I live in a border state. Phony IDs are our biggest industry.
If you want something that will withstand scrutiny, find a County Clerk who can be bribed, to issue birth certificates and death certificates as needed. Give that clerk’s name and address to every methuselah you meet.
If the methuselah’s were sufficiently numerous, they could infiltrate the record-keeping arm of the government of some banana republic. Maybe take over the entire country. Raise Princes of Monaco as pets.
Why bribe? Just get a few of your own people into those positions. You’ve got plenty of time to do so. Once in, you’re golden. Set up a whole raft of fake personas, to be used as necessary. For that matter, a little foresight and the Methusalahs could all star in My Name Is Legion.
I suggest going for the “purloined letter” approach. Tell anyone who will listen to you that you are 400 years old.
Is it a given that they would need to hide? It’s not the Dark Ages; it’s not like they’re going to be burned as witches.
They could be very productive memebers of society, although you’d have to create some loopholes WRT Social Security and such. They’d probably make good historians or at least be popular on the talk show circuit.
I volunteer to give it a try. I’ll report back with my conclusions in about 500 years.
Scientists would experiment on them. Take blood, tissue samples etc.
So “scientists” are going to kidnap and experiment on people without their consent? Ever heard of the 13th Amendment?
I think you guys take for granted just how big the world still is. Even in developed countries like the UK or US, if you had the money you could buy a house and live there and just tell people you are from New Zealand or South Africa or whatever. Then 20 years later, sell the house and move to Australia or Canada and do the same.
If they think there’s a chance of gaining the Fountain of Youth for themselves? Sure.
Given the whole Black Flights, secret prisons and secret extradition things surrounding the “War on Terror”, you’re going to even question that governments can and will do such things these days?
As long as we’re mentioning books that deal with this topic, the book Tuck Everlasting deals specifically with the problem of the characters trying to conceal themselves after they’ve found the eternal-life spring. Coincidentally, I finished reading it to my second-grade son just last night. Four years ago I read it to my older son when he was a second-grader, and before that I read it myself.
But the story is set in turn-of-the-century America (the 1900 turn of the century) and doesn’t deal too much with more modern issues.
Up until the past 50 years or so it hasn’t been much of a problem. A person not having an official ID wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. Or having a a fleshoed out ID created didn’t take a great deal of effort when all records were recorded on paper. The new age of information adds another level of complications to the equation. But with years of practice and a bagful of money even that can be overcome.
What has happened through the ages is that with the evolution of mass transit and now mass information it is necessary to move further away to avoid being recognized. Where a 200 years ago you only needed to move 200 miles, a hundred years ago you really needed to move 1000 miles.
Now it’s necessary to move into another country for a generation which really isn’t so bad. New people and new languages are challenging. When moving back to the States under a created ID the wise traveler layers identities like an onion. A researcher finding that John Smith isn’t real would probably find out that he is really Serge Lenkin from Switzerland. Problem solved, deport him back to the land of chocolate and watches.
Definitely! In fact the whole “War on Terror” is a smokescreen so that the government can indefinitely imprison and experiment on suspected Methusalahs… why yes, my hat is made of tin-foil… how did you know? :eek:
Kind of like Odessa for Methuselahs? 
That’s actually plan B. Or maybe C by now.
Plan A is much simpler.
Write the software used for recordkeeping.
This. Identity theft is trivial for even low-life crims. If you’ve been around long enough to accumulate a chunk of cash and some smarts, getting a new birth certificate and so on every few decades is trivial. Keep your head down, don’t break any laws, and you’re golden. If you do get busted, immediately flush that identity and move to one of your many spares.
Huh? If any of my co-workers or neighbours were 1000 years old, I wouldn’t have a friggin clue. I don’t know where they were born, where they went to school, or anything. If they did tell me these facts, I wouldn’t have any reason to check them out or any easy way of telling if they were lying. Modern cities are the very definition of anonymity. Providing you keep your face out of the media, you can start a whole new identity by just moving from one big town to the other. If a new person shows up in your neighbourhood, do you contact the FBI to check them out?
As long as the biological implications of a brain functioning that long are assumed, I’d say yes.
