mageroel said:
Hey guys,
As I was just commenting, I realised something: say we could cure all diseases.
Just stop and think about this for a minute; it would mean that we'd only die of accidents or murder, and dying of old age. This would stress the problems we already have even more, namely the problems of exhausting the planet's resources, as well as the space on it. What would new ethical standards be like? One child for every couple only? Forced abortions after the birth quota has been met (ok, maybe a bit radical, but still)?
Discuss.
I'd say: anti-conception free to get for everyone, if you have health care or not, and combine this with allowing one child for every home (with the exception of twins and the like, as that would be silly to kill off one or more babies).
That, or expand to Mars and the moon.
One child in every home is a bit overboard, at least as a long-term strategy. You're talking about more than halving the human population each generation (since single people, gay couples, people choosing adoption, etc. wouldn't be having children anyway), so that's a rather drastic change. One other thing worth thinking about is that, since you'd eventually have to go back to at least two children on average per couple, it might become quite hard for people to get used to raising more than one child when the norm is one for so long.
Then, as you mention, there's the issue of how you enforce a restriction like that on people. There's no way you're going to get people to voluntarily limit themselves to children like that even with free birth control and education. You might manage it after a couple of generations allowing for some significant changes in societal attitudes, but certainly not right away. Widespread abortion is a poor method of control even if you don't object to it ethically (health problems, cost, etc.). I think the only really reasonable solution would be uniform enforced reversible sterilisation. At that point, you could effectively license couples to have children. Of course here you run into problems of who grants the licensing since all but the simplest schemes (everyone is allowed one child for instance) would allow for some truly horrendous manipulation.
But no matter what you do, people will get around it. The penalties would have to be
enormous such that even the super-rich couldn't ignore them. (Though alternatively, allowing them to breed unchecked for a few generations splitting their wealth among numerous children while other couples consolidate wealth by halving the number of heirs each year is not necessarily a terrible plan.)
And then you run into a problem of motivation. If you try to continue with present beliefs about childbearing that insist that it is such a rewarding experience as to be worth the enormous social, economic, mental, and emotional cost,
many people will want more than one kid. On the other hand, especially once one-child-per-couple becomes the societal norm, if you don't play up this value, having kids at all becomes a tough sell and the population never plateaus (which you want it to do once you get to a reasonably sustainable number).
The key thing to realise I think is that we're talking about drastic societal changes beyond our wildest imagining. As a relatively simplistic example, imagine how no child would ever identify with the Brady Bunch in the same way. Not only would they not be from such families, they would never have even seen such families in real life. We're talking about enormous changes to society that are very hard to predict the full consequences of. Whole swaths of what we consider essential parts of the human experience very suddenly become little more than history.
And what do you do with the people who find a way to have more kids even though they know about the consequences? You could put them up for adoption to be raised by infertile couples, gay couples, etc. But depending on the age that you find the unlicensed children at, using that as a means of punishing the parents could do a lot of unfair harm to the kids too.
Expansion would be an obvious goal and I imagine this would provide enormously more pressure (and subsequent funding) to reaching it, but reasonable expansion beyond earth is still a
very long way away. Even the most reasonable plans put forward would take numerous generations before they could support even a small number of people, much less a reasonable number with a standard of living comparable to earth.
Edit: Regarding increased living standards, some very perilous comparisons are being drawn. Yes, modern countries with a high standard of living tend to have very low birth rates, but that's not universally true and, beyond that, there's an assumption here that this process is perfectly elastic. I'm extremely doubtful that increasing the standard of living substantially would provoke a massive and immediate change in birth rate. That's really discounting the force of tradition and the influence of societal norms in the cultures in question. Beyond that, elimination of disease could never immediately increase standard of living to the degree suggested. If would surely improve it, but it would take considerable time for the most depressed areas to reach anything like most major industrialised nations even without disease.
), could be the type of breakthrough that will significantly increase the level of living standards for all of us across the globe, and would free the tropic regions from the deadly diseases that prevent growth and prosperity there.
