I think of random things that would make good areas of exploration in the form of a novel or movie fairly frequently. I will share a recent one with the internet now.
Basic Premise:
People grow to maturity and live forever in a young, healthy state provided they do not have sex. Sex causes the beginning of aging as we know it now, resulting in death approximately 60 years later.
Explanations/Mechanism:
Evolution has resulted in a metabolism that doesn’t trigger the aging process until after it believes reproduction has taken place.
Technology exists to allow immortality, but society demands aging and death after reproduction.
Alternatives/Considerations:
The trigger is not sex, but actual reproduction.
The trigger is imperfect, allowing one to fool the mechanism. This could have multiple forms. Perhaps some sort of medical treatment, like a contraceptive, or, if the mechanism of aging is imposed by the society, secreting the sexual activity from the authorities.
What if one is infertile?
What about the case of non-consensual sex?
What exactly counts as sex? Lots of details in that I’ll just leave to you to come up with.
The fun of these, for me, is that they are interesting thought experiments. I like to consider possible scenarios under which such a circumstance would come to be, how and why it would be maintained, and the wide reaching ramifications. I encourage you all to do the same, and not to just stick with the obvious mundane sexual question that it all began with.
I give permission for production of creative works exploring these ideas. I’m pretty sure I don’t have the rights, but in case you were worried about being polite or whatever.