Askold said:
The fact that longevity is so expensive will mean that those who obtain it will be a limited group.
dragoner said:
Why would it be expensive? Resources are nothing, so the greatest investment for profit is the citizen, this really has always been true. Longevity will pay for itself, esp in a revenue based system.
I'd always imagined that Anagathics is influenced by works like
Dune where it's extremely expensive and something of an El Dorado for people to look for.
However, the problem with that is that technologies like fusion open ... all kinds of doors.
There'd should be no unobtainium at the TLs that Traveller would occur at.
It's a universe where the Imperium makes tanks out of
partially-collapsed matter and that's available at TL12 and is more dense than white dwarf matter. Usually the reason why commodities become commodities is that it is impossible to make.
By Traveller tech-levels, commodities are commodities because of some emotional cachet or because it's cheaper to mine/gather it instead of make it via fusion alchemy.
Emotion cachet would be like "real" gemstones - I don't think there's a gemstone that exists that we can't make synthetically for quite cheaply even in our TL8 present. Another example might be "authentic" wine from some vineyard or another. With "cheap, limitless fusion power" which is the cornerstone of Traveller, making gemstones would be extremely cheap. You should be able to fashion diamonds for a few pennies per kilogram by TL12 with fusion power everything.
Cheaper to gather vs. fusion alchemy is a case where gravity control + fusion should allow you to be able to make any most elements in industrial quantities. The only reason why this doesn't happen is because because it's simply too much energy to be economical to alchemy it up instead of just gathering it - for instance, making iron from hydrogen in a "supernova furnace" probably simply wouldn't be worth the time, but I'd imagine the "fusion gold reactors" or something might exist in the Traveller high TL worlds with the news talking about how "the price of gold has been rising to 20cr per kilogram, but it's thought that the price will remain stable as the alchemical reactors don't see the profits as sufficient."
With complex molecules like anagathics (presumably they're collections of complex molecules) fashioning them might be expensive at first, but between gravity control and fusion to provide energy inputs, I find it pretty unbelievable that it'd be so expensive. Any company that can do it has to realize it's literally printing money. Then the capitalist nature of the Traveller universe should kick in - even the dimmest capitalist in the Imperium has to realize that lowering the price point of anagathics will rake in vastly more money simply by the nature of economies of scale and almost geometric increases in your customerbase for every few credits you can shave off of the price. Once one company or organization does it, others would do it - in the decentralized nature of the Imperium, copyright law has to nearly be impossible to enforce. Even if, let's say, the TL for making Anagathics is 16 (I think it is or is it 15?) there are TL16 worlds in the Imperium.
Then there's the other side: Even if these worlds created an "Anagathics Mafia" of high TL worlds ... people would go to war and kill for eternal youth TL16 isn't so much better than TL15 (or even TL14) that a single world could hold out for long. I think it's fair to say it's been the dream of eternal youth and immortality has been the soul of humanity's desires for longer than recorded history; it's the cornerstone of practically every religion. One of these worlds could be bribed, conquered, or even coerced (it might just be some world of TL16 philosophers might just tell the savages the secret just to get them to leave them alone "here, here's how you do it, yes yes it works, we want you to leave us alone, why would we lie to you and make you come back? Yes yes if it doesn't work come back and ask us, but just go away!"). I just don't think anagathics would be as expensive as they are in Traveller for very long.
It'd even be in the interest of the Imperium and the worlds to do it. If only a few worlds have anagathics and others don't, and those that have it aren't willing to share - at best you have mass migrations. Everyone would pick up and move to the worlds that have it. Sectors would literally get depopulated. It isn't feasible for everyone to live on those worlds, so there'd be wars. It'd be in the interest of the Imperium to distribute it better.
