I wouldn’t be. (Age 45)
Think about this message board as a microcosm of the world. Listing those folks I can think of who are over 30, would this board be as good as it is without:
Polycarp, Seige, Weirddave, Jonathan Chance, Airman Doors, Anitavacation, RTFirefly, Norinew, Billdo, Ginger of the North, Ms Robyn, Badge, Bricker, Engineer Comp Geek, Twickster, and numerous others. Don’t feel dissed if I didn’t list your name, this post has to stay under a gig. 
ANother unrealistic assumption of the OP; that people would remain completely productive until they suddenly dropped dead at a maximum of 30. Uh-uh, sorry, doesn’t work like that. People over the age of 25 would be showing the various ailments we see in seniors today.
So, smam, basically you’re saying that given that people would have, say, 20 years in which to learn all the background they need to absorb in their field of choice (having chosen it at what, age 10?), establish themselves and gain experience in that field, reproduce, and come up with advances before illness and/or senility and/or death render them unable to contribute largely anymore.
My guess would be that you are under thirty, and are feeling personally held back by someone over thirty. My suggestion to you is to listen to the person over thirty, and see what his/her experience indicates. In my personal field, computer programming, I’ll take an experienced programmer over a newbie anyday - a degree in CS is pretty worthless for job I’ve ever held, and experience makes a HUGE difference. Undoubtedly this differs in fields that require more specialized knowledge, but MOST fields are like mine - experience trumps education to a great degree.
Ok that’s creepy. What are you on dude? You haven’t watched ‘Silence of the Lambs’ or read Sherlock Holmes recently have you? My advice to you is don’t watch ‘Superman’ or you may get the impression you can fly and leap out of a window.
I’m guessing you have a limp and refuse to aknowledge your own nostril hair.
It was just a random thought I had. It was a question I thought of and decided I would like to see what other people thought. Simple as that.
I am not having a pop at anyone over 30. The people who have posted the names of folks 30 and over have kind of missed my point. It wasn’t the best written OP so that is my fault.
You people are answering the question from a perspective of a human that should live to 70+ (and why shouldn’t you?) but the thing is that if 30 was the age limit then you would have no idea that you were being short changed so there would be no chagrin at the shorter life span.
For the purposes of the question I was assuming max health at death though, or maybe a rapid decline in the last year.
Obviously there would be no 10-15 year long university courses in this parallel universe.
I was thinking along the lines that our ability to learn quickly would increase. That everything would be condenced and speeded up.
To answer the question about grannies and teachers etc. I guess we would have to assume that everyone was allocated jobs and stations like in Huxleys ‘Brave New World’.
It’s just, if we knew that we would all live to be 200 wouldn’t things stretch out? Wouldn’t childhood, schooling, and work be stretched out a little? Things would seem normal to the 200 year oldian, but if we went to their universe things would seem slooow and relaxed and we would be forever telling them to “Hurry up” or “Get a move on”
At the other end of the scale the 30 year oldians may find us 70 year oldians sluggish and the 200 year oldians positively ent like.
Given the same desires and ambitions, would the 30 year capping not force our brains to sharpen up a little?
A little. But I think the real result would be that we would simple develop technologically less quickly.
I understand your point, smam. I’ve read a number of Sci-Fi authors who have suggested that we have developed very rapidly because of our (compared to alien races) short life spans, and others who have postulated that rejuvenation or other life-extending techniques would seriously slow our progress. But, while I think these are reasonable speculations, I don’t think that it’s an infinite progression. As others in this thread have pointed out, the human brain simply doesn’t develop all that quickly. And (I’m going out on a hell of a limb here myself) I don’t think there is that much, if any, evolutionary pressure for technology to develop beyond basic agriculture techniques.
That last sentence sounds confusing, so let’s try it again. I’m saying that once agriculture developed, there was no evolutionary pressure for the human brain to change under current Earth conditions. A person whose brain developed quicker and was therefore capable of functioning as a full adult at the age of, say, 10, would have no survival and reproduction advantage that would cause his genes to be passed along any more than anyone else’s.* A thirty year age span was plenty to develop that degree of technology with our current rate of brain maturity.
You mentioned that many, perhaps most, scientific breakthroughs have been made by people in their twenties. I think that we will be seeing that age rise somewhat. The problem is, you need to understand the scientific base before you can add to it. And as our knowledge of science and our technology increase, it takes longer to acquire an understanding of what is. Yes, we could speed that up some; a lot of our ‘education’ time is spent doing things that have little to do with actually acquiring knowledge. But I think that we will be seeing the primary breakthroughs coming from gradually older people as our knowledge increases, simply because it will take longer to achieve the ‘starting point.’
- I’ll speculate even further and say that, failing an ecological catastrophe, human evolution largely had stopped by then and certainly has entirely stopped now, as there is no individual quality that confers survival and/or reproductive advantage, and humanity in fact labors to counter evolution by medically treating those who in a harsher world would die long before reproducing at all.
No. There is nothing to “force” your brain to sharpen up. If we increased the average ceiling height to 20 feet, that wouldn’t force you to grow taller.
Your mindset would be framed by a 30 year lifespan, but your thought processes would not speed up.
I just don’t believe that we could evolve beyond the level of frontier farmers with an average lifespan of 30 years. The simple reason is that there would not be time or incentive to learn any kind of higher education required for andvanced activities like engineering or electronics. You would have time to raise a few kids as soon as you could give birth to them and then eek out an existance for 15 years until you die. Things like loans or mortgages would either be nonexistant or passed from generation to generation. Savings would also be an irrelevant concept.