I’m referring, of course, to humans.
This is going to be a bit weird. I want to talk about a possible response to climate change, as if it were a possibility, but knowing that it’s not. So the question is not whether these things aren’t possible, but rather why is it that something obvious and possible (in principle) is impossible to implement, thanks to … human nature? Or is it bellicosity? Or, what…?
Currently, we are about to bake in our waste heat and CO2. It may wipe us out as a species, but it’s also true that it’s maybe not too late. There are many crazy things about the situation, first and foremost that global capitalist enterprise and oligarchs made the decision to obscure the science regarding what was coming, because they preferred to be comfortable and rich, rather than good custodians of the billions of lives that are in their power. But the other part which is a bit odd is: did they assume that they’d be able to wangle a way out of the problem, using their wealth, and leave everyone else to suffer (a typical oligarch/dictator move) or are they so vicious and corrupt that they just didn’t care about the world they are leaving to their own descendants? Putin, for example, has 3 daughters that he doesn’t talk about much – does he assume that they’re going to be toast like everyone else’s kids, or does he just not care? That’s a hell of a father figure, isn’t it? I don’t have any answer to what’s going on with people like that, but I want to make the argument here that they’re going to murder the planet, and other aspects of human nature (is that a thing?) are going to be their weapons.
Read this carefully: all of our energy and pollution problems scale with global population.
I’m not saying “ugh, breeders!” [that may be a post for another day, because I do have serious doubts that having children is moral or rational] but simply: if there were half as many Americans there would be more or less half as much demand for gasoline vehicles, beef, beer, guns, etc. If there were 1/4 as many, there would be more or less 1/4 as much, etc. One of the big concerns in climate management, right now, is “what happens if the developing world tries to develop a US-style lifestyle?” because Americans are so good at consuming stuff that if everyone did it, the planet would quickly become uninhabitable. That points, inevitably, to the idea that – yes – American oligarchs are adopting the strategy of “get it while you can” because “if I don’t do it, somebody else will!” i.e. they’d rather see the planet dead than run by Black people, or democrats, or non-christians.
If you accept [and I think it’s incontrovertible] that pollution scales with population, then everything else is straightforward. Now, normally, when someone starts talking about drastically reducing the human population, they are usually some kind of fascist or racist who has a specific population they want to reduce, and they probably want to use some horrible method like nuclear weapons. But that just shows they are horrible human beings, because – in case you hadn’t noticed it – humans age and die just fine on their own. If all humans stopped having children, there would be no more humans on earth in 120 years, except for the descendants of the oligarchs who would, naturally, cheat. But let’s pretend, arguendo, that that’s solvable. If it were, then our pollution problems are also solvable. Easily.
Stop reproducing freely and replace right to reproduce with a lottery. Let’s say that the population is stabilized at 50 million. Whenever someone dies, a new ticket is added to the lottery. Anyone wishing to have a child has to play the lottery and, if they win, they are allowed to have a child. Simple. Next step: pick a nice part of the planet that has a decent infrastructure, central transportation, and agriculture. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, France. France does have a pretty good power-grid, as goes Germany. Note, I am not saying “kill everyone on earth but the Germans” – no, I’m saying “there is no Germany, there’s just the place where everyone lives and, until we get this arrangement in place there’s going to be a bunch of transportation issues, sure, but it’s a one-way trip.” Live wherever you like, while the new system establishes itself, but you’ve only got your life-time. So, if you like your home in Texas, stay there, and die there when you die naturally. Nobody needs to come and kill you – the reaper is remarkably even-handed about that. But anyone who wants to have a child and continue humanity has to live within the borders of what used to be France, because the rest of the planet is going to get pretty wild, pretty fast when there are no more humans on it. Let the rest of the planet lie fallow. Ideally, as people aged out and prepared to depart, they’d turn the lights off, let the cows loose, free the animals in the zoo, cap off the oil wells, shut down the reactors, etc. Move the great art from the Met in New York, if you want. It doesn’t matter – there will be plenty of room in what used to be France. Or grab a great big apartment in New York and live in it as the power grid fails, Central Park becomes dangerous as the tigers begin to take over, and there is no longer any modern medical infrastructure as the people who used to keep all that working moved to France, or got old and died. There is no need for a cataclysmic war, just a great winding-down and relocation.
One pleasant side-effect of my impossible scheme is that racism and nationalism would disappear more or less instantly. Everyone would be part of the collapsing humanity, and the only thing that would matter would not be someone’s skin color, but “do they have a ticket to make a child?” if someone is interested in keeping humanity going.
A terrible signal
Too weak to even recognize
A gentle collapsing
The removal of the insidesI’m touched by your pleas
I value these moments
We’re order than we realize
…in someone’s eyesA frequent returning
And leaving unnoticed
A condition of mercy
A change in the weather – The Talking Heads
There are a lot of other neat benefits of the gentle collapse scheme: there would be no need for commercial aviation, since France has a great rail system and eventually there’d be noplace to go, except for authorized scientists and explorers who wanted to sail across the oceans and take pictures, etc. There would be some value to having a telecommunications grid but it’d be much smaller and cheaper – something satellite-based would serve the whole country fairly easily. I imagine there might be some technologies that were banned outright because they’re too costly in terms of the environment, but also costly technologies help encourage the production of oligarchs. If there are no Lamborghinis to drive, and having vast wealth doesn’t bring a better life-style, maybe humanity wouldn’t need to produce a caste of people motivated by greed. What’s the point? We’ve already seen how much damage that does. This is a somewhat tenuous argument: the US medical system, which is a mess that is built to serve the wealthy, serves to encourage people to want to get wealthy, because it’s so bad otherwise. If public services were fair, maybe some of those pressures would be removed. If all of humanity collapsed down to 50 million people living in France there would still be plenty of people to work, plenty of opportunity, art, culture, etc. But in return, humanity would have to give up some of its ambitions: having a vast nuclear arsenal, having ethno-nationalist homelands, exploring and polluting space, having wars and perhaps churches. That’s a cultural bias of mine: I would prefer to see the roman catholic church re-branded as a bowling league and otherwise stripped of involvement in politics. Let them have big bowl-offs with the muslims. If the action is good, I’ll even watch and cheer.
