Vad är förväntade livslängd i The Culture-serien?

Typisk livslängd i kulturen i sin ursprungliga kropp är ungefär 300-400 år. Utöver den punkten anses det normalt att välja antingen autoutjämning (ca 50% av medborgarna väljer det här alternativet) eller en övergång till någon form av funktionell odödlighet , antingen genom förändring av sin fysiska kropp, lagring, en övergång till en robotkropp, en övergång till en helt ny fysisk form eller (vid den extrema änden) sublimering.

Every Culture habitat - whether it was an Orbital or other large structure, a ship, a Rock, or a planet - possessed Storage facilities. Storage was where some people went when they had reached a certain age, or if they had just grown tired of living. It was one of the choices that Culture humans faced towards the end of their artificially extended three-and-a-half to four centuries of life. They could opt for rejuvenation and/or complete immortality, they could become part of a group mind, they could simply die when the time came, they could transfer out of the Culture altogether, bravely accepting one of the open but essentially inscrutable invitations left by certain Elder civilisations, or they could go into Storage, with whatever revival criterion they desired.

Excession

Det finns också möjlighet att helt enkelt ha ett fartyg eller nav, så att du ändrar din kropp och sinne för att klara den faktiska odödligheten. En av karaktärerna är en man som har varit odödlig i sin naturliga form i nästan 10 000 år.

He was around ten thousand years ago, at the time of the negotiations which gave rise to the Culture in the first place. This individual was named as perhaps being able to help provide proof that what was claimed in the message to the Gzilt was actually true.

∞

So, not long dissolved in some group-mind, then. Stored, I take it?

∞

Not Stored. In fact, never Stored. Still with us, still alive, still extant and functioning, twenty-five to thirty full lifetimes after you’d have expected any ordinary humanoid mortal to have decently abandoned the corporeal. Indeed, longer-living than any known still independent Mind or even high-level AI from the time. Like the fucker’s decided to outlive everybody or set a record or something. But alive, somewhere, probably still within the Culture.

The Hydrogen Sonata

och

It was one of the effects of living in a society where people commonly lived for four centuries and on average bore just over one child each that there were very few of their young around,

Look to Windward

Det är värt att notera att det för många medborgare i kulturen ses direkt odödlighet som lite klibbig. Ett val som görs av människor som är grundläggande omogna på något sätt.

“Sma!” he exclaimed, turning to her. “That’s for you; it isn’t for me. You think I’m wrong to have my age stabilized; even the chance of immortality is . . . wrong, to you. Okay, I can see that. In your society, the way you live your lives, of course it is. You have your three-fifty, four hundred years, and know you’ll get right to the end of them; die with your boots off. For me . . . that won’t work.

Use of Weapons

Iain M. Banks diskuterade denna aspekt av kulturlivet i sin uppsats (krävs läsning!) " Ett fåtal Anteckningar om kulturen "

Which brings us to the length of those generations, and the fact that they can be said to exist at all. Humans in the Culture normally live about three-and-a-half to four centuries. The majority of their lives consists of a three-century plateau which they reach in what we would compare to our mid-twenties, after a relatively normal pace of maturation during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. They age very slowly during those three hundred years, then begin to age more quickly, then they die.

...

None of this, of course, is compulsory (nothing in the Culture is compulsory). Some people choose biological immortality; others have their personality transcribed into AIs and die happy feeling they continue to exist elsewhere; others again go into Storage, to be woken in more (or less) interesting times, or only every decade, or century, or aeon, or over exponentially increasing intervals, or only when it looks like something really different is happening...