Ramifications of a world with static population?

[Vrock_Summoner]

In the world I’m currently running, non-plant beings don’t reproduce. The world’s population is composed of biologically immortal (i.e. don’t age past adulthood but otherwise still vulnerable to death) monsters who reincarnate (losing all or most of their memories) into egg form at semi-random, environmentally appropriate locations around the world (not accounting for magitech intervention) and begin their lives as babies again. As such, the population of the world never goes up or down, and the entire concept of a family unit loses its drive and meaning.

Assuming they have all the other needs and desires of any other being of human intelligence, what kinds of effects would this have on the world at large and the religions, social and government structures, and even whether or not agriculture and technological development would ever kick off?

[Draconi Redfir]

i'd imagine that it would kind of get locked into some kind of culture sooner or later and just sort of stagnate, a lack of new generations would mean a lack of new ideas and people continuing to insist on old traditions and habits. so in the end you would have a society that either doesn't advance or change at all, or at least does so very very slowly.

[Mechalich]

If the people don't reproduce, then they have no evolutionary reason for having a sex drive at all. That, along with the contingent collapse of kin selection and community support benefits for child-rearing are a crushing blow to the development of society from the start. You've taken Maslow's hierarchy of needs and cored out the middle parts 'love/belonging' and 'esteem.' People go straight from satisfying the needs of survival to self-actualization. Also, since no one ever dies and there's no afterlife you've kneecapped most traditional sources of religion.

I imagine people will still group together to support crop production and defense - assuming there are dangerous animals and/or supernatural threats since these people have nothing to fight each other over - and the result is likely to resemble some sort of monastic commune.

[TheStranger]

I agree, stagnation is likely assuming a more-or-less human psychological outlook. What's the starting point, though? Has this always been the natural state of life in this world, or is it something that happened after a society had developed? If the former, what's the origin of life in this world? Some of the very first sapients in existence are probably still around, so they'll probably live about like they always have.

[PhoenixPhyre]

And who (or what) takes care of the babies? Babies are loud, annoying, and need constant care (just ask my friends who have an 8-month old). Without the attachment of family, what prevents them from being locked into a perpetual baby->death->baby cycle? How do they survive to adulthood?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

If creatures are still born curious and try to prove themselves as young adults technology and culture will probably still march on. They reincarnate with their memories lost after all, they need to regain those memories, so their childhoods look a lot like ours.

Except they don't have parents. Maybe creatures can reincarnate into different creatures? That way adults have an incentive to care for children of their own kind they find, it makes their group larger, and prevents groups of their enemies or predators or something getting larger. (Even if a troll always reincarnates as a troll but can change location they benefit from taking good care of the children to get their group up to size, if the children basically just come back whatever happens they don't mind losing a few.) They don 't have anything like evolution to drill that into their head as an instinctive idea, but that's no more of a problem for this aspect of the creatures than for any other.

They might even be fiercely protective of their children. I found someone who will take care of me when I'm old, you find your own. Other creatures or cultures might make raising children a shared responsibility of the group. EDIT: Oh wait, they don't get old, they're all elves. Hmmm...

Not dying in the first few days in this world might become a buit easier if the eggs by some means have good survivability, like say an outer layer of granite, and if people look for them and collect them before they hatch, because they know it's a kid and they want it.

The main thing that you can leave out completely is pair bonding, relationships, romance, sex, the other meaning of sex, everything in that direction. You can still keep parts of it for story reasons, maybe there are cultures that decided the perfect number of adults to raise a child with is two or something, but there's no real reason the world needs it.

Another thing that might get weird is the population pyramid. In medieval like settings large families are often the standard, they kind of have to be because so many children die young. In this scenario children who die young don't add that much more children. Sure, they reincarnate, so those four years they just spend as a kid were extra, but if they die at say 15 or 20 they added a lot more child years to the total. You get the largest families if loads of people die off just around the time they'd start parenting themselves. Like just after a war, there'd be a baby boom.

By the way, the creatures of this world don't really need gender and such, that goes out of the window with the whole pair bonding thing. But if you do have gender, can a male reincarnate as a female and vice versa? Because if they can and something kills off a lot of individuals of one gender, say a huge open field battle kills off a whole lot of men, you get a gender imbalance in the overall population. But if they can't, you're going to end up with a balanced total population but an imbalance in two generations. The generation where the men all killed each other has too many women, and the generation getting hatched soon after has too many men.

If the purpose of the idea is to create a gender neutral society with parenting, technological and cultural progress and relatively small families I think it will work well. EDIT: Very small families, because people live as adults for a very long time.