This is a scenario I’ve been thinking about for over 2 decades, when I first learned about CO2 and the greenhouse effect. I have to admit that my first idea was a pretty typically American thought, “what if we just nuke everyone else…?” but then I realized, gradually, that it’s not necessary. “A gentle collapsing” over a period of 50+ years, and humanity would be too busy building a new human economy in whatever part of the planet was selected, to need to have wars.
Of course, we all agree [do we?] that it wouldn’t work. There’s no way that 7+ billion humans would tolerate having their “right” to reproduce taken away from them. They would cheat, lie, and fight. Never mind that we can present some good challenges to the idea that reproduction is a “right” any more, when it should be a “privilege administered fairly” – humanity, collectively, would recoil at the thought. And, as far as I am concerned, that would be completely irrational. One could easily argue that, under a system such as I describe, any given parent’s child would experience much better outcomes than under the current global regime, which, I remind you, is run by people who actively want to kill us all. Or, who don’t care about what happens to their charges, to the degree which there’s hardly a significant difference. Under the system I am proposing, children would be valued and would have every opportunity because they were not going to be levered into working for a capitalist to enrich the capitalist – how can anyone object to that? Well, the 7+ billion who lose the lottery would object. “But I have a right to have children! As many as I want!” Why? Where does that right come from? You have the ability to have as many children as you want, but do you have the right? And, even if we grant that you do, so what? Those childrens’ lives will be abbreviated by the climate change that is already going on. Let’s say, conservatively, that climate change is going to seriously fuck up 5 billion lives. Now, what is the “right” to have a child worth unless you’re an oligarch who believes they can shelter their progeny from the fate they chose for everyone else’s? That’s where I start to get confused by the argument that people have a right to reproduce: global warming is saying, clearly and unequivocally: “no, you do not.” The fossil fuel industry already took that ‘right’ away and it’s not coming back for 100,000 years or so.
A couple years ago [has it been already?] I read Chixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series. In it, there is one moment when humans try to evacuate a few of the “best and brightest” from Earth and the results are exactly the kind of thing I see here: the people who were going to be left behind destroy the ark-ships before they launch because damn it if I’ve got to die, you’re not going to live. That’s an exceptionally dark view of humanity but it seems to hold. After all, the coal-burning countries of the world are saying something similar: “we’d rather kill you than stop eating steak.” My imagined scenario is actually more rational than that, but humanity’s got its agenda all wadded-up by nationalists and fat cats, and is going to just keep on making the easy decision which is the worst one.
If there were only 50 million humans, they could all drive Suburbans and eat beef all day and not affect the planetary atmosphere. The problem comes when that lifestyle is expanded out to billions. Humans can’t seem to see that, which means that – as a species – they’re going to probably wind up filed under “too stupid to live.” I remember when a paleontologist who was giving a tour of fossils once said “velociraptors were probably too stupid to survive” – that was back in the day (1967) when the prevailing theory of “what happened to the dinosaurs?” was that they laid their eggs in the open and sneaky, swift, mammals ate them and the dinosaurs went extinct. Now we know it was global climate change of a particularly sudden and long-lasting sort. What’s coming on us is self-inflicted and scales with population. Maybe we’re too stupid to survive.
Pullman’s Paradise
Whenever I encounter someone who starts talking about colonizing space, “in case something happens to Earth” I have to keep from screaming at them, and try to dissect them gently. There are, right now, trillions of pounds of human meat, animated and walking around on the surface of the planet: all that is not going to get lifted out of the gravity well and sent to ${someplace nice}. And it horrifies me that people trust an oligarch like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk – both of whom have demonstrated a phenomenal disregard for laborers – to save humanity. A Mars colony run by Jeff Bezos is going to look like Pullman or Fordlandia in Brazil. They’ll be the god-kings and everyone else will exist to serve them. Personally, I can’t see what’s the point of being god-king of a Mars colony, but there’s something wrong with the power-hungry that makes them unable to see past their short-term aggrandizement. Why would the people left behind on Earth stand around and wave as the rockets left, carrying Jeff Bezos and his brood to safety? It’d be much more likely that someone forgot to tighten some critical bolt on the rocket. Which, by the way, is why I really respect Wally Funk’s bravery for planning to ride up into space in the same rocket as Jeff Bezos. First, there’s the chance of something unintentionally going wrong and then there’s the axis of intentionality.
Evacuating the “best and brightest” is a bad strategy. The only thing that would have a chance of working is a fair, random, lottery. Except oligarchs would cheat. FFS- republican politicians drummed up fear of COVID-19 vaccines while simultaneously jumping to the head of the line. There is no hope for a species that can produce republicans.
50 million humans is probably not enough to maintain a civilization that could manufacture Suburbans. (Or cell phones.) Most items of modern technology require raw materials from all over the world and many, many different specialized industries to produce. And other industries to create the tools used by those industries. And support industries and delivery systems. Etc.
I doubt that 50 million humans could even support the sort of industry you’d need to provide fuel for those suburbans. Oh, and you also need to maintain those suburbans — so a bunch of other industries.
It would be an interesting exercise to figure out what level of technology you could support with such a small population. It would be very different from what we have now. Or what the minimum population would be that could support our current levels.
