- Nov 28, 2001
- 22,205
- 43
- 91
So this isn't serious, just something that occured to me out of the blue today. This is undoubtedly morally wrong and not something that you could ever actually do but it is an interesting thought experiment. What it is is a solution to the world's problem of overpopulation.
The solution? Engineer a virus that randomly sterilizes a random sampling of the world's population. The virus would be engineered so that it had absolutely no other impact on the affected person other than making them sterile or infertile. No side effects whatsoever. The virus would be readily transmissible either through the air or like AIDS via sex and blood. You would have to make sure that the number of people it sterilized was high enough that it made an impact on the world's population but not so high that you needed to have a high replacement rate to maintain a reasonably large population. Also you would have to make sure that the targeting was 100% random and didn't favour any one genetic type over another.
Any individual infected with said virus would probably feel it extremely unfair and cruel but when you look at it from a global perspective over time it has some merits.
The solution? Engineer a virus that randomly sterilizes a random sampling of the world's population. The virus would be engineered so that it had absolutely no other impact on the affected person other than making them sterile or infertile. No side effects whatsoever. The virus would be readily transmissible either through the air or like AIDS via sex and blood. You would have to make sure that the number of people it sterilized was high enough that it made an impact on the world's population but not so high that you needed to have a high replacement rate to maintain a reasonably large population. Also you would have to make sure that the targeting was 100% random and didn't favour any one genetic type over another.
Any individual infected with said virus would probably feel it extremely unfair and cruel but when you look at it from a global perspective over time it has some merits.