Speeding Up The Human Race In Order To Slow Down

Let's dive straight into a thought experiment. Imagine for a second that your entire life, and the lives of everyone you knew lasted just 24 hours.

8:00 a.m.

You are born on the top floor of a three storey house. At first you are helpless like any other newborn, after fifteen minutes though, you become a toddler and are able to crawl out of the room of your birth and start to make your way downstairs (there's no baby gate).

8:30 a.m.

You are down in a large circular play room, there are plenty of other toddlers there. You are all playing with alphabet blocks and other baby toys placed along the walls. It takes you four hours to play with every toy in the room, by which time you have the appearance of a ten year old child, and you walk down stairs.

12:30 p.m.

You're in the kitchen now and you're starving, you can't stop eating. You raid the fridge and cupboards, you eat anything and everything you can find. By the time you've stopped eating, you have matured to the equivalent of a twenty five year old adult.

4:00 p.m.

You've left the house, but you're still in the back yard, there are other adults there playing some kind of ball game. It looks fun so you join in. Turns out it is fun! You play for ages, until your body can't take any more, so you leave the yard.

6:00 p.m.

You have an uncontrollable urge to mate. Luckily for you there is a happening bar situated right across the street from the house you were born in. You head over, open the door and in you go.

7:55 p.m.

You found a mate, you had sex, she is already pregnant and ready to pop. The two of you return to the house you were born in. You watch your child being born, and then you die.

Time Sensitive Behaviour

OK, thought experiment over, but imagine if the human race had such an agonisingly short lifespan. Our achievements as a species would not be anywhere near what they are now. We simply wouldn't have time to do anything other than eat and procreate.

In other words, time, would dictate our actions. If we jump back into our strange universe for a second and we tweak the rules and say that humans now live for a month instead of a day. It would not be unreasonable to expect human progress to get a little further along the line.

If we keep tweaking the rules until the average human lived about 75 years, we can see the world around us today. However let's keep going, let us tweak away until the average lifespan has doubled. What then?

What about tripled? What if the average human lifespan was now 225 years; what would that be like?

Living Fast And Slow

In Iain M. Bank's 2004 novel The Algebraist, Banks creates a universe whereby the Dwellers are a species that live on a completely different time scale to humans, and thus experience the passage of time in a unique way.

The Dwellers live for millions of years and don't bother talking to quick cultures such as our own. In fact in order to speak to them, a human would need to slow down their metabolism by several orders of magnitude.

The point is that the Dwellers' decisions are based within realities that a quick species just simply can't comprehend.

To create an example let's jump back quickly into our artificial universe whereby humans only live for 24 hours.

We meet on the street and both have around four hours to live. However instead of coming with you to find someone to mate with. I tell you that I'm going to spend the last few hours of my life digging a garden and planting trees that will take many years to grow.

You look at me like I'm mad, as I try in vain to explain to someone whose whole life can be summed up in one day, about the benefits of planting a tree that will take several decades to grow to maturity.

However if we are pinged back to the real world, it is very easy to explain why planting a tree today is a good idea. As we will both live long enough to see the benefits.

The same goes the other way of course, if I'm only going to live a day, and so are my offspring, and my offspring's offspring. Then hey, why not just dump a load of that nondescript yellow chemical into the local river? Who cares? The effects will take years before anyone notices, and I find it difficult to think in years if I only live a day.

Labour Of Love

Of course in the real world we are not all so nihilistic. History is littered with examples of people starting things where they knew they would never see the end of.

Whether that project has been a cathedral or pyramid, or even a community program, we are no strangers to starting projects that will end after we die.

However that is the exception rather than the rule. On and individual basis we tend to only involve ourselves in things that we can start and finish within our lifetimes. And of course we want to do other things with our lives than just one single project. So the scope of our behaviour, and therefore our advancement, is directly linked to how much time we have and how we perceive it.

Speeding Up To Slow Down

In many ways technology is speeding us up, from communications to travel, from banking to education we are reaping the benefits of faster computers and better technology.

When it comes to life extending tech we are still in our infancy. However if we do ever get to the point whereby we are living longer, be that because of tech we put in our bodies. Or technology that allows us to upload our consciousness. Then my guess is that we will be able to take things a little slower and consider the consequences of our actions with a tad more deliberation than we currently do.

Whether it's being a bit more grown up about polluting the environment. Or creating programs that take a long time to come into effect. Our new found understanding of time will help us make better decisions as we ascend to the level of slow species.

WHAT THINGS WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY IF YOUR LIFESPAN WAS TWICE AS LONG AS IT IS NOW? OR MAYBE YOU WOULD BE DOING THE SAME THINGS IN THE SAME WAY? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Title image: Sandy Millar on Unsplash

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