Sometimes I like to contemplate a different alt-history scenario: what if, as human population exploded in the 20th century, certain religious institutions had been rudely ignored and contraceptive technology allowed to develop and spread in pace with all the others?
We’d probably have half the numbers now, and half the ecological crisis – and maybe even enough time to change the culture and economy before reaching acute survival crisis points.
Continuing Allison’s thoughts: If we reduce the population drastically, and with that inevitably drive down the level of civilization, how do we ensure the preservation of the knowledge about why it is important to keep the number of humans that small? Because if we don’t humans will inevitably repeat the cycle.
“I’ve got a little list, no one will be missed.”
Allison@#1:
I doubt that 50 million humans could even support the sort of industry you’d need to provide fuel for those suburbans. Oh, and you also need to maintain those suburbans — so a bunch of other industries.
It would be an interesting exercise to figure out what level of technology you could support with such a small population. It would be very different from what we have now. Or what the minimum population would be that could support our current levels.
Pre-industrial France was burdened with an aristocracy and church, which were a huge drag on the economy. But they survived. So we can argue with some confidence that 1750s tech was achievable.
Next: we are talking about a time in which human scarcity is not venerated. Maybe advanced cancer therapies aren’t worth it. I’ve often felt that the most important inventions since pre-industrial times are bacteriology and virology. Understanding infection and food cleanliness makes a huge difference and does not cost much – it’s just knowledge. Perhaps a civilization could be built in which advanced interventions were not offered and public health was, instead, a baseline of care and comfort. Wars are the most wasteful thing humans do, and they also drive demand for high tech – do away with them and it’s a huge leap toward sustainable economies.
Of course a pandemic could wipe out a civilization such as I describe. But so what? Climate change will absolutely wipe our current global civilization out and it may be too late. So, one thing or another wipes humanity out. There would still be humans in my scenario (the science observers in the ruins of NYC just became the new evolutionary bottleneck).
Another thing I like about my scenario is that governments are playing this fake-ass “we will be reducing emissions after we grow them massively after the next 50 years.” In my scenario, the gentle collapsing would start immediately and in 50 years the human population would be less than 1/2 what it is now and falling rapidly. So would emissions. Pax Gerrardian: cover Spain with solar panels. Who cares?
A better way of framing the objection to my scenario is “it’s totalitarian as hell. You’d need a ruthless enforcement regime.” Yeah, so? Again, climate change is going to also affect the totality of humans. The big contradiction is making the necessary enforcement regime non-monstrous. Especially given that the current global system is monstrous and is governed by elites that have demonstrated there is no level of violence they are unwilling to deploy. Nobody should fool themselves: they are going to kill everyone. I’m talking about lifeboat scenarios – it’s just “lifeboat France.”
I don’t think that humanity is particularly stupid – the problem is that humans, both by culture and biology, have long sought to both have children and improve their material standard of living in one way or another. For most of human history, those drives have generally served humanity well. Now, in the last few decades it has become clearer and clearer that these drives are becoming self-destructive to humanity and destructive to many other species as well. The problem is that people can’t “stop on a dime” and change their basic drives in such a relatively short period. The kinds of changes that are probably necessary to reduce the impact of climate change mean that people not only need to have far fewer children, but that they have to either accept reduced standards of living or accept that they will never be able greatly improve their standard of living. This is true not just for a small wealthy elite, but for most of the planet’s human population. It’s really a hell of a bind, and rather than contempt, I have great sympathy for collective humanity that finds itself in such a terrible situation.
No, it’s much more complicated than that. You’re looking at it from the perspective of the US, which is an extreme outlier.
Firstly, and most obviously, there’s the “standard of living” aspect – if you’re willing to accept a different standard of living, things change a lot. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something like 100 rural Bangladeshis to 1 middle class American
But wait! Most of Western Europe has a standard of living at least as good as the average American, and in fact arguably quite a bit better. Yet we do it at around half the per-capita energy and resource usage, because we don’t all drive fucking tanks, eat steak for every meal, and build golf courses in the fucking desert.
Now don’t get me wrong, I do think population is a very important part of the equation – but if you don’t take the complete fucking insanity of the USA as your baseline of normal, it’s not nearly as big a deal as if you do. And there are plenty of reasons to think that we could maintain a decent standard of living at a much lower level of impact – unless you really believe that spending two hours a day stuck in traffic in something that gets the same mileage as a Model T so you can spend eight hours a day doing a bullshit job in a badly designed office block is an essential component of living a good life.
Anthropologist cockroach giving a lecture:
‘As we know no mammals can be intelligent. Some archaeologists have looked at the large internal (eurggh goes the class) skull of some primates and have hypothesized that the extra space was not air cushioning to help them swim since we believe they were hairless. Nor morphology caused by runaway sexual selection. But filled with brain matter. (really, exclaims the teachers pet gosh she has pretty antennae) But they wiped themselves out by changing their environment in such a way that they could no longer live, just like bacteria eating their way across an agar culture plate.
Those archaelogist are most likely wrong.’
I think the big issue with this plan (and also the issue with reducing emissions, slowing the spread of COVID, etc.), is getting everyone on board and willing to cooperate without trying to game the system, go rogue, or use violence to establish their own system.
I feel fairly certain that some (likely religious and racist…) group is going to look at that 50M number, and decide they can take their sect, fuck off to the ruins of Japan, New Zealand, Borneo, Madagascar, or wherever, and hide out, go militant-quiverful, and kill any potential observers, etc. And then when they hit whatever number (150M?) set off to former-France to annihilate all the remaining humans and establish their group as the sole surviving humans on the planet.
