Industrial Civilization Needs a Biological Future | Hacker News Reader

Industrial Civilization Needs a Biological Future

palladiummag.com

19 pointsMelchizedek5 comments

That is some opaque language to say, "it's too expensive to have kids and this may cause the end of technological progress."

"The popular narratives and assumptions about childbearing and family life that undergird anti-reproductive norms are mostly false. The ordinary risks of childbirth are quite navigable and the actual costs of children—instead of those of parental conspicuous consumption to keep up with current standards of respectability—are quite low. It is far easier to combine children with other pursuits in one’s energetic twenties than in the late thirties or beyond.

But most people do not make these decisions based on theory or argument. They do so because their friends and relatives and role models are also happily raising children around them."

That's the core issue here - people being memetic animals instead of thinking for themselves and taking decisions in matters that are (or should be) of utmost personal importance. Ideology won't solve this problem, it may just kick it a bit further down the road, and that's it.

For pretty much their entire history as species, humans did not had to take reproduction related decisions. It just happened, and in both conception and child rearing, the instincts were there to help continue the bloodline. For (what is supposed to otherwise be) a rational being, it was hardly a rational decision. Only now, when the conditions changed enough to sever the effects of this instinctual "olimbical chord", a true exam of rational capacity begins. A lot will fail and much of the current genepool will vanish, but in all fairness, sooner or later it will have to. The article looks ahead, to a far future, where humankind is supposed to face higher degrees of challenge, thus the demands for rational behavior will most likely be higher too. Now may be the best occasion for such a feat. Maybe addressing the factors that hinder reproduction and child rearing (for those that happen to consciously choose it) will render positive effects, but actively encouraging people to have children when they wouldn't otherwise? How could this make sense (from a species level prospective)?

The article offers no solution to developed nations demographic collapse other than ideological brainwashing.

> For decades, we have been absolutely deluged by prophecies of doom and dystopia. From the nuclear threat of the Cold War, to the “Population Bomb” of the 1970s, to claims that “Peak Oil” and climate change will render the future a living hell, to the latest worries about artificial intelligence, there has been a constant drumbeat of pessimistic visions of the future. These forecasts regarding material disaster are typically exaggerated, understate the system’s ability for an adaptive response, and have been consistently proven wrong in retrospect.

The famous "impending disaster was averted, therefore the threat was never real in the first place and all warnings were overblown" school of thought.

I don't know about the particulars of peak oil or the population bomb (too young), but to my knowledge, the threat of nuclear disaster was definitely real, and so is climate change.

Earth Overshoot Day [1] 2023 will be in August, it used to be in October. It should be on Dec 31. Currently, even though humanity may reproduce below replacement rate, we're still managing to overwhelm the planet.

Maybe the first step to saving the author's beloved "industrial civilization" is to make it actually sustainable instead of bullying everyone into having children.

(The singular focus on "cultural decay" as the root cause is also quite telling from which political direction the author is coming from. At least I don't see how the observation that some countries with social welfare also have below-replacement reproduction "proves" that economic factors play no role in the decision to have children)

> Great dreams seem possible again. Expansion through the solar system, orbital colonies, cities on Mars, and the population growing to tens and even hundreds of billions off-world.

I still don't quite understand his weird obsession with population size, but this paragraph also makes clear that he (or the movement he stands for) sees population growth not as a means to avert civilisatiorial collapse but as an end to itself, ideally humanity spreading throughout and populating the entire universe. I find that vaguely creepy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

> I still don't quite understand his weird obsession with population size

I don't know the author's reasoning since it's not included but IMO, a greater population is valuable because it means more ideas and more chances for diversity. (especially with the vast distances of space)

Of course, this reasoning and I'm pretty sure your views resonate with the famous Stephen J. Gould quote:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

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