Jim Vassilakos asks:

> What are some incurable illnesses that are likely to still exist even at high tech levels?

Ooh, excellent question. Some random thoughts from the top of my head...

1) Old age. IMTU Humans tend to live until around 120-150, with a very decent quality of life, until "a short while" before the end. "Short" might be weeks or years.

2) Serious (physical) injuries. For purely thematic reasons my auto-docs come with a dozen lights on them, each green/yellow/red. Recovery from three red lights (or some appropriate combination) is very very rare.

3) Infection by 'hitherto unknown micro-organism" from "un-/under-explored planet X". Again, purely thematic.

4) Food poisoning. I'm thinking some equivalent of eating fugu (blowfish) in Japan. The locals can handle it but "innocent guy off newly arrived starship", who might have been hazed/goaded into trying it, cannot, with fatal results.

5) Excessive cold-sleep - let's say more than 10 years continuous (vary this number as you might think appropriate). Crews engaging in long-term repetitive cold-sleep will tend to 'be under' for (say) three months at a time, followed by 2 weeks fully awake, repeat as necessary. The higher the TL, the more the down-time can be extended.

6) Some types of genetic fragility - I'm thinking of things which would express _in utero_, before it's possible to pop the foetus out and stick it into an auto-doc. After that things like CRISPR/Cas9 with a few thousand years development can take care of pretty much anything).

My question: in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan" Universe there exist uterine replicators. AFAIK this do not exist in the OTU, but they do seem like a logical thing for someone to have come up with, especially at TL... (fill in your favourite number here). Has anyone ever thought about including these in their TU? I realize this is not a gearhead question, but I'm a story-telling GM :-)

Jonathan