The single biggest change in all of human history: birth control. Women don’t have to have babies any more. Availability of effective birth control is the most important factor to rein in population. Native born Americans and many other western nations are already operating below replacement rate. If women have a chance, we’ll fix population.
lochaber@#9:
I feel fairly certain that some (likely religious and racist…) group is going to look at that 50M number, and decide they can take their sect, fuck off to the ruins of Japan, New Zealand, Borneo, Madagascar, or wherever, and hide out, go militant-quiverful, and kill any potential observers, etc. And then when they hit whatever number (150M?) set off to former-France to annihilate all the remaining humans and establish their group as the sole surviving humans on the planet.
I agree. That’s also what I’d expect. Which is what makes me ask myself, “are humans too stupid to survive”?
I’d bet that everyone who read this posting immediately thought, “it won’t work because humans aren’t that cooperative/rational/decent” – which is probably correct. It’s something to think about whenever a humanist says “cooperation is what makes humans humans.” Well, just as often human cooperation is in the form of “you hold him down while I cut his throat.”
rwiess@#10:
If women have a chance, we’ll fix population.
I wish women did get a chance to run things. I don’t know why, but I imagine there would be less wars.
And look at the backlash from the forced-birth lobby, “god wants us to be fruitful until Malthus laughs out loud.”
Dunc@#7:
Firstly, and most obviously, there’s the “standard of living” aspect – if you’re willing to accept a different standard of living, things change a lot. I forget the exact numbers, but it’s something like 100 rural Bangladeshis to 1 middle class American
Fair enough. Meanwhile, China is bragging (it is an impressive accomplishment) that they have brought 300 million people up from poverty. I’m not sure what that means but I think it means lots of iPhones.
springa72@#6:
I don’t think that humanity is particularly stupid – the problem is that humans, both by culture and biology, have long sought to both have children and improve their material standard of living in one way or another. For most of human history, those drives have generally served humanity well. Now, in the last few decades it has become clearer and clearer that these drives are becoming self-destructive to humanity and destructive to many other species as well. The problem is that people can’t “stop on a dime” and change their basic drives in such a relatively short period.
I think it’s safe to agree that there are those drives. Yet, we see that among the wealthy they have kids later and they have fewer (probably because if they have more than 1 or 2, the kids start slaughtering eachother Blackadder-style) But if the wealthy and powerful are able to exhibit that behavior it makes me less inclined to believe we’re looking at an instinct/drive, than a learned behavior.
I actually do think we could stop on a dime, but we won’t. Because we’re not able to see the situation clearly enough. In another thread, Gerrardian tried to blame the Greens for the lack of nuclear deployments, which makes about as much sense as who I blame: the science fiction writers and SF TV shows, which represent an endless technological ramp that allows us to avoid the horrible mis-steps we are making. I am pretty sure it’s SF and TV that give people the idea that, “oh we’ll just figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light, some day” and basically these goobers think that a decent way to respond to a climate crisis is to run away and leave the dishes in the sink.
Again, it’s more complicated than that.
The right to reproduce comes from the right to bodily autonomy. You can’t interfere with people’s bodies to stop them having children.
Of course I don’t think it’s ethical to exercise that right.
Stupid, like intelligent, is probably too poorly defined to be a useful concept, but humans are definitely too short sighted, self interested, and incapable of thinking at the necessary scale to survive.
Meh.
Why is it supposedly important that humans survive into the indefinite future?
I’m also reminded of a bit I read about some of the finches in the Galapagos… I think it was a book titled “Beak of the Finch” or similar?
Anyways, it was a bunch of researchers observing finches and such over the span of several years. One anecdote(?) was about one of the groups of finches that primarily drank cactus nectar. An enterprising individual or two learned that they didn’t have to wait for the flowers to open normally, and could peck/tear them open prematurely and get first shot at the nectar. A great strategy for the individual on the short-term… But damaging the flower like that rendered it useless for reproductive purposes. So, while this finch or few were currently doing great with their new strategy, they were damning themselves and their relatives, as they would likely drive the cacti they were dependent on into extinction before long. Struck me as very human-like…
Whoa, excellent post! Yes, it’s time to get really pissed off.
Now for just a few random, unconnected remarks:
– this is also interesting, and infuriating, as it shows the behaviour you were commenting on at full strength:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/05/sixty-years-of-climate-change-warnings-the-signs-that-were-missed-and-ignored
– 50 millions humans are very likely not enough to preserve what is human culture all over the planet, there would be untold loss of, well, everything. Also, not sure about putting everyone in the same area.
– rather, I kind of like China’s one child policy, of course without the idiotic selective abortion of girls (another example of self-harming behaviour in spades). People are happier and population goes inevitably down, and rapidly: I was surprised at the projections for Chinese pop for around 2100!
– but I am not very optimistic. I prognostifuscate the following: nobody is going to do anything really serious until something horrible happens. What, I don’t know: could be a megastorm obliterating a major city, or giant fires barbecuing thousands of people in one go. At that point, remediation will start, but of course at that late point it will be much more painful and teethgrindy. And it’s quite likely that some areas on the planet will become and stay death zones (wet bulb temp > 35°C).
I have no certainties, but fear? That I do have.
I think it should be obvious by now that Putin has no qualms about making the world a worse place, so long as his own local position of power is enhanced. So of course he doesn’t care about leaving a worse planet for his daughters, so long as they are relatively high in the power structure of whatever is left of society.
Maybe you should erect something like this:
The Georgia Guidestones
Instead of saving 50 million, strategically killing the right 50 million people would have almost the same effect.
Pollution does not in fact scale with population, but the richest 1% produce well in excess of the poorest 50% combined.
But of course given that you’re in that 1% it’s easier to kill the 99%, am I right?
Dauphni@#22:
Instead of saving 50 million, strategically killing the right 50 million people would have almost the same effect.
