Anti-life....? bioethics... irrationalism?

Ask and you shall receive

related article....

 

Well I suppose one answer after Texas is done pumping oil is to turn the state into one giant swamp to feed these bugs

 

You're thinking like a centralized Marxist Technocrat. Why do you think we need to plan or prepare for such a transition? Society has gone through 2 great transitions this century already over similar periods of time (30-50 years) and zero planning was needed to manage it. The first was the conversion of 98% of rural farmers into urbanites, with farming consolidating. The second was 50 million cars and 50,000 gas stations along with a fuel distribution system being built between 1910 and 1950 with NO government planning or help. The department of transportion didn't even exist until 1960s.

No, I use Hubbert's numbers (e.g. Hubbert Curve), which are are pessimistic and ultra-left-leaning as you can think. Hubbert is a man who, like Ehrlich, has been predicting apocalypse, and advocating doing away with all money and prices and replacing it with government "energy credits". Every product would have a "energy price" attached to it, and we would "spend" our monthly energy credits on them. Oh, and they weren't tradeable, so all free enterprise would be eliminated. He is the originator of the so-called "steady state" economy idea, where we have ZERO economic growth + zero population growth, all because of his dire (and utterly stupid view) of worldwide resources and how things get produced.

Once prices start to rise, you'll have about 10 years before they become onerous. You're telling me for a Canadian to be given 10+ years to switch cars, it's rough?

Well, we arrived at our modern world of cars, gas stations, electric lighting, computers, dvd players, internet ISPs, et al, without grandiose government plans to "manage" our transistion to this type of society. I know you're in love with centralized government social engineering, but fact is, we don't need it.

Who managed the transistion of everyone from modems and ppp dialup into today's widespread DSL? Did we need government planning for the transistion? What about satellite TV?

Have atleast one ounce of faith in spontaneous order and non-centralized development, ok?

 

LOL I get a kick from your posts sometimes... We'll see but I dont think your 2 ex of transitions are valid comparisons. There were no real impediments to the growth that accompanied them. This is quite diff.

That I have more faith in democratic influence on the market that I think is too manipulated to adapt well in this case or that the oil is only very slowly running out and thus wont cause a sudden speculative frenzy remains to be seen.

 

I have zero faith in government to manage properly an optimization problem with a gazillion free variables. You always think the solution to the problem is getting together a blue ribbon panel of technocrats and putting forth some public policy to vote on. I just don't think any centralized entity can plan something as complex as the transition of a billion people to a new energy system and new modes of transportation.

No one knows what the best solution is. It is better to let a thousand flowers bloom first, wait a few decades for consolidation, and see what takes hold. We need evolution, not design, to solve this problem. We need millions of people trying to get rich and come up with solutions, not a few technocrats with no real stake "designing" five and ten year plans for us.

 

Yeah but what if energy investors wanting to get rich means too pricey energy... Like milking oil as far as they can take it before the market gets upset. What would happen if oil hit 50$ a barrel in a sudden speculation binge and stayed there a few years... Like they did with electricity. Even conservatives here said it takes years to build new capacity. And no one either in gov or the industry sought to build new capacity even outside of cali's ecfo borders until shit hit the fan.

You can screw an economy pretty badly even if only for a time if the oil energy crisis isnt met with vision very early on. You can lose half the car makers on the planet and the others will just take up the slack but with oil theres no real competition. Its more of a cartel really and not just opec.

Thats what the analysts and academics are worried about. They think the kind of tech we need needs heavy and long term r&d to dev an oil counterpart. They say theres little of that going on and the longer we wait the more painful it'll be. This isnt about eco non c02 energy Im talking about. Its retrofiting most major power plants for other carbon fuels and overhauling the oil processing industry to take on other sources like tar sands and coal and waste liquefaction. We cant just pay all that in one fell swoop either. I dont think the labor exists for a quick refit. Im thinking of the ice storm in Quebec a few years ago... it took over a year to rewire some areas. The economy took a major hit.

