What would happen if we decided not to have any more children?

[TheGreatIndoors]

Hello

What if society just said one day...humanity is fucked. As of xxx date, no-one is allowed to have any more children. We are going to wind down society and just let everyone die off naturally and not be replaced.

Would people still go to work?

Imagine being the last human to turn off the lights.

It sounds like a dystopian novel - has someone already written it?

Well the planet would breathe a huge sigh of relief in about a hundred year's time, and start to mend itself.

What's not to like?

Exactly! I cannot for one minute imagine that every single person on the planet would comply!

That's the thing though isn't it? The planet wouldn't appreciate our absence, wouldn't experience joy or relief. It isn't sentient. Animals have sentience to a degree, but philosophy would die with us.

Question: would the restoration of planet earth be meaningful if there were no higher intellect to appreciate it philosophically?

I think it would. Imagine the resurgence of beautiful, harmless species if we and our evil ways suddenly disappeared.

Should a magic genie give me one wish, I'd vanish all humans and give the earth back to all other creatures and plants.

I'm not anthropomorphising the planet. But every other living thing on it would (literally) be able to breathe - not with relief - but without us polluting the atmosphere any more.

But maybe that allegory passed you by.

Once everyone in the final cohort of babies were old there would be no medication, food production, sanitation, clean water, gas, electric etc. The final generation would very quickly die of disease and then the world would have eternal bliss. Hopefully everyone with pets or livestock would set them all free rather than leaving them to die alone in houses and fields.

I love nature and am deeply concerned about environmental degradation, I'm just not into queasy misanthropic sentimentality about it.

The natural world, whilst beautiful and profoundly fascinating, certainly is not "harmless" nor without suffering. Eternal bliss?! The vast majority of animals in nature suffer and die prematurely, I daresay generally speaking by being ripped apart by other animals. Nor has every living thing been disadvantaged by human activity.

My point was, if humans aren't around - then nature being beautiful and fascinating becomes less meaningful, as nature does not appreciate itself. In our absence, nature will continue to be a ruthless, cruel bitch (to anthropomorphise!) just as "she" has always been. But without us, there will be nothing fascinating, nothing beautiful - beauty and fascination are in the eye of the beholder and we are the only ones beholding. That's my view of it anyway.

The one thing that would objectively improve would be suffering of animals within the industrial agricultural complex, which would obviously cease without us.

@Comedycook
reading it the way you describe made me feel really funny. Emotional and sad. A world with no children. Imagine being a parent of the last cohort. Knowing your child will never know the joy of children as you have.
knowing one of them could be the last human 🥺

This is what I hope happens. I'm not bringing children into this life!

Yes I agree. I think a world without children would be really sad

@BibbityBobbityToo
what do you think would happen to pets or live stock set free? My old pony would die a slow and painful death. Probably starve to death due to her wobbly teeth, unable to eat grass and keep warm on a freezing winter night. My other one would gorge herself on grass and quickly be crippled lame with laminitis.
Their only hope would be that a feral XL bully would hunt them down and eat them quick

Didn’t a man take his parents to court over this? I think he wanted them to pay all his expenses forever and compensation for his suffering because he didn’t ask to be born or something.

Fast forward into the future and surely human reproduction will need to be restricted. The rate of population growth is terrifying.

China already did that

Nature deals with overly large populations of any species, plagues, climate effects, starvation knock them back or even wipe them out - its just the natural system - its rather marvellous, the world has had many periods and climatic situations, and will have many more long after we have gone.

Just watch a Disney film. You get the same effect without having to commit genocide.

Fascinating topic. I read Children of Men. Also a book by Peter Dickinson (?) called Eva - a girl’s brain is transferred to a gorilla’s body and she watched humans dying out and gorillas preparing to be the new dominant species. It really stuck with me - mad plot, but interesting ideas.

I’m not sure there needs to be particularly overt social engineering. Birth rate is dropping in the developed world and environmental and financial degradation is increasing in the global south which will have the same effect eventually. World population has peaked. I read a year or so ago that CIA reckons China population is much lower than they claim - the countryside is largely empty as illegal migration to the cities has got out of hand (so people are counted twice in census). The effects will be interesting. Life improved in England for survivors after the Black Death - nutrition peaked (eg men were the height they are now and women were taller), workers had the pick of jobs so conditions improved etc. But babies were still born.

How would you enjoy the remaining years? Society would be shutting down, there wouldn't be anyone fit enough left to work in food production, hospitality, entertainment. It would be a pretty bleak existence even if there were robots or enough working people left to do healthcare.

I would imagine we would reach a point where the remaining people were given pills. Like On the Beach (Nevil Chute?). But the last few decades of humanity would be messy for sure.

There wouldn’t be the infrastructure left to manage that at the end. Society would have broken down beyond that level of organisation.

Maybe. But I would imagine the situation would be anticipated as babies stopped. And it wouldn’t be a cliff edge - people die at all ages, not just old age. I think suicide rates could increase, as well as death rates for other illnesses -lots of people would give up sooner. I could see people being issued pills much earlier than the final 2-3 decades. Would still be a grim period though. And almost certainly a voluntary/involuntary euthanasia program for the disabled or incapable long before the final 30 years.

I think there would. It actually would take surprisingly little effort to produce the pills required.

I also think that people would still cooperate as late as possible. In 1500 the world population is estimated to be below 500 million. With todays agriculture that’s going to be easy to feed.
But in 1500 there were functioning societies.

I think there would be mass depression and 'giving up' long before we became physically incapable of caring for ourselves.
I think we underestimate how much we are invested/comforted in knowing that life goes on, that there are new generations coming. Survival of our species is deeply ingrained - we want it, even when we don't know that we want it. Theres a difference I think, in choosing not to have children yourself and knowing there will be no more children ever.
They are a source of our (humanity's) greatest joy and hope. There would be no hope do no point in doing anything.

Wow. This is the most disturbing thread I've ever read before.

The books recommended sound like an interesting read. I always loved On the Beach but I loved that humans still planted their flowers for the following summer by which time they would all be dead. The will to live and create is so strong.