Human Reproduction: Should We Continue or Reverse? (As It Relates to Global Warming) w/ Poll

Should We Continue Human Reproduction?

  • Yes - I personally have children and would recommend we continue reproducing

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • Yes - I do NOT have children but would recommend we continue reproducing

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • No - I personally have children and would still recommend that we NOT continue reproducing

    Votes: 3 14.3%
  • No - I do NOT have children but would recommend we NOT continue reproducing

    Votes: 6 28.6%

  • Total voters
    21
Nov 8, 2012
20,828
4,777
146
As it relates to the overall subject of Global Warming, should the human race continue to reproduce and populate - increasingly grow populations across all countries?

Do you feel humans can continue to make this habitable, or are we destined to continue self-destruction of making inhabitable the more humans we create?
 
Nov 17, 2019
12,188
7,324
136
No extremes like some countries and their 'one child policy', but I believe most couples should not have more than one. It should be by their own choice though, not by any law or Government policy. It's becoming more common to have none though, which may be best. There is no question at all that there are too many of us.
 

thilanliyan

Lifer
Jun 21, 2005
11,944
2,173
126
Natural instinct is to procreate, so I'm guessing we will continue doing it. Hopefully we are smart enough not to destroy the planet in the process, but who knows maybe the planet will take its revenge...or maybe some asteroid will wipe us all out.
 
Nov 17, 2019
12,188
7,324
136
One thing we NEED to do though is end the practice of paying people to have kids. No tax breaks or other benefits or incentives after the second kid. No increase in SNAP or anything else. Maybe even make birth costs higher after the second, though I'm not sure that's possible.

In short, if YOU can't afford them, don't have them.
 

nakedfrog

No Lifer
Apr 3, 2001
59,200
13,791
136
I think we should aim for zero or minimal population growth. I have kids, I only contributed genetic material for two of them, one with my previous partner, and one with my current partner (who is firmly in the one-and-done camp).
Having 5-10 kids made more sense when most of them wouldn't live to 18, but I think we're generally past that now.
 

balloonshark

Diamond Member
Jun 5, 2008
6,562
3,031
136
More people more problems.

If I were king of the world I would throw condoms from floats during parades. Birth control would be available to anyone who wanted it. Abortions would be available to anybody that wanted them and anyone opposed can go pound sand. Keep your religion to yourself. People who don't have children or who volunteer to get fixed would be rewarded.
 
Nov 8, 2012
20,828
4,777
146
One thing we NEED to do though is end the practice of paying people to have kids. No tax breaks or other benefits or incentives after the second kid. No increase in SNAP or anything else. Maybe even make birth costs higher after the second, though I'm not sure that's possible.

In short, if YOU can't afford them, don't have them.

You realize you're basically saying to shit on the poor, right?

The majority of tax credits and deductions having to do with children are related to the lower and middle-class. The upper-class, such as the Child tax credit of $2,000 per child phases out at incomes > $200k (Single).

The bottom class is essentially the main reproducing force of the US. The upper-middle and upper classes are the ones who delay for the longest time - hence the background plot of the movie Idiocracy.


I mean, what is the answer then? Tell poor people not to have kids? Sadly hasn't worked thus far.

Over all though, I'm getting a bit off-topic from the original subject. It's not a matter of "How do we reverse reproduction" but overall the bigger question of "SHOULD we reverse reproduction?"
 

vi edit

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 28, 1999
62,483
8,344
126
Wife and I ordered replacements for ourselves. Then I spent $650 out of pocket and got the snip. The US is on a growth decline. I did my part to at least keep it even.
 
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Zorba

Lifer
Oct 22, 1999
15,235
10,810
136
I think we need to reduce population size, for many reasons, global warming and resource useage being the two biggest.

Wife and I have one kid, and I'm morally opposed (personally) to having another. I would be willing to adopt another one, but wifey isn't interested.

I agree with previous poster that incentives for having a kid should go away after the second, but we also have to somehow balance that with providing for kids in need. I think we should offer incentives for sterilization, maybe after the first kid.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
111,125
30,076
146
Overpopulation is certainly a general concern, and I doubt I will have children, have little interest in them, but I do like children and recognize that it is fundamentally important to our species that we continue to have them.

That is, the simplest, fundamental, inarguable framework of Biology. I am a Biologist, so, there I stand.

But why is that something that always takes care of itself?

Easy. Understanding how population systems work, in all known models of life on this planet (yes, all of them), no population of living organism can be modeled as a logorithmic growth system. It's just, mathematically impossible. Explosions can happen that way, briefly for sure, but no living organism can sustain that. Resources are not infinite. And they are shared. ...which adds to the difficulty of their not-infiniti....ness. See where I'm going with this?