I know we'll transit there demo but unlike some car company dying like GM because a competitor like Kia innovates or gives more bang for the buck we need a smooth transition here. How much dislocation do you think a heavily indebted and budding world economy can take?

Anyway Im the conservative averse to risk here this time around. Start early and get gov involved. Its not about 'marxist' gov taking over the industry but that will happen if oil gets too pricey.

With the potato glut the local rep recently said he wants to setup an ethanol plant locally (I live in tater country). I just hope hes willing to put up the $ for the nuke plant to furnish the energy to make that ethanol... Think Ill remind him that it takes more energy from oil to make ethanol than it delivers. We'll also need a nuke plant for the tar sands projects...

God why do I feel we are on the verge of another mad experiment like the 0% inflation theory the Canadian Fed Bank tried in the early 90's causing an unnecessary and deep 5 year long recession.

I wonder if they can use the huge oil reserves that contain too much sulphur and been avoided so far.

 

One big problem with your over-the-top insult of a post is that your scenarios are completely implausible. Yes, if you force everyone on the planet to have 4 children and die at a median age of 70, then that will be worse for the planet than forcing everyone to have 2 children and die at a median age of 200. However, you don't take into account the fact that this scenario of yours will never be true.

If you have people that are living to 200 years of age, you don't think technology at the same time will be at a point where you can grow a human being inside an artificial womb? What about surrogates? Who's to say that someone who lives to 200 years of age wouldn't have time to have and raise, on average, 10 children during their life time? Figure 18 years to raise a child, 10 year vacation between, and by the time you're dead, you've brought 7 new lives into the world. If you have two kids each time around, well damn you've brought 14 new lives into the world.

People today are having children in their late 40s and in some rare cases, 50s. That was unheard of 100 years ago. Hell, 100 years ago, having kids in your 20s was probably "old". Is it any wonder that people were marrying soon after they hit puberty in many cultures?

If we're expecting to live to 200, people will still have children as if they were expecting to live to 80, or 60, or 90, or whatever age. In a purely biological world, you would be accurate because no matter how long you live, biologically once you reach a certain age, you just can't reproduce anymore. But your equations fail because they don't take into account the progression of technology, and the effect that has on our reproductive life cycle.

Population growth is a big problem because of the increased resources allocation required to keep people alive. For instance, we in the United States allocate roughly 60% of our spending to taking care of our older citizens in the form of Social Security and Medicare expenditures. That percentage is only going to increase as the baby boomers retire and live far longer than their generational predecessors.

This, coupled with an increasing birthrate, is a huge problem. However, this argument breaks down when you look at the fact that the birthrate is declining in industrialized nations, and has been for some time. What is the big problem today in industrialized nations is that our birthrate is declining, and we have entitlement programs based on the young propping up the old. However with a declining birthrate, the old population is outstripping the young population and living longer and longer, putting tremendous strain on our resources.

As countries become more industrialized, their birthrates decline and the length of time they live increases. However, we've seen that progress in reproductive science, still in its, for lack of a better word, infancy, has extended the realistic timeframe that people can expect to have children from their early-to-mid 20s just 30 years ago, to their late 30s, early 40s. Who knows where reproductive science will take us a century from now?

Of course, this is all if you actually care about discussing this matter in depth rather than calling people morons and dismissing their ideas outright.

 

How many 80 year olds do you know of that WANT to have more kids, surrogate or otherwise? I'm sure the numbers are rather small. I think the "standard" ages for prime parenting (20-50) aren't likely to change much. I doubt many people have the kind of endurance needed to raise multiple GENERATIONS of children.

PS: The planet isn't even remotely overpopulated. Just VERY poorly managed.

 

You're thinking in today's terms. If the median population lived to 200, 80 would be simply middle aged.

My entire argument was based on DemoCoder's "200 years" supposition.

Anyway, I say we all adopt Logan's Run as our reproductive mantra. That'll stop overpopulation!

