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Does our choosing a cause of death preclude them from dying of other causes? Because you could potentially do some wild stuff to postpone death of loved ones by, for example, deciding they'll die 60 years in the future of old age.
And how much control do you have around the circumstances surrounding their death? Could I specify "dies of heart attack brought on by shock of working out the key to practical cold fusion on paper" or "head trauma due to fall while adjusting to lower gravity in main living area of self-sustaining mars colony" to force us forward in technology and science?
Because that's basically what I'd do.
One consideration is: is there an "evil genie / monkey's paw" caveat to this? Like, maybe someone's death is postponed, but they are in terrible agony every second until then. Or maybe they die on Mars, but a dictator destroys Earth in the process of getting us there.
That might make a half-decent sci-fi story. Like: someone gains this capability, but they have a notion that there's an evil-genie caveat to it. So they try to advance science, but just a little bit at a time; basically they are experimenting to make sure there's no such caveat (and to get around it, if there is.) However, they are leaving a trail of the dead. And at the end, it turns that while no individual death/accomplishment had a monkeys-paw-like side-effect, all of the deaths combined resulted in a terrible downside.
Eternally suffering brain in a jar finally dies after getting knocked off the table on the mars base
This person evil genies!