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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tonguez" data-source="post: 6687875" data-attributes="member: 1125">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?</blockquote>

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