I see nanotechnology and genetic manipulation as being not only in the future for mankind, but being essential to it.
Our quest for more and more powerful medicines, for example, are merely an effort to find a better fit for fixing what tends to go wrong inside us. One of the more potent ways of dealing with that is not a powerful medicine, but a way of activating what our healthy and normal bodies would do if the problem issues did not arise.
Essentially, it is a way to correct the various steps that our internal mechanisms take to fabricate the chemicals and hormones that control them, and the manner in which those recipes get battered, stained, and illegible.
So we will be “making” our own medicines internally, from our own basic ingredients obtained from regular food.
This also will be the method of fixing errors and minor instructional typos we may have been born with.
And of course, we will not stop there. Being healthy for your whole life is a fine thing, (and yes I am very thankful about that, thank-you-very-much), but specifically where is it written exactly how long that life should be?
That’s a rhetorical question. The place that it is written is the same place that those typos have been noted to appear, our own genetic deck of cards which we were dealt.
The end goal of medicine and health care should be to develop and sustain your body, and everyone’s body, until accident or calamitous fate should intervene, as earthquakes and other events are not health issues, but simply hazards to be avoided or experienced, and survived if possible.
The possible, and perhaps best, future for humanity is one of good health for a very long time, and the major problem we will face in that future is how to choose how many people we will share it with.
Soames, by that point, has had quite some time to come to grips with his life and the reality thereof.
He has his girl, and his children were given the choice to either prolong life, or live “normally”.
Our tale follows his son, his daughters having gone their own ways and “out of our viewing”. [Think “Half Life Blue Shift” end evaluation text: Evaluation terminated, subject out of range.]
At LL Pegasi, he does have crew with families on the station he set up.
How many also share longevity is never made clear.
I doubt Soames would talk about it much, he may even find such conversation puzzling as to his point of view it isn’t anything out of the ordinary.
But in acting as an infection agent to the protag of Subject Carnivore, Soames is forcing a change on Earth society that it may not be ready for.
very likely
*tagline*
Psalm 90:10