Immortality Begins At Twenty: Played mostly straight with the eldrae and eldrae-designed immortagens. Well, late twenties, dignified early thirties, anyway, and it doesn’t take all that much longer after that before the combination of bodily reflections of the experience of age and biological youth to make it very, very hard to pin an actual age on them, anyway.
The Associated Worlds
…building civilizations with my space elves in space.
I think I would like my own immortality to be 20yo for health and flexability, 30yo for build, and 45 for the silver in my hair. But then, the eldrae probably don’t need to use age related dominance indicators for social gain.
Pretty much not, indeed – and it would be tricky, anyway, inasmuch as except for the relatively young, it gets really hard to figure out what they might be, anyway.
My figuring, also, is that a hypothetical immortagen-treated human is going to mess with all those indicators in people’s heads anyway. I think it was Niven (maybe?) who pointed out the ways that old minds in young bodies don’t move the way actual young people do (having had lots of years to optimize all the inefficiency and slop out of their movement routines), and I would expect that and a bunch of other old-mind-tells to make such immortals look rather odd to our eyes.
And that’s even before the generational cultural markers come into play…