The Gaming Den

A common inclusion of Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres are races that have wildly longer or shorter lifespans than that of humanity. Heck, having wildly different lifespans within humanity is also there; Aragorn is in his late 80s during the events of the Lord of the Rings, but that's cool because he's a pure-blooded Dunadain royal and that's just how things work in Tolkien-land. I'm curious how actually having people who routinely live to see 150 would alter society, and conversely how having people die naturally in their 30s would change things. And since introducing other races adds a whole other layer of complexity to the discussion, let's work with a scenario where we're looking at humans, on Earth, with no more technological advancement than, say, Dark Ages Europe.


So let's assume we have two alternate Earths. Everything is identical between the our world and these two except for a quirk of human physiology. On Old Earth, the aging effects we experience going from 40 to 50 are stretched out over 100 years so that our 45 year olds are in the same condition as their 90 year olds. Once you reach the physiological equivalent of 50 on Old Earth (at the age of 140) your aging returns to normal speed, meaning you decline and grow infirmed over the coming decades, and very few people live another fifty years. Then you have Young Earth, where everything is normal until you turn 20, after which every year you live ages you four years (e.g. a Young Earth human who is 25 is aged like our 40 year olds) and someone dying at or before the age of 30 isn't particularly rare.


So, how would societies be different between their Normal Earth, Old Earth, and Young Earth counterparts? Would new ideas and societal change progress more slowly on Old Earth, or would giving geniuses and eccentrics an extra century to ply their trade move things along faster? Would the opposite be true for Young Earth? Would Old Earth have longer periods of political stability (history has shown us that monarchies didn't often handle the death of the monarch particularly smoothly)? Would Young Earth be an unending chain of anarchy and power vacuums? Would Young Earth be obsessed with the near-term (for them, a century is five generations) and Old Earth, the long-term? And so on and so on. I'm curious what you all think would change when you add years to or remove years from those humans who don't die of something else first.

Also, is this the sort of discussion for MPSIMS or In My Humble Opinion? I'm kinda unsure...

The first thing that occurs to me is that setting the elongated time where you have with the end of it pretty much at menopause, means that women would have their fertile period last something like three and a half times as long; also, the productive period of both genders would last much longer, compared to time spent as a nonproductive child. I'd anticipate the second earth would have a much larger population much faster and before evolving technology beyond very basic agriculture because of the increase in potential offspring numbers and the increase in productive time of each person, but it would be hard to really say as social structures and the like would presumably change a lot as well when you conceivably have 7+ generations of a family all alive at once. I'd imagine the entire path of human progress would be rather different because of that change.

My favorite books dealing with extremely expanded lifespans are Steven Brust's Dragaera novels (Taltos books and Khaavren Romances), which have sort-of-Elves (Dragaerans) who most often live 2000 to 3000 years. They have a fascinatingly alien society, in spite of being very human-ish in appearance they are very different from humans in a lot of cultural ways. Typically, they have more patience with working in a similar job for very long periods and are willing to make extremely far plans. Their whole lifespans are effectively slower than humans. Their society which revolves around cyclic changes in rulership by different castes in a caste system is fascinatingly alien.

GreatGreyShrike wrote:The first thing that occurs to me is that setting the elongated time where you have with the end of it pretty much at menopause, means that women would have their fertile period last something like three and a half times as long; also, the productive period of both genders would last much longer, compared to time spent as a nonproductive child. I'd anticipate the second earth would have a much larger population much faster and before evolving technology beyond very basic agriculture because of the increase in potential offspring numbers and the increase in productive time of each person, but it would be hard to really say as social structures and the like would presumably change a lot as well when you conceivably have 7+ generations of a family all alive at once. I'd imagine the entire path of human progress would be rather different because of that change.

That's a very good point. And since this discussion is, in part meant to make to frame the discussion of "Elder Races" and "Child Races" (per fantasy and scifi) in something more familiar, perhaps I should put the "decade which lasts a century" after the usual onset of menopause. Still, both the "Abraham and Sarah having kids in their 90s" and the "fertility is for the young!" versions are interesting.