The planet would determine our end, or we will, or there will be a pleasant mix of this, including the obnoxiously-possible chance that random cosmic acts could also, indeed, spell our doom, so all the good we can and likely will do--increased agricultural efficiency, addressing overall resource sustainment/waste-production (major factor of that climate change thing), to a point that we can add a nice mix of workable social policies that promote a real paradigm shift in structural, social systems where we have real societal shifts in understanding our actual personal responsibilities within the world, and doing something about it....we are still going to face the inevitablle, geologic, natural order of things as it comes to life-sustainment: we will run out of actual space. We just will. Yes, it could manage to be 10s of thousands of years from now...maybe more, quite possibly sooner though...much much sooner.

Hell, we're only about 200k years (Cro Magnon--so actual Homo sapien) of our life story. (austrolopithecine--aka Lucy--so I think still the first real "us," still living in trees, but doing some field-hopping and only eating nuts and grubs--was about 3.2 million ya?)....that's a geologic fart whistle in life stories. The Dinosaurs wrecked-face, all on their own, for like 100 million+ years! 100 million! (I think it was way more, actually)....then there was another dinosaur-era-length of time (76ish million years ago), before we fricking showed up! ALl the birds and chickens and shrews and sloths and such were kicking ass in all those years. Kicking ASS!

Of course...are we capable of managing ourselves with that sort of efficiency, after having eliminated some 99% of our actual evolutionary checks, that no other animal has ever erased (disease, predators, injury, foraging/hunting food strategies, etc etc etc)...added to a thoroughly-informed desire and need to draw up even more sustaining energy and lifeblood from the same planet? hahahaha, no. No, we would never possibly live that long.

For all of those reasons, and our tendency towards violence and brainless self-destructive competition needs (Actually, one of those self-population checks that we never seemed to eliminate, so at least we have that going for us).

So yeah, there are a great many reasons we can keep this train going for thousands and thousands of more generations, even by not doing the absolute horrendously stupid thinking of "not making Children" (you could always ask the Shakers how that worked for them. Oh wait...you can't), the type of problem that you present, while actually very real, remains outside the scope of our own social structures for self-preservation, and are determined by Biological Law, which basically works on a geologic scale. That's important to think about (and yeah--the potential for space exploration is part of what can keep us going for so long and, yes, potentially eliminate that Biological Law. Eliminate it. It might be one of the very last that we can eliminate...but anyway, that's something else).

Yeah, I dunno. That's how I think, lol. I tend to think about these things on geologic scales, because I kinda have to. (Evolutionary genetics spends a lot of time in the 3-200 mya time frames, just based on lab samples that we can obtain--you know, current species that can be traced back that far...unlike us--so it's the time frame where I spend a lot of my brain-thinking)

TLDR: This is actually a very good question, that is very difficult, and very complicated, but thankfully has one possible answer that is also very very simple: Regardless of whatever natural or social problems a population group or species faces at any given time in its life history, there is but only one fundamental, quantifiable variable that will insure the end of that population: failure to reproduce and thus replace founder generations.
 
Last edited:

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
111,125
30,076
146
I think we need to reduce population size, for many reasons, global warming and resource useage being the two biggest.

Wife and I have one kid, and I'm morally opposed (personally) to having another. I would be willing to adopt another one, but wifey isn't interested.

I agree with previous poster that incentives for having a kid should go away after the second, but we also have to somehow balance that with providing for kids in need. I think we should offer incentives for sterilization, maybe after the first kid.

over time, and not a time we should probably worry about, you don't really want populations going from 2:1 ratios...it's well, it's not sustainable, lol. It also ends up creating several successive generations of increased inbreeding, general lack of diversity (but then it's us: we're actually capable of traveling and thus mixing with all possible pools and haplotypes everywhere, which is something we actually need to keep doing, lol, so again, a factor that doesn't really influence us as much as "being stuck on on island/separated by mountains/etc" does for a lot of world species)

2 kids per pair is definitely a good ratio, but we also aren't thinking about this properly--we treat ourselves unlike 99.5% of known living species, even though we are also part of that 99.5%--we try to call ourselves monogamous. We aren't, biologically, even though this mating strategy provides very real social benefits that seem to work very well in a lot of our structured societies (Even though...yeah, the entire concept only exists for a legal transaction to share land/not murder each other between warring tribes: e.g.: cooperation-seeking! See! Still a real benefit derived from insane misery!)

....so, it's hard to limit numbers to "couples," right? how does that actually work? Lot of folks with lots of partners between them, and kids as well, so while this is something that can easily be ordered in simple population data, legislating it is kinda slippery, because it almost has to be an individual level with a lifelong tracker of "# of term-carried genetic contracts" ...that sorta self-updates based on that "unit's" (e.g individual person) current population (where they've been living for x number of years....lets make it within 15 years, same statistical living zone?), because some human populations will go through challenge periods if they aren't being replaced regularly.
 

