[worldbuilding filter] What would happen if human gestation took longer?
October 31, 2011 1:42 PM Subscribe
I am playing with a personal worldbuilding project just as a fun hobby. While pondering ways to slow/speed up technological development I started wondering what the sociological implications would be of a longer human gestational period.
Important caveat: I am not that interested in the biology, both in how this would be possible (I know a general law in mammals is the bigger the animal the longer the gestation period) and in speculation about how it might change the child. For example there is some evidence that longer gestation in real-world (a matter of a few days or weeks) might correlate to slightly higher IQ. That's interesting but irrelevant to what I'm asking. Assume the baby pops out like a median human infant in our world. Because magic. (Unless you have some mind-blowing thing to say about this, then go ahead share.)
I want to hear speculation about the sociological impacts. Do you think it would make us cherish life more? Make no difference? Could you model the change in population growth dynamics? Would it impact technological development? Labor shortages?
What if you only changed how often ovulation occurred, rather than gestation?
Important caveat: I am not that interested in the biology, both in how this would be possible (I know a general law in mammals is the bigger the animal the longer the gestation period) and in speculation about how it might change the child. For example there is some evidence that longer gestation in real-world (a matter of a few days or weeks) might correlate to slightly higher IQ. That's interesting but irrelevant to what I'm asking. Assume the baby pops out like a median human infant in our world. Because magic. (Unless you have some mind-blowing thing to say about this, then go ahead share.)
I want to hear speculation about the sociological impacts. Do you think it would make us cherish life more? Make no difference? Could you model the change in population growth dynamics? Would it impact technological development? Labor shortages?
What if you only changed how often ovulation occurred, rather than gestation?
This post was deleted for the following reason: poster's request -- mathowie
Response by poster: May be a sufficiently niche question to be chatfilter. I won't mind if a mod moves it or tells me to.
posted by Wretch729 at 1:51 PM on October 31, 2011
posted by Wretch729 at 1:51 PM on October 31, 2011
Response by poster:
Actually I went and looked up the guidelines again and am thinking I have fallen into this one:
"Open-ended unanswerable or hypothetical questions like "What if Hitler had never been born?" or made up "what if" science questions. Creating arbitrary constraints and then playing "what if" is not a good use of AskMe."
So yeah I'll ask mods to purge this.
posted by Wretch729 at 1:54 PM on October 31, 2011
Actually I went and looked up the guidelines again and am thinking I have fallen into this one:
"Open-ended unanswerable or hypothetical questions like "What if Hitler had never been born?" or made up "what if" science questions. Creating arbitrary constraints and then playing "what if" is not a good use of AskMe."
So yeah I'll ask mods to purge this.
posted by Wretch729 at 1:54 PM on October 31, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by 4ster at 1:47 PM on October 31, 2011