You wouldn’t necessarily be the same person at age 300 as you were at 150, but the same thing happens within our existing lifetimes. I’m not the same person at 40+ as I was at age 13 - I retain all of that person’s scars, some of that person’s memories and a few of that person’s desires and goals, but a lot has vanished and been replaced.
Oh my God! Not blood and tissue samples!
If only some day they’ll devise a method of taking these without killing the patient.
Well, getting by the technical problems (cartilage grows your whole life, such as your nose and ears, whereas your teeth would need to somehow keep the enamel and the dentin from wearing away), I doubt you’d have much trouble hiding it. The trick would be figuring it out in the first place. Today, more and more older folks tend to look younger than in the past. So assuming you grew up normal, and then at adulthood your aging just slowed to 1/5 the current best rates, you might be considered lucky till your late 40s, maybe an oddball at 50ish, unless you naturally look older when you’re younger. (I still get carded after haircuts, and I’m not looking forward to the upcoming prostate exams in a couple years, but at my 5-year high school reunion too many folks my age looked like they were already in their 40s.)
At some point, you’d probably begin to wonder about it before others did, and you’d figure it out. If you did when you were younger, and managed to avoid going to a doctor to see why, you might have years to prep yourself. If you’re still looking 20ish as you pass 50, you might not have too much time to make plans.
Realistically, all the previously mentioned options are open to you. Even if you took the morbid route of slaying people for their identities (which I think is probably more risk and hassle than it’s worth) and got caught, how long are you going to get in jail? 20 years? Drop in the bucket, and maybe an interesting change after a couple other lifetimes have passed. More likely, you’d use a variety of things, just to see what worked out best. But as some have mentioned, it’s not like most of us really dig into our neighbors and coworkers backgrounds. If you say you’re an age, then you’re that age, and if you figured it out early enough, you’d have plenty of time to work on your forgery/hacking skills to take care of the necessary paperwork.
Really though, I think most of it comes down to how you managed to live that long. If it’s just odd genetics it might be more difficult at first than a known blessing/curse that you received. Either way, after a couple lifetimes, you probably wouldn’t even think about it much, you’d just have to stay up to date on the latest in identification needs and procedures.
I’m mixed on whether it would be fun or not, though. I mean, say the average person lives to be 70ish today. Take a typical life. 20+ years is just trying to figure things out, 20 years raising kids. Now you’re 40-50, and you’re finishing up your working years (well, theoretically) for a while, then you’re dealing with grandkids and buying plots. (Obviously, I’m not that old, yet, so I don’t know what the “almost dead” do to pass time. 
)
So, you’d get an extra 20 years not growing up, and after a lifetime or two, you might get bored of raising kids and leaving them when you had to. So you’d have almost 40 years of just living. Assuming you went all out learning new things, you could keep busy for a while, but it’s a compounding effect. Learn one instrument, it’s easier to learn the next (piano, then guitar, etc.) Similar with other skills, to a degree. Maybe research things, jumping from lab to lab as a young genius or something. So 500 years might be a good amount, compared to other lengths, long enough to explore all sorts of aspects of life, but not so long you wish you could die.
And, assuming will to live plays a part, if you had company, it could be a good thing, some peers who are older like yourself. Or it could be a really bad, annoying thing. It’s bad enough people hold grudges for as long as they do. Imagine 5x longer! Assuming luck plays a part (unless you have the highlander regeneration thing going for you), you’d still have to avoid all the bad things that can happen to people, and your more mobile, “undercover” life might add to the dangers there. For instance, a car accident when you’re only 110 might leave you one-armed for the next 400 years, and that might be bothersome.
Still, keeping it a secret would be easy, because you wouldn’t have a choice. You’d have to survive, and you couldn’t afford for someone to figure it out. Without a doubt, if you lived way longer than me, and I’m a researcher, you’re going to spend a good portion of that extended life being tested on.
I guess your pension companies would start thinking about hiring a hitman once you passed 130 and were still drawing payments.
Apart from that, finances ought to be fairly easy to deal with - it takes many people a lifetime to become completely financially independent, then they die. Immortality or exceptional longevity would enable you to settle down into a secure lifestyle just when things got easier.