Stryke1983

Member
Jan 1, 2016
176
268
136
Part of the reason I stayed at two kids was because the current population level growth isn't sustainable. A gradual decline would make the most sense rather than abrupt changes, although that's obviously easier said than done. Hopefully the population growth in third world countries naturally levels off with increased access to healthcare, education, etc.
 

Roger Wilco

Diamond Member
Mar 20, 2017
4,119
6,151
136
What if automation drastically reduces the need for population growth, or even population sustainment? At some point, the majority of people will simply exist to exist, because nobody has any practical way to employ them at any level.
 
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zzyzxroad

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2017
3,255
2,272
136
Pollution emitted form burring fossil fuels is just one of the negative impact we have on the environment. That garbage patch in the pacific ocean is over 1.6 million square kilometers. I don't see a good answer as the steps humanity need to involve to many people and would be drastic.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
111,125
30,076
146
Pollution emitted form burring fossil fuels is just one of the negative impact we have on the environment. That garbage patch in the pacific ocean is over 1.6 million square kilometers. I don't see a good answer as the steps humanity need to involve to many people and would be drastic.

If people decide to just keep having way too many kids for several generations, we can maybe just start drafting the excess kids directly into "garbage patch remediation" duties. We literally put in about 0.0000000000045% of available human capital and physical effort into that as it is, now. ....so even if that thing grows exponentially, we really just need to increase our current efforts by some 3 or 4k-fold and could at least keep it under control, maybe?
 

Fenixgoon

Lifer
Jun 30, 2003
32,080
10,880
136
Spread the wealth and you will see population growth plummet. I don't just mean that in the US but worldwide.
 
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zzyzxroad

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2017
3,255
2,272
136
Part of the reason I stayed at two kids was because the current population level growth isn't sustainable. A gradual decline would make the most sense rather than abrupt changes, although that's obviously easier said than done. Hopefully the population growth in third world countries naturally levels off with increased access to healthcare, education, etc.
You have to look at this issue globally. The global births per vs death per year will require massive change.

 

zzyzxroad

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2017
3,255
2,272
136
If people decide to just keep having way too many kids for several generations, we can maybe just start drafting the excess kids directly into "garbage patch remediation" duties. We literally put in about 0.0000000000045% of available human capital and physical effort into that as it is, now. ....so even if that thing grows exponentially, we really just need to increase our current efforts by some 3 or 4k-fold and could at least keep it under control, maybe?
I think we need to send people to Carrousel when they hit 30.
 
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dank69

Lifer
Oct 6, 2009
36,088
30,442
136
I have 2 kids and no desire for more.

Population growth rate has been declining for decades and world population is projected to effectively plateau after a few more.

That said, I wouldn't object to a 3 or 4 kid limit. That's fantasy though.
 

Zorba

Lifer
Oct 22, 1999
15,235
10,810
136
over time, and not a time we should probably worry about, you don't really want populations going from 2:1 ratios...it's well, it's not sustainable, lol. It also ends up creating several successive generations of increased inbreeding, general lack of diversity (but then it's us: we're actually capable of traveling and thus mixing with all possible pools and haplotypes everywhere, which is something we actually need to keep doing, lol, so again, a factor that doesn't really influence us as much as "being stuck on on island/separated by mountains/etc" does for a lot of world species)

2 kids per pair is definitely a good ratio, but we also aren't thinking about this properly--we treat ourselves unlike 99.5% of known living species, even though we are also part of that 99.5%--we try to call ourselves monogamous. We aren't, biologically, even though this mating strategy provides very real social benefits that seem to work very well in a lot of our structured societies (Even though...yeah, the entire concept only exists for a legal transaction to share land/not murder each other between warring tribes: e.g.: cooperation-seeking! See! Still a real benefit derived from insane misery!)

....so, it's hard to limit numbers to "couples," right? how does that actually work? Lot of folks with lots of partners between them, and kids as well, so while this is something that can easily be ordered in simple population data, legislating it is kinda slippery, because it almost has to be an individual level with a lifelong tracker of "# of term-carried genetic contracts" ...that sorta self-updates based on that "unit's" (e.g individual person) current population (where they've been living for x number of years....lets make it within 15 years, same statistical living zone?), because some human populations will go through challenge periods if they aren't being replaced regularly.
I agree that we shouldn't go to a widespread one child rule. I limited myself to one to make up for the people have 4 or 5. I do think a gradual decline back to a world population of ~5B would be a good thing. Especially as automation eliminates the need for labor.

Monogamy does have a lot of benefits to society and is likely better for than planet, however I agree that you couldn't force limits on "couples." If you were trying to do it via regulations it'd have to be something like each person gets two half kids. I'd prefer trying to get there by nudging, though, as opposed to regulation.
 

Zorba

Lifer
Oct 22, 1999
15,235
10,810
136
You have to look at this issue globally. The global births per vs death per year will require massive change.

From my understanding the current run up in population has to do with life extension, but the global birth rate is now just slightly below replacement rate. It just people are living longer so there are more total people living at once.