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

[q10.livejournal.com]

yeah, i don't know how far off from self-sufficiency five-year-old humans really are. the tweaks on that end might be relatively minor.

the main thing i want to change, really, is brain size at birth. i mean, that's what makes them so unwieldy to begin with. i want them to come out with smaller brains (and so smaller skulls), and i want their pre- and post-birth development to emphasize a fair amount of anatomical self-sufficiency, and good hunting/foraging instincts, over the development of huge brains and the full package of higher cognitive capacities, some of which may develop early, but which can in a pinch be put off.

one idea might be that after being turned out by their parents after a short dependency of a few years, children are capable of forming up into bands/packs with other comparable age children and hunting and foraging like stray dogs while they gradually finish developing into something with more of the full human cognitive package.

[crystalpyramid]

Hmm. Are there in fact any mammals that have dramatic brain growth later in life, or is this basically a thing that none of our relatives can currently do? It's certainly true that babies' giant brains are one of the big constraints involved in our current setup. Is it harder to develop brains later, for some reason?

I find the idea of bands of six-year-olds with deliberately decreased cognitive capabilities foraging like stray dogs kind of terrifying, but it does definitely create a weird science-fiction feeling world...

[q10.livejournal.com]

i imagine it must be pretty standrad for marsupials, which climb out of the uterus looking like itty bitty fetuses with giant claws (the claws are for climbing up the mother's fur into the pouch, where they continue their development).

i think that, besides that, the closest point of comparison here is humans, who, i believe, undergo proportionally more brain development post-birth than other placental mammals.

but, yeah, this is a serious deviation from normal mammalian design parameters.