In the future, humans may well be able to engineer themselves, be it by better drugs or better genes, to live as long as they please, but the cost may be twenty year olds with all the vigour, appetites and charm of the middle aged.
Armand Marie Leroi, Mutants
This is based on the idea that there is in inseparable linkage between the vim & vigour of youth and life span. As life span increases, youthful vitality will be diminished. This hypothesis is born out by experiments with fruit flies that have been bred for longer life. They produced fewer offspring, and lived a much slower, almost sloth-like existence. Nature abounds with other examples of a connection. In a species of marsupial mice in Australia, the life of an adult male is a playboy's fantasy, or so it might appear, culminating in a 2 week period of repeated 12 hour frenzies of copulation. But then the mouse dies at the end of that single breeding season, "spent" in every sense of the word.
Conversely, the British Royal family's geneological history (with meticulous records dating over many centuries) shows a correlation between the lifespan of its members and their fecundity - Those who died shortly after menopause had on average 2.4 children. Those who lived a substantially longer life (past 90) averaged 1.8 but nearly half of the nonagenarians had no children at all.
Not exactly a slam dunk case, but interesting to think about as I approach middle age territory and watch the wrinkles grow.
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