That said, being able to have an old person sire children for an extra century seems less important to me than the extra productivity you gain from having 1 apprenticeship = 120 years of skilled labor. I mean, here in the real world we've had harems and Genghis Khan and other examples of one dude well past their prime siring tons of children from tons of women. And once you reach a critical mass on population, the restriction on population growth isn't the number of fertile women available but instead keeping disease and starvation from killing off swaths of your population, especially the young.

Assuming a long-lived 40 year old is less productive than a long-lived 100 year old then you'd get huge boost in productivity without needing to first go through force multipliers like labor-saving technology or social support programs; those would still help but you could have a bronze-age kingdom just enslave a bunch of experts and have them collectively churn out an order of magnitude more fine goods, impressive buildings, works of art, or whatever it is you're whipping them to create. Organizations like merchant families or trade guilds would be much more stable in centralizing their power since they'd need to induct fewer members to maintain the same output as their real-world counterparts.

That, to me, indicates that the early concentrations of power would have lasted longer. In turn, that should lead to stagnation of technology and culture, unless the added benefit of longer periods of stability offset this endemic conservatism.

Assuming that human neurobiology (and thus psychology) is otherwise the same, the gains from regular overturning of governments and cultural/scientific paradigms would way outlast those coming from accumulated experience.

Yes, in a lot of fields -- mainly mathematics and sciences -- they have pioneers managing to contribute to the pool of knowledge decades after their signature achievement. However, for just as many areas of human knowledge or administration the Great Men of History (term used with dripping sarcasm) end up acting as a boat anchor on the field due to inertia. Military theory, political science, economics, history, music, literary theory, etc.. have been stymied by the successes of the past.

And that's of course referring to people who accidentally get in the way of progress. There's still the salient fact that there are people who run powerful organizations in government, academia, business, and the military who intentionally hold back human advancement because of malicious intent. Creationism has been thoroughly discredited for centuries, well before evolution was even hypothesized, yet it persists as a zombie lie. There are still powerful people who promote scientific racism. And of course we have Keynes' famous: 'Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.' And nearly 100 years after he said that, we still have people pushing discredited economic ideas onto powerful governments.

You ever heard of the phrase 'progress happens one funeral at a time'? Well, imagine how slowly progress comes when the funerals are less frequent.

For the early period of human history, the differences would probably be minute - increased maximum lifespan doesn't mean much when you have high infant mortality and little-to-no available medical care; your women might have a longer fertile period but that doesn't mean much when her chances of surviving a given birth is 50/50.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:You ever heard of the phrase 'progress happens one funeral at a time'? Well, imagine how slowly progress comes when the funerals are less frequent.

Does that mean that since the funerals are more frequent, Young Earth would be advancing that much faster? Would a world in it's 20s out-pace a world in it's 120s?

That comic doesn't discuss the instances of previous Contributors to Progress actually blocking the advances of future generations. Howdy, Sir Richard Owen and Philip Lenard, how's it hanging?

And those were with fields of knowledge that can be empirically justified and verified, so there's at least a way to weed out quislings and bullshitters. For fields with a shaky or even no methodology like economics or history, these cupidinous bastards can make their influence much more strongly felt -- with the only hopes of respite being their death. And this is for human beings who genuinely had something to offer the field of human knowledge at one point; there are a ton of philosophers and pseudoscientists and other intellectual charlatans who manages to wriggle their way into positions of authority despite not doing a damn thing to clear the fog of human ignorance.

Note that this has nothing to do with their age of their contribution so much as how long they remain part of the establishment after they make their contribution. And all things being equal, people who live longer will stay as part of the establishment longer. The Wealth of Nations is on the short list of books that changed the course of human history, but imagine if Adam Smith had lived long enough to have any say if Karl Marx or Keynes were allowed to exist in polite discourse.

Ancient History wrote:For the early period of human history, the differences would probably be minute - increased maximum lifespan doesn't mean much when you have high infant mortality and little-to-no available medical care; your women might have a longer fertile period but that doesn't mean much when her chances of surviving a given birth is 50/50.

It's closer to a 5% maternal death rate per birth. (50% is literally unsustainable as it would produce negative population growth).

