilted towards the old and the extremely young, education spending is obviously tilted towards children, and pensions would make less sense if people do live this long, and there appears to be global peace, (children would be a smaller and smaller fraction of society), I think that government spending goes down quite a lot as a fraction of GDP unless they increase it in other ways. How do elections change so as to unify people who grew up in such vastly time periods if today we already struggle to keep people born 20 years apart on the same page? The young typically have the most differences at first when they vote but they would be a tiny fraction of the population by the 30th century.
Of course Usagi and co aren´t the only ones who have ideas, the world as a whole would be responsible for coming up with the solutions, but we today are plausibly close to an average lifespan in some countries of 90 years and by the end of the century might get decades on top of that with the best science, where retiring is what you do just over halfway through your life if you do so at 65 rather than the last 15% of it. Some of this has some real application.
To be fair, it will probably be only the first couple of generations who will have the "related to everyone" problem, because once lifespan increases, birthrates will definitely plummet. We see this happening in the "richer" countries. The more comfortable you are, the less likely you are to reproduce. It wouldn't surprise me if reproductive drives also plunged.
There's also the issue that the Crystal Tokyo era will almost certainly mean a societal/governmental revolution. It's implied very heavily that there is a one-world government with Neo-Queen Serenity in an absolute monarchy. What makes you think that you're going to even still have your own private property to even leave an inheritance?