Science and Technology
For the most part, citizens of the Humanverse dwell in an era of technology that has sustained humanity for millennia and is believed to be beyond what our distant ancestors first used to depart lost Earth.
In their day-to-day lives, most citizens will utilize technologies that in an age past would be considered highly advanced, from computing and automation to medicine and transport. Not everyone has equal access to technology or its benefits, depending upon local political and economic systems, but everybody is descended from an interplanetary population that has lived alongside technical marvels for thousands of years.
Technology in the most developed systems–typically but not exclusively those closer to the 1Gen and 2Gen heliospheres that were discovered and settled first–is post-scarcity, clean and efficient. Use of human labor is driven by political and personal choices, not by technological constraints.
Drones are frequently used to augment or replace human employment. There are many drones deployed in a variety of tasks across the Humanverse, but they are not designed to look remotely human even if they are humanoid in basic form They are also fairly unsophisticated in terms of programming, and even multifunctional units such as domestic service or retail drones are little more than automated menu systems similar to those found on contemporary customer service vid lines or chat boxes, with similarly straightforward navigation and collision-avoidance systems.
Medical technology has extended human life beyond its original natural span, and average life expectancy in most Heliospheres surpasses a century. While individuals can suffer from uncommon maladies, disease itself is rare. Careful processing of new environments for biological contagions and strict exploration and quarantine laws when new heliospheres were discovered has ensured rogue biological elements have not ravaged the human population.
Physiological or cybernetic adaptations exist for a host of disabilities, and life-threatening genetic defects have been removed from the genepool over the millennia, though the extent to which individuals remove or compensate for disabilities varies from society to society. Some Unitas Prefectures exercise genetic screening programs and provide combat veterans and victims of mishap with highly sophisticated regrown organs, championing conformity to the human ‘ideal’. People's Galactic citizens may deliberately sport crude bionics, scars and other disabilities, believing that physical characteristics of humanity are not standardized, and that individuality is defined as much by deficit as it is strength.
While not everyone is perfectly healthy, on average a person can expect to suffer from few serious maladies. Humans can live for up to 120 years with standard medical assistance, but few live much longer. They can reasonably expect to be vital and hale until about 100 years of age, thanks to rejuvenating cocktails. Despite all precautions, local mutations in microbial life, especially on terraformed worlds, can occasionally provide stark reminders of mortality. Nothing is perfect and humankind no longer has the very highest levels of science it once boasted.
