I wouldn't mind being immortal...

[cherydactyl]

I have so many things I would like to do in life, I think I need several lifetimes to do them all. Concurrent ones might be nice, but consecutive is fine too.

It occurs to me that a long-lived male person is easy to conceive of...Lazurus Long, for example. The problem with conceiving a similarly long-lived female is in reproductive timelines. Unlike men who mature sexually and pretty much stay viable and potent, women have a definite reproductive lifecycle defined by a limited number of ova, which are said to be created before she is born. Or, at least the men don't decline because of reproductive schedule, only due to overall health.

Would a long-lived female only be able to live the bulk of her life post-menopausally? Or would it imply she had an extra-big set of eggs, that her 'monthly' cycles only happened once per year, or less frequently? Were of longer duration? Would it mean she violated the rule of being born with all the ova she would ever have? Would menopause after a few hundred years of cycling mean impending death within a few decades?

How annoying it is that men could easily be supposed to be long lived and fully potent for their duration, but to have an immortal woman be believable requires one to consider her reproductive stage. Well, I guess really it requires *me* to consider it. I can't help it that I must critically examine ideas. Truly I can't.

I heard somewhere (I believe it was a Frazz strip, bolstered by Roald Dahl's Matilda, I suppose), that mammals have a certain number of heart beats in their lifetimes and then they are done. Which explains why exercise is so good for longevity, because although heart rates peak during exercise, it also causes a slower heart beat at rest.

To paraphrase George Carlin, these are things I think about when the computer is downloading and my family are asleep (so I can't make too much noise).

p.s. I keep thinking I need to write down some of these ideas in a file and start writing short stories.

p.p.s. I did finally start reading The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry this morning. Maybe poetry first. Then later, I can tackle drawing, painting, photography, sailing, fencing, aikido, tai chi, game design, juggling, calligraphy, paper making, baking, science reporting, essay writing, mountain climbing, and all the other hobbies I would like to pursue but don't have time for.

Comments

[nicegeek.livejournal.com]

Hmm....idle musing here, but I wonder whether menopause is delayed by the (relatively new) use of the pill to skip periods. I doubt that it's been done long enough for there to be any data, but it would be awesome if, in addition to reducing the frequency of periods, it also extended the fertile period by a proportional amount. I've got to assume that someone is or has studied this.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

Good question, but one thing to keep in mind -- in the old days, women wound up skipping a ton of periods too, because you don't get them when you're pregnant or at least some of the time you're breast-feeding.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I don't know overall, but I have to say the pill screwed me up but good. My experience was that I didn't cycle at all for a long time (>6 months) after going off the pill, and it took infertility treatments to get me restarted ovulating again at all.

I doubt it's been studied. My experience with infertility medicine is that they only fractionally know what the hell they are doing.

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

Sigh... My experience with pretty much *all* branches of medicine is that they only fractionally know what they are doing.

(By the way, I can't think of anything intelligent to say about it, but I was completely intrigued by your musings about women and immortality.)

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I figure if I don't write this stuff down somewhere, I will forget it, and, more importantly, never get to develop it into anything.

Thanks.