Space men and aging

Greetings, all who care to read this. Let’s get some Ideas from science shall we. As the best ideas for gaming often come from reading or watching some thing, selecting one or two parts and twisting it up nicely to suit your current world. Hell you can base entire worlds of these ideas. I am creating a post apocalyptic / "new age world" campaign. Of importance to this was how the world went and killed it self off, well 95% off anyway. So this article in MIT Technology Review gave me an idea. Maybe not in use as the main Idea but it helped kill the people off. A nice common and infectious disease or even a boring non-infectious bacteria goes in to space as part of the worlds expanding space programs. Someplace up there it changed and became Mr nasty. I will probably have it happen on one of the Chinese mining craft, as mining craft are dirty and China has a lot of people to cull in this game.

The Spacemen thing is about the mention on page 2 of changes in human kidney genes. Twist this around and why not have being in space a Long time slowly change you around a bit. Allows for funny mutations to show up in populations that survive and the are more likely to survive as they are more valuable people than ordinary citizens and so get place sin the bunkers before the nukes/radioactive comet/asteroid/terrorists screw the world up.

This article in MIT Technology Review gives me something to work from to explain why the genetically engineered super soldiers are still alive 200yrs after the world got screwed. I have them live 350+ years so most of the originals are basically old or middle aged at best. They are unplayable as they are meant to elite level soldiers that can and do kill whole villages by hand. They do rule the odd place but they are not as extinct as most of the remaining humans think, just give them time...