Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SalmonGod]

Downside:  Everyone will be reckless as shit, having very little to lose.  You think people are irresponsible now.  Especially when it comes to kids.  Expect 3-4 children before age 20 to become commonplace.  And you think social pressure to have kids is bad now.  Imagine it being expected payment for 10 years of life.  Population will skyrocket.  Rampant hard drug usage, too.  Get as much pleasure as possible in as short a time as possible, knowing you won't live long enough for it to catch up with you.  Enjoy your overcrowded death rave.  Edgy stuff usually only works when thinking of people in terms of numbers, not when you think of sociological effects.  Yes, I know you weren't serious.

[wierd]

Did I somehow stumble into a Logan's Run movie?

Because it looks like I stumbled into a Logan's Run movie..

Yeah I think that's the one I was thinking of. Either that or the Soylent Green one, I wasn't sure what the title was that I was remembering.

Definitely Logan's Run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run

[smjjames]

Yeah, looked at wiki and it wasn't Soylent Green, though I could see it happening there in order to increase production of Soylent Green.

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah, definitely. Having kids would be a societal pressure. Just like NOT having kids is a societal pressure that some think needs to be enacted.

Three kids before 30 certainly would be commonplace, and encouraged. Discussions would change from when to have kids to whether or not you should ethically be sure to have them before 23 if you ever intend to. Your parents would talk to you about family planning the same way they talk to you about college.

Everyone wants to talk about how we should logically run our society, let's do it. And really, who cares if they have an overcrowded death rave? We could set up zones. Let the police guide traffic in and out. We already have insanely overcrowded sports events, and those are managed with machine precision. Hell, overcrowded Nascar races are basically the same thing. We're talking about a sustainable society based on population control, but now we're doing it in a way that we can contribute to. No blaming others, just our own action. We're basically heroes. You wanna get crazy, let's get crazy.

[SalmonGod]

*Meaning of Life Territory*

Just to address this because I missed it in the shenanigans, my issue with it comes in when society and the planet has to bear the burden as well. Long ago, our ignorance and lack of sophistication and science served as a check on population growth. We've outstripped nature's ability to prevent us from wrecking the planet, seemingly. So I do see literally having a kid year for 5 years, or however many that people start to wonder why, as contributing to a lot of problems.

I agree.  Which is why I said that my personal opinion is it's irresponsible in today's circumstances to have more than 2.  My only contention was applying that universally.  No qualifers.  No "you shouldn't have kids if/when..." or "you should ___ before having kids...".  That's stepping beyond the point of authority that I think anyone can claim legitimacy to, and using concern for children or overpopulation as a vehicle for other unfortunate implications.

[Magistrum]

I all for eating the rich, but I'm stumbling a bit since this stuff seems a lil bit fishy coming from a llama.

[MrRoboto75]

death by 30 w/o kids?

guess my 'sperg ass is as good as dead, then.

[Trekkin]

Three kids before 30 certainly would be commonplace, and encouraged. Discussions would change from when to have kids to whether or not you should ethically be sure to have them before 23 if you ever intend to. Your parents would talk to you about family planning the same way they talk to you about college.

If we're to run society logically, why let them voluntarily have kids at all? Just sterilize everybody, collect gametes, sequence them, then load them into a master gene bank from which we can withdraw whatever combinations are maximally likely to code for hereditary traits we've decided are good while otherwise maximizing genetic diversity. Ordinarily I'd say the next step would be exowombs, but as we're restricting ourselves to wholly extant technology, I guess hire people to serve as full-time incubators and control the maternal microenvironment (and, within a few generations, some epigenetics) that way. Foster them out to dedicated parenting teams and then into school until they're ready to be productive.

Insanity is no excuse for inefficiency.

[wierd]

Barring any epigenetic factors playing a role, this would be a great use for unskilled/untrainable females in the population.  Guaranteed employment.

[Kagus]

I mainly am leery of having kids because I don't really feel like I'm capable of properly taking care of myself, let alone someone else, and I'm also aware of how much my parents' best intentions ended up fucking me over in the long run.

But apparently, according to everyone, the only thing you really need in order to become a good parent is to pop out a kid. Then the magic happens, and everything that seemed insurmountable before just gets done instead. For some reason, I never quite managed to take that explanation to heart...


I have an old friend in North Carolina who got pregnant when she was 17. She was on the pill. And with North Carolina's opinions on abortion, not to mention her family's opinions on abortion and sex in general, by the time she managed to arrange a pregnancy test from an out-of-town gas station where no one would know her and blab to her mother about her purchase, and then arranged for an appointment to discuss terminating the pregnancy, the doctor just told her that she was too far along and there was nothing for it but to keep the child.

Married and with a kid at age 18.

[McTraveller]

The goal is to reduce our effect on the planet,

Although I believe in good stewardship of resources, that's not my goal - so it can't be the goal.

Incidentally - it's quite fitting for a politics thread.  Balancing disparate goals is the quintessential political topic.

[Frumple]

Eh... for what it's worth it kinda' has to be 'the' overarching goal right about now. Otherwise most to all of our species is dead in the relatively near future. Individuals can vary but on a large scale we either start pulling harder on that stewardship or the bottom on which all our other goals rely is probably going to fall out. We can pooh-pooh about it being a generation or two down the line but we're already seeing migration and mass disruption due to environmental shit getting out of hand. Balance with this stuff is effectively suicide.

[JoshuaFH]

I mean, you'd think "preventing the death of the planet" would rank pretty highly on people's priorities.... heck, if all of humanity had a homogeneous utilitarian philosophy, we'd have already maximally terraformed Earth, and probably the Moon, for optimal human capacity while retaining a semblance of nature.

[sluissa]

Someone go check with Elon Musk, see how close he is to getting Asimov robots to take over as gods. (Jumping to conclusion that he isn't one already. That is SUCH an Asimov name.)

[McTraveller]

My argument is philosophical - when words like "this must be our goal..." are used, without any kind of reason why that must be the goal, it just bothers me.  For instance, physics cares not if humans persist or not.

I'm less troubled by arguments like "if we claim to be a utilitarian species, we should..." because that at least has a prior assumption: "if this, then that."  So unless you give me a good argument for "If we believe X, then we should try to preserve humanity" - I will claim that's a hollow goal.

I have my own personal reasons why preserving humanity is better than not, but it's not a "universal" reason.


Regarding robot overlords:  I'm still not convinced any robot-overlord situation ends well for most of society.  I think parts will benefit greatly, but others will either be extinguished or suffer.  Or maybe we'll end up with a world with only 10 million people all living in luxury instead of 10 billion that struggle.