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?

Do you only measure life in monetary terms?

Obviously the scenario you describe would be soul-destroyingly shit.

I haven’t read children of men but watched the film. It’s really horrifying, I think it’s quite accurate to what would actually happen if there was mass infertility. Complete breakdown of social order as there is no future beyond the next maybe 80 years. I think everyone saying it would be good is silly. We’re just animals whose brains expanded rapidly but the same primal functions to survive, procreate and not die alone are there. I mean, actually imagine it. We’ve a loneliness epidemic which literally takes years of people’s lives but sure, you’d be happy with robots. Don’t think so x

But you are applying human/mamallian sentiments to the situation.

the idea of restoring/healing the planet is highly subjective, throughout millions of years our solar system and earth as we know it has undergone extreme changes, even from ice ages and the like to eventually settle down to something hospitable to life. But that’s probably a pure coincidence, and not necessarily the natural order of things? The universe doesn’t really care whether or not Earth remains hospitable to our current forms of life or whether it becomes covered in a dense cloud of smoke. Maybe new life would thrive.

this is why I find it bizarre when people try to argue that the world would be a paradise without humans, maybe if you have nice visions of fluffy mammals running around enjoying a lush green paradise. Highly appealing and understandable to us, but the thought of an earth with extreme temperatures and climate hosting different forms of life is meant to be bad. Still projecting our human desires. Even without us in the picture the existential threat is too much, we have to project it onto fluffy animals.

man I need to actually go get ready for work… ha

I think when we talk of preserving life we are thinking of the world as we know it now. Over millions of years there has been a load of extinction events, no ice on the poles, times where we wouldn’t have been able to breathe the air. Life evolves and adapts even if the current species can’t survive the changes. The very first life poisoned itself by producing so much oxygen it changed the atmosphere content.

I’m not suggesting we don’t try to change things we know are causing harm but that life in some form will survive and a new era will begin, it just won’t be one we would recognise and perhaps not one we would survive in. However if we want to protect the life we have on this planet now then decreasing our population wouldn’t be a bad thing.

I guess there would have to be a way of sterilisation for babies of the last cohort which would have to continue for at least 20/30 years unless older people would be required to do so too. I think the urge to reproduce is too high for there to be now slip ups otherwise. Imagine being the only child in the world because somehow your parents had slipped through the net. All countries would have to do it too, so global sterilisation.

The other way would be to do what we are now and pricing youngsters out of housing so they never get the chance to have a home to raise a family in! My adult children are worried they will never be able to afford a family.

Hopefully, everyone with pets or livestock would set them all free rather than leaving them to die alone in houses and fields.
Nature is not benevolent. It's not going to.be like Zootopia without humans. My ddog( and most other pets and livestock) would be ripped apart and eaten within days.
Animals know how to keep themselves alive and their babies. That's it. They dont know that their baby rhino is one of only 3 in the world or whatever. They aren't going yo say to a lion ' don't eat me, we're going extinct' They wont know or care that they will be going extinct. And if the planet is better without humans the best way to kill humans off is to destroy the environment as much as we can. It will be almost impossible to get everyone to agree not to have children. It won't be impossible to burn fossil fuels, have enormous wars, and pollute the atmosphere to such an extent that fertility drops off a cliff. So do anti natalists want that? The only species on earth ( and probably the universe) who has the ability to appreciate the bigger picture are humans.

This self-centred view that we know what is best for 'our' planet and should try our utmost to stop future generations from existing, whilst wanting to enjoy our 'winding down' years is really quite shameful to me. I understand the question is hypothetical, but this is basically the position being taken more and more.

@DramaLlamaBangBang is spot on that if we really believe this the most logical thing to do is to destroy our planet as quickly as possible in the hope that we make ourselves extinct.

I do weep for the younger generations who are too fearful and self-loathing to have families, families that for some of them might bring great happiness and meaning, because of a belief that human beings are a parasite that must be exterminated.

If we were to inflict great pain on humanity with mass sterilisation it would be in the aid of, what? Other life to flourish. Such is in itself great pain and suffering. That is nature, survival, procreation, death.
Life and humanity literally is the point because without human beings the concept of meaning ceases to exist at all!

