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If we were immortal, the need to "extend" ourselves through kids would also decrease dramatically. People (especially women) feel the need to have a kid after a

If we were immortal, the need to "extend" ourselves through kids would also decrease dramatically. People (especially women) feel the need to have a kid after a certain age because they are afraid they will be too old if they do it too late. If you lived 1000 years, would you still be in a hurry to have a kid at 30? It's a natural instinct for humans to want to pass their genes to someone else before they approach death (and leave enough time to care for them, too). Also, about a century ago people thought we would face terrible overpopulation by now, due to limited ground space for buildings homes. That's before we learned we could make apartment buildings. Don't think of the future 100 years from now, with the eyes from 2011. You don't know what conditions might be created by then to allow for increased population. Humans tend to find solutions for everything, especially when approaching a huge crisis.

delinquentme 16y ago
the possibility of super long lives happens to have really interesting social repercussions ... I see no reason why after but a single generation this idea of popping kids out pre 30 wouldnt just go away
- evgen 16y ago
  The idea would not go away, but there is a lot of strong evidence that it would diminish significantly. Two hundred years ago an average woman in the US would have had 7-8 live births by the time she was 30, a hundred years ago it was 3.5, and today it is around 2. Better birth control and better options for how women want to live their lives can explain a large part of the second drop, but the drop from 1800-1900 was almost completely because of increasing lifespans and increasing standards of living. The change would not happen in a single generation, but just observing what happens as countries transition out of third-world poverty over the last fifty years has provided a lot of justification for claiming that it would not take too many generations for birth rates to adjust quite radically.
  - delinquentme 16y ago
    as soon as you can tell a girl: " you've got the option to have healthy kids at age 200 and you're probably going to live to be 1000", and the gravity of that sinks in... Enormous cascading effects, and comparing these possibility to past events ... im sorry the scale simply pales in comparison.

delinquentme 16y ago

the possibility of super long lives happens to have really interesting social repercussions ... I see no reason why after but a single generation this idea of popping kids out pre 30 wouldnt just go away

evgen 16y ago
The idea would not go away, but there is a lot of strong evidence that it would diminish significantly. Two hundred years ago an average woman in the US would have had 7-8 live births by the time she was 30, a hundred years ago it was 3.5, and today it is around 2. Better birth control and better options for how women want to live their lives can explain a large part of the second drop, but the drop from 1800-1900 was almost completely because of increasing lifespans and increasing standards of living. The change would not happen in a single generation, but just observing what happens as countries transition out of third-world poverty over the last fifty years has provided a lot of justification for claiming that it would not take too many generations for birth rates to adjust quite radically.
- delinquentme 16y ago
  as soon as you can tell a girl: " you've got the option to have healthy kids at age 200 and you're probably going to live to be 1000", and the gravity of that sinks in... Enormous cascading effects, and comparing these possibility to past events ... im sorry the scale simply pales in comparison.