Genesis

[Bruce Bostwick]

On Jul 26, 2008, at 2:38 PM, Jon Louis Mann wrote:

>>> What's wicked about bringing children into the
>> world that you have the
>> resources to support and nurture?
>> Doug
>
> it's wicked because it creates even more scaricities among other  
> children in undeveloped countries whose parents do not have the  
> resources to support and nurture.  would you suggest that we forbid  
> anyone too poor from having children?
> jon

I might.  There, I said it.

If our species were made up entirely of individuals who approached  
decisions, especially important ones like whether it's wise to  
reproduce, with as much thought toward collective benefit as  
individual gratification, I wouldn't suggest that.  But this species  
has proven time and time again that the majority of its individuals  
do, in fact, act only on a motivation of immediate self-gratification  
and very often completely counter to collective benefit, even in the  
case of driving a population explosion that continuously paces or  
exceeds our best efforts at meeting demands for basic necessities such  
as food and shelter, and in the case of creating gross inequities in  
wealth that make virtual Olympic god-kings out of the wealthiest one  
percent or so, and exploit and starve large numbers of other people in  
the poorest parts of the world.

And one big factor of this is a perceived "right to reproduce" that is  
common to most cultures, our own included, that makes it seem  
abhorrent to place any restrictions on how many children any family  
may have.  China has its back farther up against the wall than many  
other countries, and even with its massive population and the strains  
on its natural resources, it has to fight the perception that its one- 
child-per-family policy is some sort of assault on its citizens' civil  
rights.

Yes, if I were to become "dictator of the world", placing restrictions  
on who was and was not allowed to have children would be on the  
table.  I'd likely be despised and hated for it, but I'd still at  
least consider it, if only to give us some fighting chance of a  
managed population decrease.  Reduce the earth's population to 1-2  
billion or so, with the knowledge we now have of agriculture and food  
production, and earth becomes close to a utopia.

The only exceptions I would make would be for people willing to help  
terraform and colonize other habitable bodies in the solar system.   
I'm pretty sure Mars' surface could be terraformed to the point where  
people could live and produce food there without life support, with  
the right approach to releasing the CO2 locked up in the regolith and  
using a series of introduced plant species to convert the CO2 to  
breathable oxygen and jump-start biosphere growth.  With a controlled  
population reduction, the economy could probably support a pretty  
massive spaceflight/colonization initiative ..

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed  
and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless  
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H.L. MENCKEN