[Honest Tiefling]

I imagine massive amounts of malnutrition and the inability to settle in non-temperate regions. Without meat or dairy products, you'd need a way to get a food surplus for long winters when plants have given up. It is possible to get complete protein from plant products, but these plants aren't native to most of the world. You also wouldn't have animal products like cat gut or hide.

Unless cows are monsters. In which case I could see a few hilarious incidents where people stab new beings. If they reincarnate, then they're probably sentient. And they forget that you stabbed them!

Through if people's biological impulses go wonky, I imagine trying to murder someone undesirable to get a baby would actually occur. I mean, you kill a few rapists and some people get to adopt a baby. Or if they have no biological impulse to take care of a baby, they are suddenly cursed with the presence of a screaming, wailing poop fiend. Which would probably not end well.

[aimlessPolymath]

Alright, let's look at someone from "birth" to "death". I'm assuming that the culture has stagnated in a stable form, but what is that form?

First off, you have a baby appearing magically somewhere. Where is it? Ideally, it's somewhere where people find it. If not, it dies of exposure or dehydration, and we start all over again. Once it's found by someone, it.... goes into foster care? It needs to be raised somewhere, by someone. Maybe it's a government program? Maybe people volunteer? Presumably, there should be some method of care in the past, before the government was set up, which implies that there is some kind of biological imperative for child-raising at some age.

Once development is done, then... they go into the workforce? Forever? What do people do to get food? People will stay in their jobs until they're forced out or retire (is retirement a real thing, given that it could last indefinitely, or is it just indefinite vacation), so where are job openings coming from? Is the economy communist, socialist, capitalist, what? In any case, expect the people in power to stay in power for a long, long time- once you have power, it's easy to snowball it into future gains, so the current leaders are likely to be very, very old.

[Anymage]

Taking care of babies could be understandable. Accidents would eventually happen to even the most cautious immortal. A "pay it forwards" concept where a community will take in someone who's down on their luck, because they'd want to be taken care of if they were similarly reborn (or if they were taken care of when they were in the vulnerable child state) could easily sprout up. Altruistic aliens like that are not uncommon in sci-fi.

Two other big questions are how much of their past lives they remember, and whether they're more tribally or globally conscious. Do the plains people think of the forest people as part of the same race (possibly even remembering times when they were part of the forest people), or are they something different? If the latter, you could expect to see some understandable tribalism. Human population is indirectly related to land and resources, and humans have a long history of warring over land and resources. If the only way I could have more people of my tribe was to kill members of other tribes and change the environment so that a random place picked on the planet is more likely to be, say, plains, expect fierce competition. If the former, then again expect peace and altruistic alien-ness.

[Xuc Xac]

People still form clans or tribes. The nuclear family is replaced by the creche, a cohort of siblings of similar age raised as a group by the tribe. The "respawn" points become precious resources. If you control more respawn points than your enemies, you can convert them through warfare. You could kill your enemies and they might respawn in one of your tribe's nests. The enemy loses a member and your tribe gains one (they lose most of their memories and you raise them as one of yours).

Over time, the balance will shift. Some tribes will get too small to hold an egg spawning point and no longer replace their losses. They'll go extinct and other tribes will grow into nations. Just think of any real time strategy game with "run away leader syndrome" : once a tribe gets a big enough advantage, it will inevitably outpace those behind it. The rich get richer. Eventually you reach a stalemate between superpowers that can't dish out enough damage to each other to overcome the replacement rate.

[Newtonsolo313]

government would lose a lot of its power to enforce laws because outside of straightjackets its pretty much impossible to keep a criminal from suiciding and popping back up again a few years later unless they lose memories/are a different person biologically
edit: also if memory persists you have some crazy long grudges

[Knaight]

A lot of this depends on the exact mechanics of reincarnation, so I'm going to make some assumptions - that the reincarnation points are at least somewhat predictable, that memory is lost in reincarnation (most to all is a bit vague), and that species is preserved. Given that I wouldn't necessarily expect the loss of the family unit. Rather the family unit would be based on adoptive families, and it's the idea of the generation that really breaks down, with large extended tribes that trace back to shared adoptive ancestors. Essentially, this sort of setup is pretty much perfect ground for tribe and clan structures to develop, and raising children is downright useful for increasing clan size.

As for agriculture and similar, that could easily develop. Raising meat animals from egg to meat to egg again makes total sense, particularly for docile species with predictable egg spawning grounds. This does go out the window a bit if human intelligence truly is standard, as opposed to intraspecies reincarnation working for basically any creature. Plant agriculture could also work pretty much normally, and it would actually be susceptible to long term breeding. These egg spawning grounds also encourage settlement, so if anything I'd expect that to happen sooner.