Future Long Life, "Immortality" and Family Dynamics

So I was watching StarTrek Renegades and got to the bit where Chekov is talking to his great great grand daughter and mentions something like "I'm only 143 years old". (ps no spoilers I'm gonna watch the rest tonight)

Anyway that got me thinking about how long life and virtual immortality might affect family dynamics. Dunbars Number suggests that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 close stable relationships that includes family and friends. So how would that affect things if you had 300 direct genetic descendants? Would the familial affection mean that your social connection is extended or do some of your grandchildren simply have a lesser relationship?

Also what if your entire town of 2000 + is directly related to you? Is that kind of community going to be more like a big happy family under the direct supervision of the still living geriarch, is it going to have more nepotism or seem like one of those strange cult communities we hear about or indeed is it going to have exactly the same factions and politics are any other town despite everyone having the same surname?

Currently of course we do have people with large families and great grandparents living in four and even five generation households but generally the group size has the built in limiter of age gaps and death, which allows numbers to be readjusted. How would immortality affect the way communities and families work if they were at 6 or more generations living together and all of them mature adults and still relatively active?

Well if we don't get off this rock, they way that they did in Star Trek, then we're pretty much going to have to maintain the same size families no matter many years are involved. There are too many of us on the planet already.

I would think that at the simplest, you would be closest to those closest/longest in your proximity/age.

Which means you'd remain very close to your siblings (who also live forever). And your kids. And their grandkids. But things would be gappier with the cousins, great-great-great grand-whatevers that you generally only need to see at the family reunion at a park.

At some point, you can't be bothered to be cognizant of your sibling's spouse's relatives. Same thing for long-lived people. There's a limit of degrees of separation where they just don't matter other than saying hi when you see them.

Plenty of people already don't really know some of their cousins, nephews, nieces, etc.

My takeaway was "300 years in the future, and he still looks old at 143?" I pretty much expect in the next 50 years that elderly *appearance* is going to be a thing of the past, and in 300 years the age 143 won't be old at all.

Tonguez said:

Dunbars Number suggests that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 close stable relationships that includes family and friends. So how would that affect things if you had 300 direct genetic descendants? Would the familial affection mean that your social connection is extended or do some of your grandchildren simply have a lesser relationship?

Also what if your entire town of 2000 + is directly related to you?...
is it going to have exactly the same factions and politics are any other town despite everyone having the same surname?

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150 isn't the max number of close relationships you can have. It's the number of -relationships- that you can have. Given hours in a day, and a person's need for ego stroking, you can't have a "relationship" with much more than 150 people. Age has nothing to do with it.

So if you're immortal, you could try to increase your relationships with more than 150 people, but those would just end up being one-way relationships like politicians or celebrities have with their fans. Like Ryujin points out, there's already too many of us to leave room for more relationships.

If everyone in your town is related to you - you're one big happy family - you're going to have a few mutants, and a few family feuds. Otherwise, you'll be just like any other community of 2000 people.

Tonguez said:

Anyway that got me thinking about how long life and virtual immortality might affect family dynamics. Dunbars Number suggests that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 close stable relationships that includes family and friends. So how would that affect things if you had 300 direct genetic descendants?

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Many of them will be like Facebook-friends are today.

Currently of course we do have people with large families and great grandparents living in four and even five generation households but generally the group size has the built in limiter of age gaps and death, which allows numbers to be readjusted. How would immortality affect the way communities and families work if they were at 6 or more generations living together and all of them mature adults and still relatively active?

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The poor (meaning anyone who has to work for a living) will live and die just as we do now. Only worse, because while the need to work won't have changed, the pool of available jobs will have reduced to almost nothing. Immortality will be a privilege of the absurdly rich, who will live in gated communities well away from the plebs.

On the plus side, humanity may well be extinct by 2100, so I'm not sure it matters.

Related to immortality, say it is reached via cloning. What would be the legal framework for inheritance with clones involved? A lotof people have no will, so clones could complicate things (forget that the very rich, the ones who could afford clones in the first place, rarely have no will).

With a clone that as no memory of being the original, does it have to pay some estate taxes if it receives an inheritance from the orignal or is it still the same person so there is no transfer of estate? Is it an inheritance at all. Identical twins, the closest thing to a clone we currently have, still have to pay taxes if they receive money from their twin. Do "traditional" children of the original get to say something when a clone gets an inheritance from its progenitor?

If the clone has the memories of the original, legally, is it the same person as the original?

goldomark said:

Related to immortality, say it is reached via cloning. What would be the legal framework for inheritance with clones involved?

If the clone has the memories of the original, legally, is it the same person as the original?

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Given that human cloning is illegal pretty much everywhere, I would presume that at the same time they changed that law to allow it, they would also work out the legal details.

My best guess is that the clone would be considered in the same light as an identical twin: a different person, but probably the closest living relation. And I can't see that being any different regardless of whether the clone inherited the memories or not. (I can't imagine governments not declaring the clone to be a different person - they'll want their cut of the inheritance taxes, after all!)

delericho said:

Given that human cloning is illegal pretty much everywhere, I would presume that at the same time they changed that law to allow it, they would also work out the legal details.

My best guess is that the clone would be considered in the same light as an identical twin: a different person, but probably the closest living relation. And I can't see that being any different regardless of whether the clone inherited the memories or not. (I can't imagine governments not declaring the clone to be a different person - they'll want their cut of the inheritance taxes, after all!)

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It raises questions of identity. If I have the same genetic code than a person and the same brain structure*, why am I not that person? I tend to think it is the same person. The clone as no reason to think it is someone else.

That being said, if the super rich are the ones who can pay for clones, they'll lobby heavily to make sure their clones are considered the same individual.

*Say brains scans are done of the orginal and the tech exist to mold a clone's brain so it becomes an exact copy (99,9997% certified by NeuroPlasty Inc!) of the brain scan.

goldomark said:

*Say brains scans are done of the orginal and the tech exist to mold a clone's brain so it becomes an exact copy (99,9997% certified by NeuroPlasty Inc!) of the brain scan.

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That seems less plausible than Morrus' exact duplicate teleporter.

This picture assumes a sort of static picture of the brain - that once it is wired up, it is set, and the wiring is what matters. But, brains retain some level of plasticity for your entire life. The rate at which you rewire it drops over time, but within our current lifespans, it never completely stops. So, unless that copy and rewiring happens at the moment of death, the clone won't have the same brain structure as the original. In addition, significant portions of your brain chemistry are dependent on development as you age, rather than on the state of interconnection at the current moment. This can lead to differences in attitudes and behavior, even with the exact same memory.

"If we can perfectly duplicate a human," questions are thus a little shaky.

Now, if you go to an example of artificial intelligence that has been granted personhood, where the corpus is a machine, and the mind is a program, such that copy to a known level of fidelity is plausible, then we have issues