 

True enough. All I'm saying is I don't see the age-band for "desire to raise children" expanding along with an extended lifespan. Don't get me wrong, childrearing is probably the most rewarding accomplishments one can experience. It's demanding as a 20-year project, I can't imagine it as a 50-year project. I hear lots of people lament the leaving-home of their last child. However when asked "why not have 3 more"? They quickly laugh and say "nonononono, thanks..."

 

You simply must keep up with the latest technological news. This company called Changing World Technologies out with a process called Thermal Depolymerization last year that takes garbage and turns it into virtually pure oil. They're expecting to be able to sell oil for $15 a barrel with the process.

Of course if it takes off, we'll need some serious increases in fuel efficiencies from hybrids to take into account the hundreds of millions of new drivers across the globe who will be dumping carbon monoxide and other pollutants into the air. Eventually we will need to move to Hydrogen in order to fully curtail the problem with fossil fuel pollution. But it will not be so cut and dry in terms of the market dictating the move over to Hydrogen the next 20-40 years, if Changing World Technologies is successful.

 

True, but how much of that is because by the time they're done raising their kids, they're in their late 40s, early 50s, nearing retirement?

If you're done raising your first brood by the time you're 45 (living to 200), as a percentage of your life span, that'd be roughly equivalent to you being done raising kids by the time you're 20 (living to 85). It'd change the mentality wrt age and raising children imo if people were living 2.5x longer than they do today.

On the flip side, it could mean that the nurturing process would be extended. Who's to say that kids shouldn't stay with their parents until they're 30 or 40?

 

Your argument simply doesn't fit the evidence Natoma. Reproductive science has extended the duration of women's fertility while increasing the likelihood that conception occurs and that the baby will not die, yet despite women's prolonged ability to have children well into their late 30s and even 40s, birth rates are still declining. The vast majority of child birth used to occur at below age 21. Women's puberty has been pushed back younger and younger and their fertile period older and older, and the extension of the fertility period has not lead to people continually producing children from 18-40, instead, people delay childbirth People who live to 200 will not have larger families just because they live longer. More than likely, they will have the freedom to delay starting a family for much longer. Once women's "biological clock" stops ticking, they will have far less incentive to rush into child bearing in their 30s because "if I don't do it now, I'll never be able to".

My wife wants to start a family now. She is 32. Reason? She feels her time is running out. Does she really want to raise a baby? No. She feels her life will be over and the freedom we enjoy now to travel around and do what we want will be severely impinged. If she didn't have this fear that *never* being able to have children, she'd easily delay it into her 40s.


Secondly, you failed to read my posts where I discussed the "greying population" theory. If people are living to 200, they are not retiring at 70, and moreover, they are not sucking down mega resources in nursing homes from 70 - 200. That's just "present day" thinking.

Flawed assumption based on "todays thinking". You consider people over 60 to be consumers instead of producers. This won't be the case with youthful 60s. The scenario is that people in their 60s and 80s will be working to pay social security for those who are 120.

And despite all the advances, the trend is still downward in fertility.

It is your thinking that fails to take into account changes that happen in society, not mine. You imagine a world where those who live to 200 will be retired and claiming social security in their 80s, while a dwindling population of younger workers struggles to support them. In your world, all technology remains the same, except old people have been put on life support for 100 years. Pretty pathetic vision.

But ignoring all that, your basic thesis fails the math test: birthrates, not old age, are what makes the equation exponential instead of linear, and long life span + increased fertility has consistently been shown to lower birthrates, not increase them.

 

It's the same thinking that is mired in today's life cycle age that I mentioned to shanehudson.

I would wager that one of the main reasons the birth rate is declining is that as a country becomes more industrialized and "technologized" (woo new word!), the reason people put off having kids is because they're spending more and more time learning, and less and less time worrying about where their next meal is coming from, and who's going to help them tend the farm. But because we spend more time learning, we put off child rearing until a later date, thereby compressing our biological reproductive window.

If our life spans were increased to 200, and reproductive life span increased by a comparable amount as a percentage of our life span, it would change the entire equation. As I said, on the flip side, it could mean that we'd even further lengthen the time that we deem people as "children" who need nurturing. Or it could stay roughly the same and people would simply have more kids.