Probably not. For one thing, killing people is work, while letting them age out of the population is pretty natural. The important point there is that we could be dramatically reducing emissions in 50 years without doing anything except not being stupid.
But, by the way, did you notice that my whole posting was a suggestion for how population could be reduced without killing people? Here, I bend over backwards and exert whatever cleverness I have to demonstrate that it doesn’t need to be a massive collapse, and your comment ignores that, then:
but the richest 1% produce well in excess of the poorest 50% combined.
So what? In 50 years there wouldn’t be a 1%.
But of course given that you’re in that 1% it’s easier to kill the 99%, am I right?
No, you’re completely wrong, and you’re trying to make a dig at me along the wrong axis. Again, here I am proposing a process (I know it won’t happen) that would rid of us the 1% as a side-effect and be inherently fair, and you’re making incorrect assumptions and then trying to snark at me about them. That’s a pretty half-assed performance on your part, in my opinion – you’ve so widely missed your target it’s embarrassing even me.
Reginald Selkirk@#21:
Maybe you should erect something like this:
The Georgia Guidestones
That’s amazingly cool! How did I not hear of these things before now?!
I’m a fan of granite and that’s a lot of granite!
You’re right, I shouldn’t have posted that, and I apologise.
I’m having a particularly bad-brain day, and if I was more lucid I’d never have clicked that post comment button.
It’s just that I’ve seen way too many people post ecofascist kill them all bullshit lately, and I needed to vent.
Don’t know why my brain short-circuited on your posting when, as you say it’s trying to be the polar opposite from that.
Again, I’m sorry.
Women’s reproductive systems don’t have a magical on/off switch. Some become pregnant when their chosen contraceptives fail (do you suggest forced abortions?). In addition, they often cannot conceive on demand at any specific point of time when some ruling politician decides that they have had too few babies this year and they want an additional X number of kids born by next January for the yearly quota (many people, despite being fertile, have tried to conceive for years with numerous spontaneous abortions until they finally get a baby).
How do you propose to implement your idea? Everybody who is interested in biological children can apply for the lottery at the age of 16, and whoever loses the lottery gets sterilized at 16? (How else can you avoid forced abortions among teens? You have to sterilize all the lottery losers early.) And whoever wins is allowed to have one child within the next two decades? But really, most teens have no idea whether they will want kids a decade from now. It makes more sense for people to decide about whether they want children or no later when they are already older and capable of taking care of a child.
But if you allow older people to apply for the lottery, we can get a situation that a woman experiences a traumatizing mandatory abortion at 22, and then some years later she wins the lottery when she is already 39, and now she has to struggle with conceiving before menopause.
Also what happens if a woman who won the lottery falls in love with a man who lost the lottery? Or vice versa? Or maybe only women can participate in the lottery and pick any guy they like? Either way, we get some weird family arrangements and incentives for people who want biological children to pay money to lottery winners for giving birth to their biological kids. Example: a woman who won the lottery gets money to carry to full term a test tube baby with some specific person’s DNA.
I just checked the latest data. Right now in my country the birth rate is 1.6 kids per woman. Back in 90ties the number fell down to 1.1 for a while. If you just want fewer kids to be born, access to contraceptives, education, and career options for women do the trick. There is no need to implement some draconian population control laws from above that mandate forced sterilizations/abortions and dictate which people are allowed to have how many children and when.
Historically, politicians have attempted to force people to have more children (Latvia right now; I think Nazi Germany also wanted blonde and blue-eyed women to have more kids). They have also attempted to force people to have less children (China; various eugenics movements across the world). The attempts to enforce such laws were always barbaric and violated people’s bodily autonomy. I just don’t see how your lottery could be implemented (enforced) differently without all the emotional pain and suffering that comes with political elites messing with their citizens’ bodies.
@ Adreas
Vasectomies are mostly reversible, and sperm donation is pretty easy.
That said, I actually agree that this can’t be ethically implemented.
The best option is to point out that people should not have kids, and support them in making that choice. But then you still have to support the kids that people choose to have, because it’s not fair to punish them.
Being an amoral arse definitely makes a lot of these questions easier.
dangerousbeans @#28
Vasectomy reversal success rates depend upon numerous factors, but these procedures are far from guaranteed to succeed. Besides, the more years have passed between a vasectomy and the attempt to reverse it, the lower the chances of success. Also, like with all medical procedures, vasectomy and vasectomy reversal have risks (bleeding, infection, pain). Conclusion: it would be stupid for politicians to enforce mandatory vasectomies only to allow people to reverse them afterwards.
As for sperm donations, forbidding lottery winners from choosing their preferred partner adds another layer of trauma on top of forced sterilizations/vasectomies/abortions.
Besides, sperm donations are not exactly that simple. At least the legal option. My boyfriend volunteered some years ago. He got a huge amount of medical tests, and afterwards he needed to show up to the clinic once every week for several months in a row. Oh right, he also wasn’t allowed to have sex before the sperm donations. There was plenty of hassle. Then again: free medical tests can be a cool perk for poorer people without health insurance (assuming they can find free time for regular clinic visits). In addition, from what I have heard, people who want to conceive via artificial insemination also experience plenty of hassle compared to conceiving by just having sex with your spouse at home.
Indeed. A former friend once told me that all women who still don’t have children after 30 are deeply unhappy and miserable. I have been told again and again that everybody must want children and that kids are the only thing that gives happiness and fulfillment to people. When I searched for a surgeon who would agree to sterilize me, everybody kept telling me that I will regret my decision. Nonetheless, despite all this breeder social pressure, many people still don’t want kids (myself included), and I live in a society with fewer than 2 kids per woman.