That's still roll a d20 and hope you don't get a 1. Not a situation I'd like. Factoring in non-obvious pregnancy complications probably bumps it up a bit, so 10% isn't unreasonable.

But really, the big advantage of longer fertility periods is the ability to put off having kids. A larger body that can accommodate pregnancy and childbirth more easily is a good thing. Waiting till later also increases productive pre-childbirth years.

Instead of longer fertility periods, one might prefer delayed fertility.

Of course, if you really wanted to increase childbirth survivability you'd have this delayed puberty accompanied by changes to the pelvis that make upright walking impossible, but drastically increase the ease with which a giant head can pass through. But then that wouldn't humans with longevity. That would be something else entirely.

Lago Paranoia: I happen to agree with you that there would be a strong institutional drag from people (whether they were once significant figures, or are merely cogs in the administration) delaying further progress longer by living and holding those positions longer. My question to you is, would the opposite hold true? If a lot of luminaries peaked before their 30s, would having the majority of people die somewhere between 25 and 30 move the deadwood out of the way, allowing progress (both technological and societal) to advance faster?

Because it seems like there would also be an issue with instability undercutting that. Today, someone can enter the bottom of a bureaucracy in their late teens so that they have decades to rise through the ranks and run the joint. In the Young Earth scenario, those familiar with an administration would be dying off every 10 years, and when "the administration" in question might be "the government" or "the military", having rapid flux therein seems like it'd be a Bad Thing(tm).


Hyzmarca: I hadn't considered the Old Earth option of putting off kids until you're ready. That's an interesting idea, because, of course, it has a big impact here in first world countries and we don't have an extra 90 years of vitality to play with. Assuming death from unnatural causes was sufficiently low (the longer your lifespan, the larger an impact even highly-unlikely-but-still-fatal issues pose), you could have a society that cranks the "quality over quantity" approach to reproduction up to 11, with couples spending decades rearing a single child before moving on to the next, and still maintaining steady population growth. What impact do you think that'd have, though? Here it mainly means empowerment of women, as they can enter the job market or get an education before having things derailed by children.

But here it's also extremely likely for a woman to survive any and all pregnancies she has. With the Dark Ages tech Old Earth scenario, women would have waaaay more to lose by having children early, and waiting until the end, or very near the end, of their extended decade would probably be the safest way to maximize lifespan without compromising population growth. But that's a long time for a woman to be sexually capable without having reliable means of contraception, so you'd get what?, women with decades of non-reproductive sex (same-sex or heavy petting) followed by the gauntlet of child birth sometime in their 70s or 80s? That sounds like the foundation of some Amazon/Greek inspired cultures right there.

I think it's a good point that there is a tradeoff: Longer lifespans means that progress is slowed because the ideals the current administration is in life with are 400 years out of date instead of 40, but it also means that by the time you reach that position you have had enough time to reasonably become an expert in an awful lot of subjects, which means bureaucracies can get bigger before you have to start dealing with the problem that no one person within the organization actually has any idea what the organization as a whole does in detail, not just on a day-to-day basis but in general.

Here, this might be interesting.

Extreme K selection, such as the longevity we're positing, would make an organism fantastically vulnerable to changes in its environment. Sentient species such as homo sapiens can overcome this to a limited extent by controlling our environment and thus stopping it changing, but whenever change exceeds our ability to control it, we cope very badly.

In other words, genuine disasters fuck us a whole lot more than they fuck rats; and we in turn would be vastly more adaptable than elves would. Which suggests that the natural thing for elves to do would be to constrain all change, be it social, technological or environmental, to an extremely slow and gradual process.

Laertes wrote:Here, this might be interesting.

Extreme K selection, such as the longevity we're positing, would make an organism fantastically vulnerable to changes in its environment. Sentient species such as homo sapiens can overcome this to a limited extent by controlling our environment and thus stopping it changing, but whenever change exceeds our ability to control it, we cope very badly.

In other words, genuine disasters fuck us a whole lot more than they fuck rats; and we in turn would be vastly more adaptable than elves would. Which suggests that the natural thing for elves to do would be to constrain all change, be it social, technological or environmental, to an extremely slow and gradual process.

Incidentally, this also offer a nice scientific explanation for why the elves always seem to be in decline.