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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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"But we have a hundred years before the environment collapses!?"
Theoretically yes, but there's that sticky point of what happens to us when the environment is ~~collapsing~~ dying.
Not to mention empathy for the next generation.
Honestly, while it's very much an unpopular opinion, at this point I think it's unconscionable to add to that next generation and I definitely secretly judge my peers who do so as making an incredibly selfish decision likely dooming that child to a quite depressing future by the time they reach adulthood themselves.
Also, one of the worst things you can do for the environment in a developed nation is have a child.
No need for human extinction, but 90% population reduction would be helpful. Environmentally speaking.
Yeah, I've had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked "how long will death continue?" And the response was "as long as women bear children." Followed by her asking if she'd done well in not having any.
It's interesting how across history it's inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and "be fruitful and multiply" as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
I could not have worded it better myself. It is absolutely a survivorship bias. Those who believe it is good to have children will have children and pass on those beliefs, while those of us who recognize the inherent ills of procreation do not.
And then due to the relatively small number of us, we are written off as psychopaths or pessimists for acknowledging the realities of the situation.
It’s sad, and it’s extremely annoying. But at the end of the day, I’m at least doing my part by not throwing another person unwillingly into this mess to be both a perpetrator and victim
It's pretty arrogant to assume that your pessimistic outlook on the future is the only valid or reasonable one. Human quality of life, on average, has pretty consistently improved since the industrial revolution.
I'm hopeful that as a greater proportion of people aren't scrambling to survive day to day more of us can turn to the issues of environmental protection and remediation.
Me choosing to hope for a Star Trek future is no less valid than your belief in the inevitability of the Mad Max future.
Broadly, human quality of life has pretty consistently improved for as long as there's been humans actually.
It's happened faster than before in the past 100 years.
It's happened quite a lot over just the past 20 on many measures.
It's accelerating rapidly.
But alongside that acceleration and improvement has been knowingly playing a dangerous game in maximizing short term gains in exchange for long term consequences on which we developed technologies to increase the potential debt we were taking on for short term rewards.
Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina that averts disaster and delivers us from paying those debts we've brought on ourselves.
I too hope that's the case.
But to me it's irresponsible and presumptuous to gamble somebody else's future on that hope.
"The world is going to end" has been a line for as long as there's been lines to be written down.
And yes, it's consistently a false prophecy.
But "not one stone will be left of these buildings around you" tends to be correct given a long enough time scale and in places in the world today it becomes true for neighborhoods or cities literally overnight.
The world may or may not end. But what we really need to worry about is the survival of civilizations under significantly increasing pressures. Because "the end of civilization" is potentially much, much worse to go through than the end of the world. The sun explodes? It'll be over quick. There's famine so bad people start eating their neighbors? Nuclear fallout poisoned the land around you? The oceans die?
Maybe not the best environments to raise a child, even if humanity overall will ultimately survive.
A baby born today will have microplastics inside their body when born and we've seen the most rapid change in global environment in millions of years, seeing changes that previously took tens of thousands change in decades. And they'd be born into a world with a so called "Doomsday clock" at a second away by scientists symbolically showing how close we could come to an end for an entirely different reason from why many other scientists today think we have less than a century of civilization.
The past performance may no longer be the best predictor of future returns.
Well said.
I think we agree on the state of the world, and even that civilisation is worthy of continuation. So the question is, which is more likely to end civilisation, an entirely preventable apocalypse that we already have all the tools needed to perfect against without even materially losing quality of life?
Or no children ever being born again? Because I was responding to people suggesting that this was the only reasonable option.
Individual choices not to have children seem extremely unlikely to suddenly reflect a universal avoidance of having children, and given the world was working pretty fine with populations of only a billion people in the past, especially given automation is coming along which can replace a large number of people within the workforce, even a global drop in population to 50% or 20% of what it is today would likely be more than fine. Sure, a drop to 0% for a prolonged time would spell the end of humanity, but that assumes conditions and forecasts don't improve such that people resume having kids.
As for "we already have all the tools needed to protect against without any material loss of quality of life" - not sure what hopium you rely on, but that's patently not the case for most of the existential threats we face.
In theory we have had the technology to end all wars and have peace on earth since at least the invention of the drum circle and singing Kumbaya. Weirdly that hasn't happened yet.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
You said it was unconscionable to have children, so by your metric no-one should have children. If you'd like to walk that back and concede you were being hyperbolic feel free to so!
Again, I agree with you, I agree that a smaller population would be a Good Thing. But the shock to society/civilisation of even a 50% reduction in birthrate could be just as savage as the impacts of climate change. We'd be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
I also think that there's not a lot of point to civilisation if we aren't aiming for people to be happy and fulfilled, and for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment. You dismissing that of hand and judging those people for wanting what makes them happy seems pretty mean and uncaring.
