Age Prevention

Towards the end of the Age of Shackles, technologies were starting to emerge that promised to halt or even reverse the process of natural aging. Available initially only to the hyperwealthy, these treatments relied on proteins extracted from the blood plasma of the young, administered via IV infusion. For many years these proteins proved remarkably difficult to synthesize, and so the market for blood plasma boomed in a world distinguished by gross wealth inequality. After the liberation, it was discovered that synthesizing the compound had become possible 8 years prior, but the wealthy had sought to make themselves immortal rulers of the mortal working poor, and so kept it to themselves. After the liberation, anti-aging infusions became widely available, and extremely popular. For a decade or so after the liberation, receiving the treatment required quarterly visits to infusion centers, to get an IV treatment for 6 hours. Eventually, the technology to synthesize the proteins was miniaturized and made available as an at-home treatment, but it still required IV administration. It wasn't until 50 AL that it became possible to get an implant that would continuously synthesize anti-aging proteins and release them into your bloodstream.The implant relies on a catalyst that has to be replaced every 50 years. These implants were made available to all who wanted them, and eventually only religious zealots died of old age. People still died from other causes, such as accidents and untreated disease, but those things became increasingly rare and more easily treatable over time as well.
Ultimately, death would become entirely optional for humans. Freed from the toil of working to survive, with a whole galaxy to explore, most humans chose to live extremely long lives.There were people who had lived through the liberation present for First Contact nearly six hundred years later.