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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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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.