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by ALittleLight 2541 days ago
Having children is immensely satisfying and fulfilling. It's challenging, time consuming, expensive, and productive. All the accomplishments of humanity stem from having children.

The vast, vast, majority of humanity will never accomplish anything that will rival raising children well. The remainder are those who invent, discover, build, and market those things that let us live and have children better.
1 comments
brokenmachine 2541 days ago
>All the accomplishments of humanity stem from having children.

And all the failures.

There's already too many people on this planet for it to be sustainable.

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falcor84 2541 days ago
As one who grew up reading sci-fi such as Asimov's, I would strongly hope that we go ahead and colonise the universe soon. There's a lot more space out there. And perhaps eventually we could live in a simulation a-la Greg Egan.
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mcny 2541 days ago
I absolutely agree that not everyone needs to have children. I'd go as far as to say most people don't need to have children. However, how do we go about changing this?

We demand constant growth in the economy which won't play well with a rapidly shrinking population.

That being said, I'd love to promote the idea that your children are not just your responsibility but mine as well. It is such a primitive tribal idea that I find it strange people are offended by it because it is "socialist".

Personally, I am OK with waves of forced mass sterilization but I understand, because human nature, it will be just as poorly implemented as any war draft so I can't promote this idea.

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brokenmachine 2541 days ago
>We demand constant growth in the economy which won't play well with a rapidly shrinking population.

That ridiculous and frankly insane expectation of constant growth is the reason we're in this mess in the first place.

Also, a "rapidly shrinking population" has never happened so who knows what the effects might be.

>Personally, I am OK with waves of forced mass sterilization but I understand, because human nature, it will be just as poorly implemented as any war draft so I can't promote this idea.

I wasn't suggesting either genocide or mass sterilization, but lets not go too far the other way and pat ourselves on the back too hard for simply making more people, and making vapid statements like, "All the accomplishments of humanity stem from having children".

Those billions of accomplishments are rapidly destroying the only planet we have, so clearly on average every extra person is a net negative.

I haven't had children myself so the effects of all those accomplishments won't be my offspring's problem when I'm dead.

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brokenmachine 2541 days ago
Replying to myself because I found this interesting, so someone else might as well:

>We demand constant growth in the economy which won't play well with a rapidly shrinking population.

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/world-population-ch...

Especially interesting/scary is the "World population since 10,000 BCE" chart.

I don't think a rapidly shrinking population is the problem that we are likely to experience.

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antepodius 2540 days ago
Look at Japanese, Korean, and European birthrates. Look at the birthrates as a function of how 'developed' a country is. The trend is clear- as countries develop, they die. They stop having kids. Even the US, I'm pretty sure, is below replacement rate- without immigration, their population would be going down. If you want to stop population growth and kill off the human race, do whatever it is Japan, Europe, Korea did to themselves and people will stop having kids.
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