A story imagined on Quora that i find interesting
It would be epic.
Born into a first world country, she lives a very pleasant life. First kiss in high school, merit scholarship to go to college, shitty internships, living with too many roommates in a group house. Good friends. Bad friends. Fun dates. Bad dates.
Age 25:
Officially “adulting.” She’s maxed out her Roth IRA for the first time this year. Amazing to think she’s already saving for retirement.
Age 27:
She’s in love. This is the year she gets married (average age for women to marry in the United States).
Age 30:
Her first child!
Age 38:
Her first home!
Age 40:
Wow she’s aging well.
Age 48:
Her child is off to college. The similarities in their appearances are off putting. Everyone thinks they are sisters.
Age 50:
What is happening? All her friends are aging. She looks and feels as good as she did when she was 25. Her partner doesn’t want to do as many activities as her. Some of her friends have tragically fallen ill with cancer or heart disease.
Age 55:
The doctors don’t know what’s going on. Her cells are not decomposing. Her bones aren’t shrinking and her muscles don’t show any signs of weakening. Her cognitive tests show zero decline.
Age 60:
Word has gotten out about this “timeless” woman. She’s done some press about how she has kept in such good shape. She signs a book deal.
Her child has a child. She’s a grandmother. She looks identical to her daughter.
Age 65:
Her book, “40 Years a Twenty Year Old,” is a New York Times bestseller. Her family has built a very comfortable nest egg of several million dollars from her lifetime of retirement savings plus her book sales.
Age 70:
She has taken to athletics and is setting all sorts of national and even world records for her age bracket. Her stardom rises.
Age 75:
Her daughter looks older than her. It’s uncomfortable being with her partner in public because she looks 50 years younger. She’s in peak shape and her partner looks elderly.
She feels distant for her spouse and her child. Her social circle is nearly non-existant. Her childhood friends are completely different from her and she’s too much of a novelty to make friends with people who “look and act” her age.
Age 80:
Her partner passes away. She hasn’t aged in over 50 years. She wonders if she is immortal. She’s an international celebrity.
Age 100:
The last person she ever knew from her childhood has died. She feels a weird sense of isolation from humanity.
Age 118:
She breaks the world record for the oldest person to have ever lived. She realizes that everyone alive today was born after she was born.
Her daughter is 88 and she visits her at a nursing home (paid for with her book royalties.)
She spends a lot of time hiking and kayaking with her great-great-grandson.
Age 150:
Her celebrity has taken on a more mythical status. She is a frequent and celebrated talk show guest and provides historians all kinds of eye witness accounts of events hundreds of years ago.
She has no real close friendships and has decided to direct her seeming immortal life toward academia.
Climate Change has extremely damaged the earth and governments in many coastal countries have collapsed.
Age 165:
She’s fluent in ten different languages.
That “nest egg” she thought she needed to pay for her retirement and her book royalties have been gaining compounded interest for decades and she is a millionaire many times over. Money is no object to her.
The concept of a nation-state is changing as physical boundaries of the earth are rewritten with changing sea levels and the conversion of many agricultural lands to deserts.
Age 180:
Shes fallen in love again. She starts a new family. It feels weird at first, but she is happy and loves having children again.
This is a bright spot in the face of mass starvation and population loss.
Age 350:
Shes had three families and has seen three beloved “life partners” die and generations of her descendants die. Life is too much to bear. Everyone she loves is gone in the blink of an eye. No one is even alive to share in their memory. She falls depressed. She attempts suicide and is horrified that she cannot die. She wonders if she lived a previous life and is now in Hell. Perhaps she is, because the world itself is hotter and more unstable.
Age 400:
Its taken FIFTY years of therapy and processing, but she decides to give life another try. Perhaps she could discover a way to make herself mortal. In the meantime, nations are formed much more fluidly and, with a greatly reduced global population, can be much more easily overthrown with the right conditions.
Now that she has attained Demi-god status and immeasurable wealth and knowledge, it only follows she would form her own nation and build a utopia for humankind. She calls it, reductively, Eden.
Age 450
Her compounded investments are ridiculous and she has some of the largest VCs, hedge funds, and philanthropic organizations in the world.
She’s gotten a PhD, a JD, an MD, and, for a brief 20 year career as a vet when she got into farming, a DVM. She’s had dozens of careers.
She has spent hundreds of years working on the most difficult problems of physics and mathematics. She’s made discoveries that would be unachievable in a regular lifetime. She’s developed a way to travel through outer space as fast as .3c.
Eden is a bastion of wealth and vitality as she is able to personally fund the government and support the population with a universal basic income.
Age 500:
Preparation is complete. She will become the first human (if you can call her that) to leave the solar system. She is going to use her technology to go to a solar system that’s 4.7 light years away—-the closest to Earth—where there is a possible planet in the habital zone. She is obviously the best candidate as she can guarantee (everyone thinks) that she will live to make it there and, if she decides, back.
At .3 speed, she'll reach it in only 10–20 years. She could be back to celebrate her palindrome birthday of 555!
Age 600:
She made it. She found a habitable planet. Her arrival was disastrous however. Her massive ship failed to slow enough and collided into a vast portion of land traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour. She blanketed the planet in an atmosphere of exploded land that causes a several years-long winter and kills 90% of the life forms there. Some of them were massive creatures that were as tall as trees. She is horrified by what she has done. She has caused an apocalypse and permanently altered life on this planet.
Age 650:
She feels something she hasn’t felt in over 600 years—-she feels….older. She considers her own mortality in a way she hasn’t since that first time she went to the doctors office and he said he couldn’t diagnose her some 600 odd years ago.
Age 690:
Communications with Earth abruptly ended ten years ago and she hasn’t received anything since. She is pretty sure that isn’t a good sign. Instead of planning her return, she decides on Plan B: developing the several hundred thousand diverse embryos to build a new world here that she will stay to raise.
Age 691:
Her memory is fading. She has arthritis in both hands. She has had a bad cough for months. But she has almost found the perfect place to found civilization. She just made it to a large land mass with wide, fertile plains.
Age 695:
The camp is set up, but she realizes she is dying. There is such a poetic justice to this. Her, a bridge between worlds. The last of her kind. Starting a new world while hers is ending. Her decades-long wish to be mortal and die is now seemingly coming true—right when she wants to live so she can raise her “children.”
Age 699:
Her test batches have all gone horribly. They just can’t survive. It feels almost as if the world is just not ready for people like her. Perhaps, she thinks, it’s a sign—yes in her old age she’s started to believe in things like signs and fate. Perhaps this place must age a little longer to be ready for humans.
Age 700:
This world is a beautiful place. She feels connected with the universe and feels this solar system is truly her home. She’s travelled light years and left a dead world behind to found a new one. After centuries of fame, she feels content that she shall die and leave a world that will never know she existed.
She takes her beautiful “children,” frozen in their state, to their time capsule where they will sleep until the conditions are right—-temperatures that stay roughly between 50–100 degrees in temperate zones, for the atmosphere to change to a more fitting 21% oxygen and .03% carbon, and more kinds of wildlife that could feed people (damn that she killed all those giant creatures when she got here!).
She kisses them goodnight and walks to her favorite spot beneath that one tree with the funny bend halfway up. She closes her eyes and falls asleep.
….64.8 million years later, the time capsule opens.
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