Imagine a world in which instead people accepted the idea that a happy life without kids is possible. That not everybody must breed. That kids are an immense responsibility and commitment, thus only those who absolutely want kids and love spending time with children should consider becoming a parent. A world in which drawbacks of parenthood were discussed openly and parents didn’t get shamed for admitting that they regret having had children. A world in which religions stopped telling people that God wants them to procreate and disapproves of birth control.
When given a choice, people don’t even want to breed that much.
But no, instead of proposing social changes that would motivate people to choose to have fewer children, even on Freethoughblogs we get discussions about how somebody from above (politicians? wealthy elites?) could undermine people’s bodily autonomy and treat them like cattle.
The fact that people are having too many children is indeed a problem. But how comes that the first solution people can come up with involves stripping people of their bodily autonomy and subjecting them to severe emotional trauma? If too many people want children, determining who gets to procreate via lottery would be fair. But how can you enforce such a system after the lots are drawn without traumatizing people who lost the lottery as well as those who won?
Actually no. Mandatory sterilizations/vasectomies/abortions would be hard to implement and impossible without first creating a totalitarian dictatorship. And totalitarian regimes (like empires) often don’t last that long, because citizens often attempt to overthrow them at first opportunity.
Show me where I called for killings or mass sterilizations?
That it ought to be obvious that people need to control their reproduction, and can’t, is the point. It’s why we’re going to face massive die offs and possible extinction. While that’s happening, some jackass will be prating about people’s right to have kids – a right which is going to be abrogated by reality, and which the wealthy and powerful will arrogate, as usual.
It’s stupid to argue about rights in a burning building but that’s humans for you.
Also: upon what is this “right” to have children based? I see the “capability” to have children but that does not automatically make doing so a right. Besides: reality does not respect that right, so perhaps its merely wishful thinking.
But how comes that the first solution people can come up with involves stripping people of their bodily autonomy and subjecting them to severe emotional trauma?
My first solution was to appeal to people’s rationality. Hardly stripping people of body autonomy.
The reality of climate change is going to provide plenty of emotional trauma and stripping of bodily autonomy. It’s inevitable at this point. Perhaps we’re in a lifeboat scenario and/or perhaps humanity should just do the moral/libertarian thing and party on until the music stops and everybody dies of expressing their liberties? Humanity appears to me to be too stupid to live.
But how can you enforce such a system after the lots are drawn without traumatizing people who lost the lottery as well as those who won?
That’s the point. Given something that is an obvious, non-violent solution to a problem, there will be people who cheat – cheating on themselves, basically, and who’d rather doom the species than make a smart decision. Of course people would cheat or get violent. Humanity is incapable of concerted action even when the writing is on the wall.
Don’t ask me how to enforce such a system – it’s going to enforce itself anyway; it’ll just be uglier than I suggest, and more violent. Is that what you prefer? Your preferences make no difference in a malthusian collapse, anyway. Basically “you can do this the easy way or you can do it the hard way” and sure, some libertarian jackass is going to say “what about my freedoms?!” That’s got a lot to do with how we got into the situation in the first place.
Next up: I have a right to drive a gas guzzler because I own one?
rwiess
It’s more than that. Practically all industrialized countries have birth rates per woman below replacement rates
…
Dunc
Re:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility
Many of the supposed co-founding factors are co-caused. The key is to change the poor parts of the world into something resembling the industrialized parts of the world.
…
Andreas Avester in 27
Yes.
…
Marcus
This assumption is false.
Instead of some ridiculously unimplementable restriction of birth rates based on a lottery, the solution to overpopulation is to improve the quality of life of poor people, and then they’ll have less kids. Already the birth rate per woman in basically every industrialized country is below breakeven. As long as current industrialization trends continue, then birth rates will continue to drop, and specifically worldwide population is prediced to peak at about 10 or 11 billion people and then start to decline.
What was achievable? Sustainability? No. Around that time, populations in Europe were drastically growing, and soon the available farmland in Europe wouldn’t be enough to sustain Europe’s growing population. This led to wars over literal bat and bird poop in the Americas so that they could be transported back to Europe to be used as fertilizer. It was only the invention of the Haber process that averted this calamity. The Haber process, along with the transistor, are arguably the most important human inventions ever.
It might, but it probably won’t. It might cause the deaths of millions, maybe a billion, but unless the cathrate gun goes, it won’t end human civilization. To end human civilization, you need something bigger than climate change. Climate change is a serious enough problem (a very serious problem), threatening the lives of billions of people (mostly non-white) without the need to exaggerate.
I see you disagreeing already? What’s the mechanism for human extinction? What’s the mechanism for ending civilization? The only mechanisms that can do that are 1- most of the world gets literally too hot to survive, and that’s not going to happen (minus an extrem cathrate gun scenario which causes further greenhouse gas emissions), or 2- it becomes impossible to grow food, and that’s also not going to happen. Also for billions of people dying, you need some mechanism, and it’s unlikely that climate change and global warming is going to reach that.
Why not just dump the Greens into the sea, and use nuclear?
So much wrong with this sentence…
Testing
Marcus
Not sure what happened to my comment. Maybe you have me in auto-moderation, or maybe I tripped auto-moderation for some other reason.
kinda tangential, have you seen the computer game The Fermi Paradox?
It’s obviously about alien life, but population and resource scarcity are big themes. It’s also more a zen gardening/story game than an Master of Orion style strategy.
Well, getting no response. Figure I might as well try posting it again with slight alterations to get around the weird auto-moderation.
…
rwiess
It’s more than that. Practically all industrialized countries have birth rates per woman below replacement rates
…
Dunc
Re:
ifstudies DOT org/blog/how-income-affects-fertilityMany of the supposed co-founding factors are co-caused. The key is to change the poor parts of the world into something resembling the industrialized parts of the world.
