That 90%, on what source is it based? I believe we can only speculate about the efficiency of escape pods, but that's a discussion for another topic.:)
I expect pods are a bit more effective than that, except possibly in the case of insta-death. Generally someone would eject once their ship starts going critical, unless it all happens just to fast.
Once someone is ejected, they'll likely live. Maybe as a prisoner, but I think relatively few factions would just go and blow up an enemy pod. They've already won, the enemy is defeated and helpless, anything more is just cold blooded murder. Taking them captive for interrogation/incarceration/ransom is more likely, or slavery in the case of certain factions (Outcasts).
But that's neither here nor there, I would hazard a guess based on no actual information that less that 1% if the total human population of Sirius engages in regular spaceflight, and many of those don't engage in high-risk spaceflight (combat, etc.).
I think an average age of 100 or so for middle-class Sirius citizens with decent healthcare seems pretty reasonable. High-risk jobs or dangerous activities would likely reduce that a bit.
Quote:I think an average age of 100 or so for middle-class Sirius citizens with decent healthcare seems pretty reasonable. High-risk jobs or dangerous activities would likely reduce that a bit.
While there are places that are clearly exception, such as Planet Leeds with a far lower average and Planet Kurile for a higher average (if I'm remembering right), 100 or so would seem good to me.
90-100 is likely the deal, due to Retro-future-ism. Many sci-fi universes fail to fully take into account the ramifications of significantly advanced technology. Realistically, they could probably be living for as long as 200-300 years if the nanotech was good enough, but I'd say that 90-100 is likely the norm. Now, there's the OCs and their Cardi which boosts 'em up to the high hundreds, and as others have mentioned, there's always hellholes like Leeds.
These seems irrelevant but isn't.
I once read the book Contact and the main character in it (I forget her name) visited a space station, where people were living.
Basically it was said that because of the low gravitational stress, people could extend their lives by 200 to 300 percent. But could not return to earth because their body had been severely weakened. So I'm betting that a pilot who does spend a fair amount of time in space would actually have a longer lifespan than someone living on a planet like Leeds.
However the problem with this theory is yes space battle does happen, but what also could be the complications when that pilot returns to a planet. Would his life be longer? Or, because of his bodies weakened state would he suffer major medical issues. Or, would it not even matter? I'm going to say that they die even younger than 30.
I'd say depending on where you're at home, you could expect to live about 80 - 105 years (Cardamine users can add a couple of years). If you've got the cash though you can definitely achieve clinical immortality (ie, you can still die by force, but not by age) and maybe even more, though I expect that the various House governments and probably even the Pirate factions have strictly outlawed things like the technology used to achieve technological singularity or create too far modified transhumans as such technology would not only change society far too much, but also pretty much render humanity obsolete (hey, at least it's an in-RP idea to counter the atrociously unrealistically slow technological development in the FL universe).
By the way, I think it wouldn't be completely unrealistic to assume that there *might* be a couple of humans so old that they actually where on the first sleeper ships that are still alive...good stuff for conspiracy theories.