The point is, neither is a known quantity, but you seem to dismiss the other side outright.

I never said that they'd sucking down mega resources. I said that the problem in today's economic climate is the "graying population" theory in that our birthrate is declining while our older population is exploding. That was in relation to today's problems, not what would happen if people were living to 200.

The whole point of that section of my post was based on today's problems.

See above regarding compressed times to have children. Basically stated, people aren't ready to have kids until they're about 40 years old in our society, based on the length of time we spend educating ourselves and "growing up." But because our reproductive lifespan basically ends 10 years earlier without technological assistance, people have kids when they "feel the crunch" of time.

If people are able to reproduce into their 90s and 100s due to increases in reproductive technology, and live to 200, I believe that people would indeed have more children just as a factor of not running out of time. How many working men and women finally feel the urge to have children in their 30s and 40s, desperately want to, but can't because science hasn't caught up yet? This is what I'm referring to.

Actually, no. How you're reading what I've written is completely incorrect. I imagine a world where people are living to 200 and are capable of reproducing through that time. What you're supposing isn't what I'm supposing at all.

That's not my thesis DemoCoder. This is what I did. I offered up the problem we have today when dealing with our expanding expenditures to the population of seniors that is living longer than ever. That, coupled with an increasing birthrate, is a tremendous problem. At that point, I stated that that argument breaks down however, because in fact the birthrates in the industrialized world are declining.

The double edged sword of longer life and increasing birthrates, I posit, will show itself if people are able to fully "grow up" and still have plenty of time to have children. As I said earlier, industrialization forces you to spend more time in the nurture phase, leaving less time for the reproductive phase. If technology expands the reproductive phase along with long life, so that people are able to reproduce past the century mark, I wager that population growth would explode even in industrialized nations.

In effect, I merged your thesis with the posited thesis that started this thread in the first place. Do you agree or disagree with my thoughts on this outcome and its effect on a future society?

 

I simply don't buy it. Children are a consumer good now instead of an investment good. In developing countries, children are an investment. Large extended familities spread out risk, provide labor, and are a form of private social security. To top it off, contraception is often unavailable, so child bearing, unavoidable.

There is zero incentive for westerners in their 80s to breed like Mormons. Raising a child is an *incredibily expensive and time intensive* task, even if you are well off. Educated westerners know it, and the loss of freedom, stress, and responsibility it entails.

The time compression theory simply doesn't work. My mother didn't have her first children until 24, yet she still managed to produce 4 kids (I have 3 siblings) by age 30.

I have a much better theory: materialistic, cosmopolitan, educated, westerners, used to a care-free life of freedom and hedonism, are shocked into brutal reality after they get their first kid, house, and SUV. They might try for a second kid if they did not get the gender they wanted, or on the theory that having a sibling is better off for the kid's social development, but it is unlikely that they will want more after that -- not because the women is infertile or too old -- but simply because the task of raising a large family in modern society is expensive and time consuming.

Let's look at Sweden, where the welfare state had completely removed all responsibility from parenting. Women in Sweden can effectively be single mothers with little financial impact, and child care is provided by the state. Has this caused Swedish women to go out and pop-out babies like crazy? quite the contrary. Swedish women have become alot more sexually promicious while at the same time, birth rates declined, and marriage rates are at rock bottom.

Modern technology and wealth has freed us from being imprisoned by our gene's desires to spread themselves. We are able to resist the urge to have children and focus on ourselves and our own personal growth.

I personally don't care about spreading my genes so "some part of me" will be available in the year 2100. I hope to be present myself.

 

Certainly major socio cultural changes could occur if we could live 200-250 years. In the next time frame of 100-200 years also tech will change meaning less work. Eventually no work. Both of those could lead to an explosion in the birth rate as at least a proportion of humans could choose to rear big families again. Many kindly nostalgia of having been raised in big families. Of course new tech could make the issue of overpopulation nil at that point.