Developed countries are already doing that naturally.

Indian and China are also doing that naturally.

Educate your women to at least the end of primary school and the birth rate starts to fall.

Also population growth us driven atvthe moment by people living longer, not birthrate. The global birthrate has been more or less stagnant fir 50 years. So if you want to reduce populations really quickly you need to stop people living so long.

Wouldn't that be an interesting novel in itself? Only the offspring of the truly wealthy and self-serving can reproduce - so there is a small civilisation with a massively high proportion of extremely tall and clever sociopaths and psychopaths with utterly selfish and ruthless attitudes to society.

What would happen?

(Maybe there is a novel about this too. I can imagine someone like Will Self or Edward St Aubyn could have fun writing that.)

@DramaLlamaBangBang True! So perhaps rather than reducing birth rates we should look to reducing lifespans. No medical intervention after a certain age? It also saves money which is a concern for many!

The thing is those people would not want to be doing the drone work themselves ( cleaning their homes, nursing, getting rid of their own rubbish) so there would need to be a 'servant class' too.

Maybe a drone class born in labs and raised en masse to serve? Perhaps genetically modified to be both sterile and biddable. Or frontal lobotomy at an early age. Or (as in Children of Men) import your drone class, then eject them at the end of their peak working years.

Referring back to the economic factors mentioned already above, we were heading (v slowly) into a mad system where only the very rich and very poor could afford multiple children. This could be tweaked either way. Social engineering is strsaightforward to do. Moral issues driven by economic expediency. Governments can reward or deter children. They can do the same with mothers WOH/SAHM.

I agree with @Shrimpi about nature, it's not Disney, it's "red in tooth and claw". Nature would carry on evolving, birthing, killing and dying. That's all.

I have to agree with you and I'll be honest - the people I have seen 'promoting' antinatalist views are without exception depressives trying to look like 'the cool kids'. Playacting that they accept the inevitability of our destruction because of their own fear, anger, exhaustion and nihilism. In other words they are mentally ill and without hope. They are afraid and tired of the circumstances of their own lives.

So yes I feel desperately sad for them too and sad and angry at the socio-economic circumstances that have brought them to this point. Creativity and hope are natural human conditions. We need to give people the basic things they need to thrive so they can be creative enough to solve the problems we are facing. Also to wean people off mass consumerism which is an addiction destroying us.

@landris

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

I couldn't agree more. The human race is completely superfluous to Earth's ecological system and food chain. It takes far more than it contributes and what little it does contribute is solely to try to undue the devastation it has caused.

I honestly can’t imagine wanting to bring a child into this planet we’ve already destroyed anyway.

It's quite possible that climate change will cause a significant collapse in the global population through lack of food.

@Whatevershallidowithmylife In what way is the planet already destroyed?

@anxietyaardvark it is also quite possible that it won't.

@Autumnweddingguest Clara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro explores what happens when one group of people becomes gene-edited, another not, and then where humanoid robots might fit into that scenario.

Bit that's how thought experiments work.

Remember Covid, where we all had to stay in, worrying about whether there were enough workers to do the essential jobs like electricity and food, well the end years would be like that, without the Covid loans and supermarkets keeping going. Not enough people, not enough carers, not enough hospital staff, pretty grim all around. We would die quicker though.

But we value Earth's current (or rather, very, very recent) ecology because it is idyllic (beautiful, meaningful, fascinating and above all liveable) for human beings.

If you take away the human perspective, is current earth objectively better than post-anthroposcene "degraded" earth? There are many species which would thrive on ruined earth - we're just not among them. When we talk about the earth being ruined or degraded, we mean for us (and animals like us), which is a fundamentally human-centric perspective that no longer makes sense if we cease to exist.

Can't you see the nonsensical irony in wishing humans extinct so that conditions idyllic to humans will prevail?

Totally agree @shrimpi The air breathed by the dinosaurs with huge levels of carbon dioxide was ideal for them. Ice ages were ideal for wooly mammoths. The only reason to do anything about environmental destruction is to ensure the planet is habitable for as long as we exist on it. We are a blip in the lifetime of the Earth. Something will replace us, and the earth will trundle on until the sun dies, with or without us.