What would the world be like if the average human life span is 20 years of age?

Question

note: The current average life span for humans(male and female) is 67 yrs. old(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy)

Answer 1

Life would be frenzy like that of the firefly. Burning and burnt out in a single night.

Answer 2

From a Pro-life fundamentalist perspective perhaps the average human life span already is about 20 years of age. According to them, human life begins at conception. And according to medical science most such 'life' fails to implant in the womb, thus 'dying' within days or hours. According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, their souls have not been cleansed of the stain of original sin, so they cannot enter Heaven, but a Merciful God allows them to spend eternity in a reasonably pleasant Limbo.

Actually Aquinas didn't believe they had souls until they were 'formed' in the womb, supposedly 40 days after conception for boys and 90 days for girls. And there is no scriptural basis for Limbo. According to the atheist William Empson, Aquinas seems to have been a reasonably kind man (I actually suspect he was an unbeliever pretending as much as necessary to avoid getting himself and his writings pointlessly burnt at the stake, but I'm not sufficiently interested to properly research this question). Anyway the suspicion is that he invented Limbo to comfort the parents of unbaptised dead children by falsely and heretically implying that the perfect justice of an infinitely loving but also perfectly just God did not require these souls to suffer eternal agony in Hell. Their position is basically just like any other unbeliever who has had the 'misfortune' of never hearing the Gospel message. The scandalous implication of this doctrine would seem to be that evangelisation would have to be banned, since unbelievers are relatively safe until the Evangelists arrive bringing the Good News of Salvation. Incidentally this Good News, at least according to Saint Augustine of Hippo, is that most of us, through being unbelievers or sinners or both, must suffer eternal agony in Hell thanks to the afore-mentioned perfect justice of the afore-mentioned infinitely loving God (the 'most' bit comes from the Gospels, which state on the subject of Salvation that 'Many are called, but few are chosen').

So if the average human life span is 20 years, then either Limbo or Hell is even more crowded than we currently expect, and we should ask the Flying Spaghetti Monster to advise us on how to profitably invest in property purchases in both locations, though given my suspicions about the heretical nature of Aquinas's teachings, some may feel that Hell is the theologically more sound of the two investments.

Answer 3

Not that much would be different. People would simply have familys by age 13 or 14. Other than that most things would be the same.

Answer 4

our life now would all be crumpled to a span of just 20 years. we will be like animals, having sex at 5 or 7 years, dying at just a glimpse of what life has.

yet, it may not be possible because it would not match to our physical attributes. we look like babies while having sex? 18+ is now 10+?

Answer 5

Civilization would come to an end really fast because most women don't have children until they are in their late 20's or early 30's.

Answer 6

I guess it would mean that everyone would hit their sexual peak at about 4. And by about 15 you would be old and gray. Pax - C

Answer 7

One thing would prevail among everything else if life was that short..........SEX....a lot of it. It's not perverted, it's the truth.