Destiny and speculative mathematics (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Friday, July 18, 2014, 18:03 (3579 days ago) @ Numinar
edited by General Vagueness, Friday, July 18, 2014, 18:13

Yeah, finding the tutorial area in alpha was epic (I saw screens, but didn't lock it down myself until the last night).

It proves the Golden Age was very close to present day (Wheeled, contemporary vehicles) and shows the tail end of what must have been a traumatic evacuation of Earth. The fact you are found there means that you may be someone who is actually alive in the present day, as in you are you, and thats awesome.

Actually that would suggest you were one of the last people alive in the golden age.
Before I came to that bit of logic, or came back to it, what you said got me thinking about whether it's plausible, mathematically. The Traveller, or something it did or provided or enabled, tripled human life spans. Depending on what that statement was based on and how literally we're supposed to take it, that gives us a lower bound for the length of the golden age, because you can't know what someone's life span is until it's over (unless, I guess, the Traveller gave us advanced medicine to the point we could know with much more certainty than today when someone will die, but that hasn't been mentioned and it makes my math moot, so let's ignore it).
The average life expectancy, i.e. the average predicted life span, for the United States, and much of the developed world, is in the upper 70s, close to 80 years. In some areas it's lower, in a few areas it's higher, and for most of human history life expectancy has been roughly in the range of 30 to 50. Some people have been known to survive a little past 120 years. With anything above 66, if you triple it, you're looking at a figure over 200.
Based on all this, I'd say life spans were at minimum reaching 200 years on a pretty regular basis, and may have gone as high as 360 years. (I think it's unlikely this would be based on the very longest lives, but I wouldn't surprised if it was close; 350 is a nice round number that I might buy.) It would seem like the golden would have have to have lasted at least 220-ish years, for people to get a handle on when people would die, but what about people that were already alive? If the Traveller lifted up the life spans of everyone, even those who were sick or infirm or near the end of their life as things were, you could have people at the upper bound of human life spans, around 120, living to triple-life-span ages. The question then goes back to what exactly those are.
I'm fairly confident in saying they might have been rounded down or exaggerated or otherwise misremembered or miscounted or fudged as 200 years (as opposed to being in the 230-240 range they should be going by the highest average life expectancy), and they may well have gone up to 300 but probably not much past that, as living to 100 is pretty uncommon. The lowest estimated new normal life span minus the highest previous life lived, 200 - 120, gives 80 years. The highest life span (with nothing subtracted because it would start at birth) would be 250, 300, maybe 350 years. So I'd say the golden age was anywhere from 80 to 300 years long at a minimum. Going by preliminary evidence, for example the use of what seem to be modern cars and guns, I'd say it probably wasn't much longer than the minimum; probably 100 to 400 years.
thoughts?