How can someone be invulnerable to any damage down to cellular levels while still having a limited lifespan?
One commonly cited problem with invulnerability-style immortality is that you watch the people around you wither and die while you survive. On top of that, even though you don't deteriorate, at some point you run into mental issues, where you can't make new memories and life starts to become a blur.
With that in mind, is there a scientifically plausible way for someone to be completely invulnerable to all injuries and diseases, from blunt force trauma and the common cold to cancer and genetic illnesses, but they will still die from old age at about the same age as they would have without immortality?
In addition, I'm not looking for an abrupt end, like a sudden heart attack at a random day between their 90th and 120th birthday. I'm more interested in something where the person can know "I will die soon" and has time to say goodbye of their friends and loved ones, like an elderly person dying of cancer.
I'm looking for a scientific approach, not a divine or arcane approach. Basically, humanity has developed a universal cure that makes the user immune to everything until their biological lifespan has ended. What biological mechanism could the cure use for this?
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There was an article by Brandon Sanderson about how superpowers are basically magic.
If you want Wolverine style healing, where you could burn him down to a skeleton with a few gristly bits and he'd be able to regenerate, then just say that eventually the magic runs out...
Another idea, is that the individual has another organ responsible for making the substance that promotes the regeneration, but the organ can't regenerate itself. Eventually the organ wears out and starts to fail, which means that the healing factor begins to diminish, and then possibly reverse so that rapid aging occurs.
If you want less magical and something more plausible, say that it's nano machines that are rebuilding the tissue. They wear out over time and have to be replaced. But it's a conscious choice for him to go get the procedure done. After living X number of years, where the friends and family are aging and dying away, the hero slowly loses the will to keep going on and so decides not to get the next set of nano bots.
Or possibly they can only perform the procedure a limited number of times.
If it was an experimental procedure there might be side effects that don't show up for X years, and once they begin to appear he has to retire or die quickly...
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