Author Topic: How old can a Hydral get?  (Read 1539 times)

Offline TheVampire100

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How old can a Hydral get?
« on: September 17, 2014, 09:28:20 am »
I'm wondering, in TLF you are playing the last of your race. When you die your race perishes. This will come one day or another, you cannot live forever.
As far as we know the Hydral you play has already waited some time (maybe years) in prison before he escapes with the spacefaring prototype of the race that captured him.

The actual game itself will also take multiple years depending on how fast the player can manage to unite the races into one federation.

So, looking at all of this, how old can a Hydral actual get? It is pretty much obvious that Hydrals have a large life span to support the gameplay/setting. Otherwise you would die of old age before you can reach your goal (which could actually be a new hardmode called "speedrun").
But have Arcen Games actually thought on a specific timespan or did you just say "It's so long that he's almost immortal"?

Offline x4000

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Re: How old can a Hydral get?
« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2014, 10:07:41 am »
My thought has always been that their natural lifespan is around 400 years.  I'm not sure if that 100% works out lore-wise, but that's just what I've had in my head all this time.  However, I do figure that with technological help the natural lifespan could probably be extended quite a bit.

I don't think it's remotely within our grasp anytime in the foreseeable future, but I don't see why there can't be a "cure" for aging.  Most of those processes have to do with DNA shifts and parts wearing out and whatnot.  If we had the ability to keep accidental DNA mutations from happening, and a variety of other things at the nano-scale, it seems feasible to live forever.  Though something would have to be done about memories in the brain, because eventually those neural pathways are going to be full up.  We're already shedding and replacing all our cells anyway, so we just need to do a better job of making sure that the new cells aren't inferior to the ones that came before them.

It is hilariously outside the realm of any current technology, of course.  And even for the races in this solar system, it's way outside of the bounds of anything that we've seen them do.  But exactly how old this Hydral is at the start of the game is unclear (though it's probably at least 150ish), so he has a pretty good length of time left to him.  Even just with some less-drastic health measures, he could live beyond 400, I'd say, and by then who knows?  Maybe he's still out there 2000 years later, tooling around the galaxy all by himself.  What happens to him after a successful campaign is not currently known.
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