Ever seen the Star Trek TOS episode Miri? Well, to recap or give you what you need to know, there's a planet, which I call Planet Beatnik because it seems to be ruled by teenagers who are the embodiment of the '60s television writer's idea of a beatnik. That's not the intention of Star Trek but the trope was used by just about every situation comedy in the '60s. Or at least it seems that way to me. That the planet is seemingly identical to Earth doesn't really matter, but it makes the name slightly more apropos.
Anyway, Planet Beatnik used to be a planet like Earth with humans living on it of all ages, but then they all caught a virus which... Actually, let me sidetrack.
They didn't all catch the virus, but they created a virus which infects people who've hit puberty, which almost immediately killed all the adults. That's how it's presented in the episode. Initially I thought this wouldn't hold up scientifically. Surely once the virus killed off all the possible hosts, it would die out and society might be fucked but you wouldn't be in the situation in the episode, which I'll get to in a moment. But given a population distribution of age similar to Earth and with a large population and probably enough children would be aging into it to keep the virus going.
Then I realized that it's academic, because... returning to the plot, everyone must have been infected because after the adults were gone, the children aged incredibly slowly, 1 month in a year according to Spock. This was all a result of eternal youth gone wrong. So they've all got the virus but it doesn't kill them until they finally hit puberty. This isn't acknowledging the very real possibility that if it's alternate Earth, there would likely be a reasonable portion of the population who have a generic disorder that causes them never to hit puberty. That's not addressed, so let's just assume they all died in the ensuing violence after the infection event.
Oh yeah, the disease makes you go all Reaver, albeit for a relatively short time before you kick it. That's to say nothing of any violence simply caused by the death of all the adults in the world. You've got to figure that a lot of children died in that fire, probably including newborns and a lot of infants. So we're not dealing with a population of even all the children when we start this little thought experiment. Then after that, hunger and disease are going to knock off some more.
This, according to the episode, happened 300 years ago, approximately. Which means that a newborn, if it somehow managed to survive 300 years of life on Planet Beatnik, would now be, by Spock's math, 300 months or 25 years old. And also dead of the virus.
But even though it's not stated in the episode, let's assume the aging speeds up the older you get, until it all hits you like a ton of bricks when you hit puberty. The episode does say that the older you are when you contact the disease, the quicker it kills you. I think they were going for a sort of, "Well, you can put off aging for 300 years but then it hits you all at once." They don't crumble to dust when they die, but they do sort of die of old age.
So let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that children could have lasted 300 years without hitting puberty. The youngest kids shown seen like they're maybe 5-7, and the oldest... well, they look like teenagers but they're supposed to be prepubescent.
You may ask why we're assuming that the aging speeds up rather than slowing down as you hit puberty. Well, we've already established that it can't go faster than 1 month per year because everyone would be dead. And since Miri, the child tested to determine the slowed aging, showed 1 month per 1 year, if it were faster for younger children they would still all be dead. And that's not considering the metaphor they're using for the virus: it seems to increase effect as you get older.
It's an interesting population distribution because you'll have a spread as you increase the age. 1 day difference age would magnify, depending on the curve of acceleration for aging (how fast the aging speeds up, essentially). You might wind up with no children of certain ages as you went along and depending on the population size.
Now, imagine the society that results. Supposing the oldest in the population were 5 when the infection struck. They would have some degree of sophistication, would speak, walk, and might even have some education. Plus the older children would be able to raise it to a certain extent. This isn't taking into consideration disease and hunger, just the social evolution of the child.
But the oldest inhabitants of the planet who could have passed anything on would have been prepubescent. Not great thinkers, probably. And this is the society represented by the episode.
It's an interesting thought experiment to consider how it might work if one could somehow introduce new population to the equation. What if, somehow, you could make it so that everyone lived to be 300, only aged to puberty, and then died, but new babies were somehow produced.
We already have things like that on Earth. They're called animals. Plenty of insects and fish breed once before they die. Suppose humans became like that.
Why lengthen the human life to 300? Well, humans develop relatively slowly compared to animals that breed and die. I'm not sure 300 is necessary, but on Planet Beatnik that's how it goes. Well, actually we don't know for certain how long the life expectancy is because we don't know how old the older children were when they were infected, but we're assuming you can live to be at least 300, probably longer because there are younger children so the oldest children can't have been newborns at infection.
Strangely enough, salmon and mayflies don't need a virus to do this. It's an evolutionary advantage for them to do it that way, or there would be octogenarian salmon swimming around with great grandchildren. But humans didn't evolve that way in part because we can't be left alone as larvae, so Mom has to last at least nine months after puberty.
And that's saying nothing of raising the child. Salmon and mayflies rely on instinct, but babies who don't have adults to raise them, even if they managed to survive somehow totally alone, don't really develop. Sure, they might eventually look like children, but they won't be potty trained, won't speak, won't know anything, and again, will have starved or been killed long ago.
But we've got older children to help, so let's say they manage to survive. But with every new generation, the collective knowledge and experience is going to go down. And at a certain point, humans are going to be more like salmon or mayflies, and they won't be humans any more. Mammals don't really do spawn and die.
And this is all assuming something interesting, which I think the show assumes too. That the human brain changes in adolescence. We didn't always believe this, and in some ways we still don't. But that must be the case for social breakdown here to make any sense.
If age doesn't change the brain, then puberty wouldn't matter. These children would become "adults" after experience and then they'd essentially die of old age if they made it. In 300 years, they'd basically be aliens who happened to look like human children. They might not be advanced, but they would have matured.
But we tie maturity to puberty for a reason. Humans do start getting more mature as they hit puberty, mentally as well as physically. So what the show is positing is that prepubescent children wouldn't go on mentally developing as they attained more years of experience. That if we somehow lived as children our whole lives, even if we lived to be 300, we'd never mentally grow up.
Something to ponder as you try a child as an adult, wonder why we let 16 year olds drive but don't trust them to vote until they're 18, or any other age restriction. I'm not at all saying that it's true, by the way. If all children lived 300 years, they might develop differently because of increased experience.
We judge age by both how long you've been alive and also development. For humans, our metrics tend to line up pretty well. Who knows how they'd line up if everyone lived 30 times as long and died at puberty. While I don't think there's any way to add new members of the population, for the length of the society I'd be interested to see how life on Planet Beatnik would fare. If they weren't all killed by Reavers, starvation, disease, accident, poor child rearing, or suicide.
Pretty strong meat there from Star Trek.