…
Andreas Avester in 27
Yes.
…
Marcus
This assumption is false.
Instead of some ridiculously unimplementable restriction of birth rates based on a lottery, the solution to overpopulation is to improve the quality of life of poor people, and then they’ll have less kids. Already the birth rate per woman in basically every industrialized country is below breakeven. As long as current industrialization trends continue, then birth rates will continue to drop, and specifically worldwide population is prediced to peak at about 10 or 11 billion people and then start to decline.
What was achievable? Sustainability? No. Around that time, populations in Europe were drastically growing, and soon the available farmland in Europe wouldn’t be enough to sustain Europe’s growing population. This led to wars over literal bat and bird poop in the Americas so that they could be transported back to Europe to be used as fertilizer. It was only the invention of the Haber process that averted this calamity. The Haber process, along with the transistor, are arguably the most important human inventions ever.
It might, but it probably won’t. It might cause the deaths of millions, maybe a billion, but unless the cathrate gun goes, it won’t end human civilization. To end human civilization, you need something bigger than climate change. Climate change is a serious enough problem (a very serious problem), threatening the lives of billions of people (mostly non-white) without the need to exaggerate.
I see you disagreeing already? What’s the mechanism for human extinction? What’s the mechanism for ending civilization? The only mechanisms that can do that are 1- most of the world gets literally too hot to survive, and that’s not going to happen (minus an extrem cathrate gun scenario which causes further greenhouse gas emissions), or 2- it becomes impossible to grow food, and that’s also not going to happen. Also for billions of people dying, you need some mechanism, and it’s unlikely that climate change and global warming is going to reach that.
Why not just dump the Greens into the sea, and use nuclear?
So much wrong with this sentence…
rwiess
It’s more than that. Practically all industrialized countries have birth rates per woman below replacement rates
…
Dunc
Re:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertilityMany of the supposed co-founding factors are co-caused. The key is to change the poor parts of the world into something resembling the industrialized parts of the world.
…
Andreas Avester in 27
Yes.
Well, let me try to figure out what is triggering the auto-moderation.
Marcus
This assumption is false.
Instead of some ridiculously unimplementable restriction of birth rates based on a lottery, the solution to overpopulation is to improve the quality of life of poor people, and then they’ll have less kids. Already the birth rate per woman in basically every industrialized country is below breakeven. As long as current industrialization trends continue, then birth rates will continue to drop, and specifically worldwide population is prediced to peak at about 10 or 11 billion people and then start to decline.
What was achievable? Sustainability? No. Around that time, populations in Europe were drastically growing, and soon the available farmland in Europe wouldn’t be enough to sustain Europe’s growing population. This led to wars over literal bat and bird poop in the Americas so that they could be transported back to Europe to be used as fertilizer. It was only the invention of the Haber process that averted this calamity. The Haber process, along with the transistor, are arguably the most important human inventions ever.
It might, but it probably won’t. It might cause the deaths of millions, maybe a billion, but unless the cathrate gun goes, it won’t end human civilization. To end human civilization, you need something bigger than climate change. Climate change is a serious enough problem (a very serious problem), threatening the lives of billions of people (mostly non-white) without the need to exaggerate.
I see you disagreeing already? What’s the mechanism for human extinction? What’s the mechanism for ending civilization? The only mechanisms that can do that are 1- most of the world gets literally too hot to survive, and that’s not going to happen (minus an extreme cathrate gun scenario which causes further greenhouse gas emissions), or 2- it becomes impossible to grow food, and that’s also not going to happen. Also for billions of people dying, you need some mechanism, and it’s unlikely that climate change and global warming is going to reach that.
Well, let me try to figure out what is triggering the auto-moderation.
Marcus
This assumption is false.
Instead of some ridiculously unimplementable restriction of birth rates based on a lottery, the solution to overpopulation is to improve the quality of life of poor people, and then they’ll have less kids. Already the birth rate per woman in basically every industrialized country is below breakeven. As long as current industrialization trends continue, then birth rates will continue to drop, and specifically worldwide population is prediced to peak at about 10 or 11 billion people and then start to decline.
What was achievable? Sustainability? No. Around that time, populations in Europe were drastically growing, and soon the available farmland in Europe wouldn’t be enough to sustain Europe’s growing population. This led to wars over literal bat and bird poop in the Americas so that they could be transported back to Europe to be used as fertilizer. It was only the invention of the Haber process that averted this calamity. The Haber process, along with the transistor, are arguably the most important human inventions ever.
Well, let me try to figure out what is triggering the auto-moderation.
Marcus
This assumption is false.
Instead of some ridiculously unimplementable restriction of birth rates based on a lottery, the solution to overpopulation is to improve the quality of life of poor people, and then they’ll have less kids. Already the birth rate per woman in basically every industrialized country is below breakeven. As long as current industrialization trends continue, then birth rates will continue to drop, and specifically worldwide population is predicted to peak at about 10 or 11 billion people and then start to decline.
What was achievable? Sustainability? No. Around that time, populations in Europe were drastically growing, and over the next century or so, the available farmland in Europe wouldn’t be enough to sustain Europe’s growing population. This led to wars over literal bat and bird poop in the Americas so that they could be transported back to Europe to be used as fertilizer. It was only the invention of the Haber process that averted this calamity of mass famine. The Haber process, along with the transistor, are arguably the most important human inventions ever.
It might, but it probably won’t. It might cause the deaths of millions, maybe a billion, but unless the cathrate gun goes, it won’t end human civilization. To end human civilization, you need something bigger than climate change. Climate change is a serious enough problem (a very serious problem), threatening the lives of billions of people (mostly non-white) without the need to exaggerate.
