SF books with long-lived humans/aliens?

[luzula]

Can you think of SF books where there are long-lived humans/aliens who by reason of their long lives are better at overcoming the problems of short-term thinking? Problems I'm thinking of are things like "let's go on hunting this species for food, even though if we do, it'll go extinct", or "let's go on burning fossil fuels, even though if we do, it'll wreck the climate".

I guess another question is whether longer lives would necessarily make us wiser that way...we already do have long lives compared to lots of other organisms. No matter how long you make it (500 years?) there would still probably be even longer-term problems that this society would take a short-term approach to, on their terms. And even if you have a long life, you might still discount the future as opposed to the present.

KSR's Mars books do have lots of interesting thoughts about how a longer life changes you personally, and also changes society.

Comments

[starshipfox]

Some of the stories about generation ships deal with this idea to an extent: for example, "The Dazzle of Day" by Molly Gloss, the novella "The Birthday of the World" by Ursula Le Guin, and "Marrow" by Robert Reed. However, I don't think any of those quite capture the idea of longevity leading to overcoming short-term thinking in quite the way you describe. It's an interesting concept!

[luzula]

Oh, I do like "The Dazzle of Day", and everything else Molly Gloss has written!

Yeah, generation ships are something else, I think: that's a more sharply constrained world where you don't have as much leeway for things to go wrong...