This year isn’t a leap-year. If it was a leap year then tomorrow would be 2/29 instead of 3/1. Some years ago I pondered the question of babies born on that elusive day, the twenty-ninth of February. The joke is that those people only get a “true” birthday every four years. I asked myself “what if those people literally only experienced one birthday every four years?” Consequently they would only age one year for every four. The result would be a small segment of the population that lives a great deal longer than the rest of us.
My initial opinion is that this would be a mighty gift. Such a person could expect to live about 300 years on average. I wondered, though, if the curse of spending 50-60 of those years waiting for puberty and 50+ of them as an elderly person is worth spending so many years in one’s “prime.” I think society would be split over this question and on each 2/29 the hospitals would be jammed with mothers trying to either ensure that their baby is born on that day or ensure that labor is suspended until the clock rolls over to 3/1.

Financially, the leap-year superhumans would require some special arrangements (assuming that the parents have a normal lifespan.) The parents would have to invest wisely so that in 72 years when the child has reached a physical age of 18 the investments made when they were babies would be worth a fortune. A good thing considering that the parents would long since have died of old age. In fact, in a family containing one long-lived child and several normal ones the normal ones could end up raising the long-lived one!

Finally, it’s entirely possible that a jealous population would simply rise up and slaughter the long-lived superhuman freaks and ban childbirth on 2/29.