Discussion anti-natalism - who turns off the lights?

[daley]

One of the things I am most proud of is not procreating.

However, if everybody adopted that approach - the human race would come to end rather
abruptly. Billions of old people won't have anybody to take care of them.

I know nothing matters in the grand scheme of things, but its rather sad.

Why am I even thinking about this? Is this a realistic problem? Probably not.
It might be a good premise for a short story though - if you are interested in writing.
How do you get the human race to wind down with the least suffering?

For one, I thought that having no children at all might cause a crash that would be
too catastrophic for the last generation of the human race.
Perhaps to alleviate that, each couple should have one child. This
would result in a more gradual decline.

Still it makes me imagine the life of that last child, the one who would really
turn the lights off for the human race.

I haven't read much about anti-natalism. Do they consider such issues?

 

[Pluto]

 

[Forever Sleep]

I think the world would have to change drastically for even the majority of people to go antinatilist. Two scenarios I can well envisage are- climate change becomes so severe that there are terrible disasters cropping up every other week. If a lot of people directly experience that kind of hardship on a regular basis, I don't see why they'd consider bringing more life here. Or, AI takes more and more jobs. People simply can't afford to support themselves or a family anymore. Maybe if things get too bad for people in general, there will be a greater push to legalise assisted dying.

 

[daley]

I think the world would have to change drastically for even the majority of people to go antinatilist. Two scenarios I can well envisage are- climate change becomes so severe that there are terrible disasters cropping up every other week. If a lot of people directly experience that kind of hardship on a regular basis, I don't see why they'd consider bringing more life here. Or, AI takes more and more jobs. People simply can't afford to support themselves or a family anymore. Maybe if things get too bad for people in general, there will be a greater push to legalise assisted dying.

Those are two scary scenarios, and pretty likely.

Come to think of it, even without these a population decline is probable.

Although the population is continuing to rise, it is expected to go down eventually, as many places already have
birth rates below 2 per woman. Even though this may be centuries from now, I wonder how the world would
respond to a continuing decline. Will the human race decide that we cannot get below a certain threshold, and
start enforcing birth rates above 2 ?

An argument could be made, that even though it is better not to bring people into existence,
the human race as a whole is worth preserving. I could see that happening.
Surely there are plenty of sci-fi stories and movies with that theme of preserving the
human race against a population crash.