Given overpopulation, maybe China had it almost right. Have as many kids as you want, but only let N survive to adulthood? "Play" weeds them out? Die having fun, better than starvation, better than never to have existed?
(I have two kids, love both dearly, but maybe in 50 years do we reach the stage where an individual life is not this gospel thing but a pragmatic one?)
(Granted how well you do on mile-high monkey bars doesn't predict your usefulness in subsiding global warming, but something along these lines. Perhaps it's time to start the conversation.)
(Granted why should "continuing some random genetic code" be considered "pragmatic" for anything but "continuing some random genetic code"?)
Maybe it's time for a change of Weltanschauung. Instead of having two kids and protecting the hell out of them, have a hundred kids and decide the two you want to keep. Wouldn't this be far more proactive than assuming the two fastest sperm (yours or your partner's) are a-priori the most useful kids you'll ever have?
I guess retroactively in a world of finite resources this is going to happen anyway.
Overpopulation is kind of a myth. Population growth rates are plummeting globally and below replacement in some places. Global population is expected to peak then decline well before hitting the Earth's carrying capacity.
Carrying Capacity refers to an ecosystem's capacity to support a certain population size. It can hardly be said that their earth's ecosystems are sustainably supporting the current human population. We've had to essentially destroy and replace working ecosystems with a regime that now relies on petroleum-based technology (fertilizer, herbicide, mechanization, transport) to raise productivity. We are on borrowed time and now have to rely on new technology to save us before we either run out of fossil fuels or cook the planet.
We've been relying on technology for our salvation since the advent of agriculture, every day trying to fight back our inevitable doom at the hands of one out of a million causes. We may have remodeled our ecosystem(s), but it is still an ecosystem. The term Carrying Capacity wholly applies.
I guess I glossed over the most important bit, which is that it implies a sustainable system. Ingenuity may keep disaster at bay or it may not. Natural resources that took millions of years to develop like fossil fuels, aquifers, and healthy soils are being strained or drawn down by human population growth.
And in other places, the total fertility rate is over 8x.
> Global population is expected to peak then decline
ORLY, "expected" by whom? Is it the same people who expected mosquitoes to be extinct by the end of the 20th century because people don't ride horses anymore?
You're a little out of date. "new analysis suggests that the world’s population will keep rising through 2100, and not flatten around 2050 as has been widely assumed".
There's a lot of problems in your old analysis, including the fact that sub-replacement fertility trends that affected Europe and East Asia aren't catching on in other parts of the world.
As I recall, the argument was that the main breeding grounds for mosquitoes were horse stables and swamps. The horses would be replaced by cars, and the swamps would be drained to make room for highways and factories, thus leading to the mosquito's extinction.
(I have two kids, love both dearly, but maybe in 50 years do we reach the stage where an individual life is not this gospel thing but a pragmatic one?)
(Granted how well you do on mile-high monkey bars doesn't predict your usefulness in subsiding global warming, but something along these lines. Perhaps it's time to start the conversation.)
(Granted why should "continuing some random genetic code" be considered "pragmatic" for anything but "continuing some random genetic code"?)
Maybe it's time for a change of Weltanschauung. Instead of having two kids and protecting the hell out of them, have a hundred kids and decide the two you want to keep. Wouldn't this be far more proactive than assuming the two fastest sperm (yours or your partner's) are a-priori the most useful kids you'll ever have?
I guess retroactively in a world of finite resources this is going to happen anyway.