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 think we'd die out, unless the people who did have children had huge numbers of them.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to say that even if the people who do have children have large numbers of them, we'd still die out.

I can't find any way to look at this that isn't a clear dystopia where large swathes of people are miserable. Every time I come back to thinking about this I think of new problems. (New problem: in addition to depression/suicide, boredom and lack of responsibility would lead to all sorts of society-wide drug problems.)

[q10.livejournal.com]

i think you're keeping too much of the basic human programming constant. humans are lost without children because their evolutionary programming is incentivizing them to procreate during their peak child-bearing years, not because it's some unshakable law of the universe that any human-like intelligent organism must be lost without children.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Are we supposed to be assuming non-humans, then? I thought we were assuming humans, but where everyone takes puberty-delaying drugs until they're 70. (Plus Jim's reply to me above where pregnancy/childbirth isn't nearly as physically taxing.)

[q10.livejournal.com]

i feel like we need permission to make enough changes to the other aspects of these people's hardware and software to bring the world back to some kind of coherence. i agree that, without such freedom, this is prettymuch a non-starter.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

But if we start changing stuff too much we might as well start from scratch. And then we can make up whatever we want and it becomes an entirely different (and in my opinion, less interesting) exercise.

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

Indeed you may! It'd be interesting to see what different variations people could posit would allow this scenario to exist, especially how it could be achieved with as little change as possible.
Naturally, if we all agree that my initially-stated situation would lead to humanity having long ago gone extinct, that's suboptimal. And boring.

I have to say, the ethnographic part of me is fascinated to consider why people in that world might conclude that *our* biology would doom *us* to a dystopia. (Remember Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Report on Planet Three", in which Martians conclude based on their analysis of Earth's conditions that it would be too harsh to support life?)

[crystalpyramid]

Problems with our system that they might see:

• How would you ever get anything done, if you had to spend all your most productive years raising children? No wonder the original humans took so long to achieve spaceflight!
• Gender inequality. The idea that women and men are economically unequal, women's wages are lower, women have more difficulty getting promotions, etc, would be completely alien to them, because most of that stuff stems from women historically having to spend their energetic years bearing and caring for children. They might be a lot less uptight about same-sex relations, and as carpenter suggests, the one-man one-woman partnership model would be a lot less fundamental. Children would probably be raised in a much more gender-neutral way.
• Romance would be alien. All those aspects of first love where it's precious because it's the first time anybody understood you, or tried to. All the beauty of naivete that comes mixed in with the idea of love, along with all the mistakes people make in relationships because they just haven't figured out how to understand people yet, they would all seem stupid and pointless to people who didn't procreate till they were older. Children with unpleasantly divorced parents would probably be a lot less common. Older people, even under the influence of new hormones, would probably be a lot more pragmatic, simply due to the weight of experience.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I kind of like (as an interesting story, not as an actual society to live in) my version where death during childbirth is the norm and surviving to have a second child is the exception. I'm imagining this would result in extreme gender inequality: women aren't allowed to do any difficult manual work because they have to still be healthy enough to carry a child at 70, they get pampered and protected a lot possibly to the point of being infantilized, basically there's a whole cult around women and it just gets worse the older a woman gets. Kind of a queen bee/ant thing, except that all the women are potential queen bees and you need all of them to survive.

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

Except unless you tweak biology so that triplets-and-above are common, the population is going to decline with each generation - perhaps steeply. I guess another tweak that would permit a replenishment-level birthrate would be to have almost all people be female. It's those nonduplicating males who really cause the population shrinkage if the average woman gives birth to, say, 1.2 children.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd been thinking about that. As it is now, more males are born but they have a shorter life expectancy. Under this new system there'd be a lot of selection pressure for girls to be more common. Of course, if nearly everyone is female, you don't get the cult thing I described above.

The answer seems to be that you need to tweak the biology beyond just changing reproductive age, but once you're doing that there should be a lot of possible solutions. Since your questions were originally about society, I think we'd have to pick a specific biological solution and then try to extrapolate a society from that. The more we tweak the biology, the easier it is to imagine this working, but the harder it is to extrapolate the society. (And, I think, the less human our projections become, the less interesting of an exercise it is--it starts to become world building for the sake of world building, detached from anything recognizable, and I, at least, only find that interesting in the context of a real story with a compelling plot and characters.)