Again, I agree! But I do think that the existing technical solutions should be proof against the despair that you are peddling.
Yes, I agree, right now no one should have children. If in a decade we have benevolent AIs doing work for everyone and universal basic income and peace on Earth, this should probably be reassessed. But as of this moment right now, everyone should not have children. What I'm saying is that your argument this would have higher odds of disaster than other things is baseless as we both know that not everyone will stop having children even if they should.
We literally already are back at that with some of what's going on with the euthanasia program in Canada in practice, even if that wasn't in the intended design.
Sure about that?
Well I'll keep in mind that cures for cancer in mice should be proof against despair should anyone I know or love come down with it.
Yes, if your loved one comes down with a cancer that can be cured by applying existing technologies, not ones that have been tested in mice, but ones that are currently being used successfully to treat patients you should not despair!
Worry? Stress? Generally be concerned? Fucking riot if the government starts limiting/preventing access to that treatment? Yeah sure, that would be a healthy response. But despair? No way!
Oh, so there are scalable technologies to bring climate change back to decades earlier levels in existence already and not just in theory in research? Is that what you're claiming?
Not to reverse current climate change, but we aren't living in the Mad Max reality just yet.
But the technologies needed to seriously limit climate change and achieve Paris agreement commitments do exist. It's really just employing solar, wind, and batteries at scale, electrifying what we can, and using biofuels for the rest.
And the IPCC plans don't require people to give up having families for a generation.
Science supports the pessimistic Mad Max future, not the Star Trek one. So it’s not arrogant at all. It’s foolish to think otherwise.
Nonsense! The IPCC reports include perfectly reasonable science based action plans to address climate change and prevent the Mad Max future.
It's politics that supports the current plan of emitting as much as possible as fast as possible. It's people like you who have given up and embraced doomer pessimism that make it so hard to build the political captial needed for change.
You understand the problem. You should know that it's solvable. Don't give up before the fight is over!
I worry that this news just makes people apathetic, which is counterproductive.
Ah yes, lets end life to save life
Choosing not to unnecessarily create more life isn’t ending life.
It’s being responsible.
And all the other creatures we are killing off right now not to mention their impact on us.
If there is one, tbh.
We also had decades to prevent climate change from happening and look how well we tackle it now.
I'm confident we'll have a plan to prevent that collapse that's due within 100 years, but to keep it reasonable, its execution will be spread over 100 years, and we think about starting in 80 years providing everything goes well in the meantime.
Chill, you can see it's all taken care of!
Yup! I can just go about my life knowing that someone else will definitely take care of that pesky climate problem. No worries!
*promptly forgets the world's fucking dying and buys a latte
That's my plan. I didn't ask to be born into this shit. The day the human race is wiped out is the day the Earth can finally start to heal, and maybe produce a species that will do better.
While I agree with the premise, I don't agree with just giving up. I'll be doing what I can to save what's left until it's gone and after that I'll be trying to restore it until the oceans die and I suffocate, along with everyone else. Seeing how many other people are still driving cars and taking flights, I doubt my input will have any effect but that doesn't matter.
That one person that is still trying to fix this shit could be the difference between annihilation and salvation. Don't give up.
I don't think we'll be around to see the oceans dry up. We probably will be around to see water wars, floods, and civilization collapsing. Look on the bright side, you're probably more likely to die from cannibalism than lack of oxygen.
The oceans won't dry up, the life in them (specifically phytoplankton) will die off when the water is too acidic and hot to support them. Phytoplankton produce the vast majority of the oxygen we breath and without them every oxygen breathing species on this planet will die, which obviously includes us. They are called a keystone species for a reason.
I misread your comment, sorry. Also, I didn't know that, thanks for explaining. So shouldn't the surplus of trees and plants due to high CO2 offset that a bit? Besides that, I think that society will collapse and the majority of the population will die off before we ever see that happen, but you are right, some of us might be around for that.
IIRC terrestrial plants only create ~20% of the worlds oxygen, and this percentage is further reduced with areas being 'developed'. Not to mention all the land that is used for forestry and agriculture. Plants are growing faster since they can create sugars at higher rates with all the CO2, but I highly doubt it's enough balance out the potential loss of marine ecosystems. Losing those wouldn't only affect oxygen levels, but it would also affect any and all animals that depend on those ecosystems as a food source. Thus, plants that rely on animals for pollination or spreading seeds will eventually die off too, leaving only plants that rely on wind even further reducing oxygen production.
Any meaningful change will cost a tremendous amount no one is willing to pay. Profit at all cost.
It reminds me about how people talk about not caring about how they treat their bodies because they'll die early anyways, but they don't realize that what it really affects is their quality of life as they get older