I see you disagreeing already? What’s the mechanism for human extinction? What’s the mechanism for ending civilization? The only mechanisms that can do that are 1- most of the world gets literally too hot to survive, and that’s not going to happen (minus an extreme cathrate gun scenario which causes further greenhouse gas emissions), or 2- it becomes impossible to grow food, and that’s also not going to happen. Also for billions of people dying, you need some mechanism, and it’s unlikely that climate change and global warming is going to reach that.
Why not just dump the Greens into the sea, and use nuclear?
So much wrong with this sentence…
It might, but it probably won’t. It might cause the deaths of millions, maybe a billion, but unless the cathrate gun goes, it won’t end human civilization. To end human civilization, you need something bigger than climate change. Climate change is a serious enough problem (a very serious problem), threatening the lives of billions of people (mostly non-white) without the need to exaggerate.
I see you disagreeing already? What’s the mechanism for human extinction? What’s the mechanism for ending civilization? The only mechanisms that can do that are 1- most of the world gets literally too hot to survive, and that’s not going to happen (minus an extreme cathrate gun scenario which causes further greenhouse gas emissions), or 2- it becomes impossible to grow food, and that’s also not going to happen. Also for billions of people dying, you need some mechanism, and it’s unlikely that climate change and global warming is going to reach that.
It might, but it probably won’t. It might cause the deaths of millions, maybe a billion, but unless the cathrate gun goes, it won’t end human civilization. To end human civilization, you need something bigger than climate change. Climate change is a serious enough problem (a very serious problem), threatening the lives of billions of people (mostly non-white) without the need to exaggerate.
No it won’t. Climate change and global warming really don’t have that kind of power. I feel like I’m repeating the words of the character from Jurassic Park saying to Hammond “No you cannot blow up the planet, and no you cannot end all life”. Millions dead is highly plausible, and a few billion dead is slightly plausible, but that doesn’t mean the end of global civilization, and it definitely doesn’t mean the end of the human species. To get that kind of level of die-off or end of civilization, you basically need to drastically reduce the potential global food supply or make most of the planet literally too hot to survive. There is no plausible pathway to either. Global warming and climate change is serious enough. We don’t need to exaggerate.
Why not just dump the Greens into the sea, and use nuclear?
So much wrong with this sentence…
historically the human population has been limited by disease and food scarcity, not by our intent. whenever the existing limitations were removed the population increased massively, and then would often die when a new limitation appeared.
the history of our species supports Marcus’s view. out population has increased, what, 10 fold in the last 200 years. and it looks a lot like a new limitation is going to impose itself on us.
and lots of people will die.
will we go extinct? probably not, but there are a lot of nuclear weapons lying around. and we have already fought wars over shit, so nuking people over fresh water seems pretty plausible.
dangerousbeans
Stop armchair philosophizing, and look at the actual evidence. The birth rate per woman is already below breakeven (roughly 2.1) in practically every industrialized country. Your armchair reasoning is clearly wrong. Do you care enough to investigate why your reactionary conservative, Green, neo-Malthusian dogma is wrong, and become part of the solution? Or do you want to stay part of the problem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
Oh, I see. If we just assume that nothing significant happens that upsets the decline of fertility the population will level off at 1.5x the current level some time around 2,100, and it’ll all be ok.
We can definitely have 10+ billion people running around with nukes, trying to live a comfortable life while also dealing with the global warming that has already been set in motion. Plus whatever else comes from the extra people.
And its not like wars and conflicts seem to result in increased birth rates.
All of which is clearly wrong.
Instead of some ridiculously unimplementable restriction of birth rates based on a lottery, the solution to overpopulation is to improve the quality of life of poor people, and then they’ll have less kids
The point of the OP is that it’s unimplementable; thanks for agreeing.
GerrardOfTitanServer@#33:
Well, let me try to figure out what is triggering the auto-moderation.
Apparently your massive text-walls of postings are indistinguishable from spam…
It’s not a very sophisticated algorithm; I think it uses repeated word-counts to develop a probability that a posting is spam if it looks a lot like other postings it decides are spam. Once you’ve convinced it, that’s it, it spam-cans everything you post thereafter until I manually reset your spamicity score.
Marcus
I see.
dangerousbeans
Instead of moaning and complaining, come up with a better plan or shut up.
Nuclear power plants are not nuclear bombs. Don’t conflate the two.
It is impossible for a nuclear power plant to explode like a nuclear bomb.
It’s exceedingly hard to make a nuclear bomb from material from a conventional power reactor, and that’s why no one has ever made a bomb from material from a power reactor. It’s cheaper and easier to use centrifuges or a reactor design optimized for weapons material production.
The crossover technology between reactors and bombs is more tenuous than you think, and restricting access to nuclear power will do very little to restrict access to nuclear weapons. Just look at North Korea vs South Korea. North Korea is the most sanctioned and isolated nation on the planet, and they built a nuclear bomb, and they don’t have nuclear power. South Korea is a modern industrialized democracy with nuclear power and without nuclear bombs. Restricting access to nuclear power will do damn near little to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and furthermore, restricting the spread of nuclear power will lead to more economic instability via climate change and via more mundane pathways, and that will lead to wars and instability which is likely to spread nuclear weapons. As paradoxical as it seems, if we want to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, we must spread nuclear power (under a careful international regulatory regime, similar to the one already in place).
Where the fuck did I mention nuclear power? I’m not worried about Iran building a power plant, I’m worried about the US and China.
Well since I don’t have a solution let’s go back to pretending it’s not an issue.
dangerousbeans
What? Excuse me? I’m the one giving solutions. You’re the one complaiming about my solutions and implying that inaction is better than my solutions.