a little science-fictional speculation

[eclectic_boy]

Some rather-rambly thoughts on an SF concept I haven't seen before:

I was thinking about how the structure of families and the relationship between parents and children is tied to both our lifespan and to our period of sexual fertility. Humans (and lots of other creatures) are fertile pretty much from the moment they grow into adults, even a bit earlier. Indeed, that's a plausible definition of when a person has become an adult. And they stop being so well before death (on average).

Now, playing around with that may be evolutionarily unbelievable, but given that advances in technology have allowed humans to greatly increase the prevalence of other characteristics that are way unfavorable from a purely evolutionary perspective (as my 20/500 eyesight reminds me constantly) I'm not going to let that stop my speculating. Note that I'm not going to give an explanation for *how* this would come to be -- that can be worked out later if the speculation leads to interesting places.

So for the moment let's just accept that humans still have an 80-year-ish average lifespan, and that fertility starts around age 70. From late teens until then you're adult in every way except sexually. What changes happen to people? To families? To society?



First of all, you can no longer take for granted that you're going to live long enough to have children. If that's important to you, cut out all risky behavior that could kill you before age 70.

Next, parents' lives won't have a lot of overlap with their children's. And nobody will ever know their grandparents/grandchildren. How will families, or society, structure themselves to deal with orphans, which would be common given that many people would be just a few years old when their parents died? Would kinship become less important because you'd encounter less evidence of your place in a generational chain, or would that very rarity make family even more important a part of a person's identity?

How will the start of puberty be viewed by a 70-year-old entering it? By their 65-year-old younger sister? By the society around them? Sure, it'll be seen as a natural stage of everyone's life, but for most people in the surrounding society it'll be something that they've never experienced. Certainly it'll be a confirmation of aging more severe than grey hair or wrinkled skin is to us. Will it be something some people try to hide?

What sorts of structures will people make for themselves during their pre-puberty lives, and how will they deal with the sudden urge to be with a sexual partner?

Of course there are many ways this universe-tweak could play out, many blanks I haven't filled in. For instance, is a 40-year-old in this universe more like a 40-year-old in ours? An 11-year-old with a larger body? A Vulcan sans pon farr? Feel free to tackle some of those blanks, or just tell me what your ideas are about this science-fictional supposition!

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

I know this isn't the conversation you're trying to have, but I find it completely unbelievable that, in a situation where humans were able to have children healthily in their 70s, they died in their 80s or 90s. I hear that whole labor and birth thing is hard work, not to mention the actual raising of the children, including through the teenage years. Given how fragile and needy human children actually are, I'd be worried for the future of the species if this were to ever happen naturally.

On the other hand, I can think of more plausible-to-me ways you could end up with people not having kids till their 70s, and without dying in the process. The first thing you'd need is the technological advancement such that bearing children is more detached from one's actual personal body, e.g. artificial wombs or whatever. The second thing you'd need is some reason that people could no longer bear children themselves, whether because of extremely hostile conditions, weird future evolution, or the need to genetically tinker with every kid for whatever reason. Bearing kids artificially would be more expensive, and thus maybe one would need a lifetime's worth of savings and accomplishments before one got to the point where reproduction was feasible. Or I could think of plausible ways that people only bearing children late was due to need to have careers first (as is already sort of happening), or part of some kind of extreme population-control measures.

But anyway. Not the conversation you were trying to have. More on-topic, I think it would seriously mess with family structures. I've been part of a bunch of conversations on the internet, usually inspired by reading the book Promises I Can Keep (which I haven't actually read), and one of the things that comes up in the book is the difference between child-rearing strategies among the rich and the poor. Poor women think rich people who wait to have children are being selfish, because when they're older they won't have the energy to help their children, and their parents and siblings won't be around to help them raise the children, so their children won't get as strong an upbringing. Rich women think poor people who have children early are being selfish, because their financial and educational resources are so slim early in life, while later in life they will have a lot more advantages to give their children. It's somewhat of a rude oversimplification of what I'm sure is a more nuanced argument, but the dichotomy is there. The less time you have with your children, the more you'd better have material things to pass on to them in your absence, because you can't just pour time and energy into helping them yourself.

Such a short period of reproductive years would reduce the age span of sets of siblings, although of course you'd still have crazy families like my aunt who pop out a kid every year or two, so you could still have large families. But it would be harder, I think, because the later the kids are born, the less actual time you'll spend with them. And then why bother? The thing where younger children get less parental attention would be dramatically exacerbated by parents not having to stick around to watch how they've messed up their youngests. If you have your first kid when you hit maturity, your third kid won't be able to read yet when you hit your life expectancy.

[crystalpyramid]

(Hit the comment limit, would put that in the subject line, but LJ deleted subject lines in their last idiotic overhaul.)

Socially, people might be very close to their siblings (having had to endure losing parents early), or they might all drift apart after losing their parents, depending on how things were structured. I'm not sure networks of extended families would really exist -- people would be very bound to their cohorts, age-mates who were having kids at the same time they were, and those peers would become crucially important at that time of life. Having everyone that rigidly in synch for reproductive years would probably mean you wouldn't have a lot of relatives of dramatically different ages — everyone would cycle through more or less together, all your cousins would be about the same age, all your grandkids would be about the same age. Those age-mates would maybe be very close, but the inter-generational family ties would be pretty much gone. Chosen family and friends would probably be much more important than blood family, simply because blood family is so sparse. If you wanted to learn from older role models, you'd have to turn to outsiders.

It sounds even more lonely and materialistic than our current society, without the opportunity to share anything real with families, without the ability to pass anything on except your words and your stuff. And I'm not actually sure there'd be a motivation, other than biological, to having children, if you weren't going to be around to see their lives. Maybe it would be an important status symbol? Maybe I'm underestimating the human need to have a legacy? But what a lot of work for such a small window of togetherness. Human development depends so much on nurture, and if you don't raise your own children, how much will they really have gotten from you? Maybe in a society with institutional or communal child-rearing, where children were generally raised uniformly anyway, and there wasn't so much idiosyncrasy and individualism involved in it, it could be reasonable. Contributing children to the population, rather than having them grow up your own and passing on your values to them. It might be more efficient (more working years, more quality control of child-rearing), but it sounds like it would also be less fun.

[crystalpyramid]

Humans are such a k-selected species, high parental investment, low number of offspring, that decreasing the level of parental investment seems really dangerous to me, unless, I suppose, you had everyone have more children.

Maybe you could have a reasonable sort of society with strong "godfamily" relationships. When you are in your thirties and forties, you help rear other people's children, because someone has to. When your children are born, you appoint the children you raise to be the godparents of your own children, to help raise them after you are gone. You know that they're good people, because you did contribute to raising them, and there's a meaningful tie there. These people, in turn, appoint your children as the godparents of their own children. Thus you can have family continuity and culture being passed on, even though you miss out on most of your own children's lives. And you can still have strong family ties, but in a symbiotic kind of relationship between two mostly unrelated (or distantly related) families that are half a generation out of synch.

Maybe it would be advantageous for children to have different people dealing with them as teenagers than raised them as infants, because the second shift of parents wouldn't have so much trouble adapting to the idea that the children whose lives they once had to control completely, were turning into thinking people. I can't see a lot of other advantages, though — if society was structured as above, it would basically mimick our current society, just with farther-delayed gratification.