I hope so I think we could easily accomodate 10-15-20 billion with well managed and widespread use of foreseeable technology. Heck we could even vacate the surface in mile high cities with plenty of room to spare. or similar accomodations underground...

 

My point is that there are a gazillion scenarios that could happen, and I don't want eco-nuts invoking some kind of perverse "Logans Run" precautionary principle because they religiously believe their doomsday scenarios.

Today, we have lots of research that will continue to make humans life healthier, longer lives. I do not want that curtailed because people like Natoma think it's bad for social security and "something could go wrong" In my mind, people who want to limit human beings lifespans have no right to call themselves liberals.


Predictions on the timespan of 100 years are grossly inaccurate and many of the technologies we are discussing: biotech, nanotech, etc are incredibly disruptive. It is vastly immature to start making public policy today with respect to trying to curtail people's maximum life span, on flawed malthusian basis.

I'd rather savagely curtail people's reproductive rights than savagely curtail science and people's right to live longer and healthier.

 

But my question to you is, is this because, in general, people have children almost as soon as they're capable of having children in developing countries? Is that why they're seen as an investment, because the chance of dying is so much higher, vs a family in an industrialized country where child mortality and survival rates are so low they're not even considered?

In a world where you expect your child to live, then I can see why they'd be seen as a "consumer good," as you put it.

I'm speaking about the population in general. How old are you Democoder? I ask this because I want to know what "era" your mother had kids. Are you Gen X? Gen Y? Baby Boomer? Older?

My mother had my brother when she was 21, and had me when she was 23. However, she has told me on several occassions that realistically she didn't want to have kids until she was in her mid 30s, so that she could get her career and be fiscally settled. However, that would have made it exponentially more difficult to have children, due to the fact that there were really no reproductive technologies at the time other than the relatively new "test tube baby" procedure. I was born in '77 and my brother in '75.

Now, if you extend the lifespan of a human being to 200, and extend the reproductive lifespan to 90-100, do you think your mother, and my mother for that matter, would have had us as young as they did? Or would they have waited another decade or so to get their own lives in order, then have children?

Personally, I want children. But, I want children when I know I'm capable of raising them in a fiscally sound and emotionally sound environment. I don't feel I'd be able to provide that environment completely (at least when it comes to the fiscal part), until my boyfriend and I are in our mid-to-late 30s. If people were capable of reproducing into their 90s and 100s, then the pressure and incentive to have children would be lessened. It would become less of a "consumer good," i.e. something to "have," and more of a time investment.

"We've got our lives in order. Now we can bring another generation into this world."

You say that there's no incentive for an 80 year old, keeping in mind that an 80 year old in this future world is more like a 30 year old in terms of overall lifespan and reproductive capability. However, as you said, raising a child is time consuming and expensive. Is it time consuming and expensive because of the nature of raising children in and of itself? Or is it time consuming and expensive because of how we structure our lives in this rat race? We get out of college and "settle down" by the time we're 30. We have 35 years to work before retirement, and during that time that we're working toward our own retirement, we're worrying about raising enough capital to send our son and/or daughter to private school, college, grad school, etc.

Lengthen that time frame, and I believe you increase the incentive to have kids. It's no longer a rat race where kids are consumer items, but a slow enjoyable build in which kids are an investment in the future.

I guess I'm just an optimist in this regard whereas you're a cynical old fart.

You're so cynical.

Well I don't know enough about Sweden to comment on their particular social order, but I'd gather that it's the same overarching problem facing all industrialized nations, as I said before. People are "growing up" and doing their own thing in longer and longer intervals, because the premium is placed on knowledge in industrialized nations.

When they're finally adults, they find that they're too old to have kids. If they're able to "grow up" in an industrialized nation, hit 40, and realize they've got another 50 years of reproductivity left, I think you'd find a lot of people choosing to have large families, because they can afford to do so. Large families by their very nature are very condusive to the type of society you spoke about that exists in developing countries.

That is why I believe that if you extend the reproductive age as well as the life span, you will have a population boom, even in an industrial/technological society. Of course, I don't know if Koss/Kass/whatever the hell his name is took that into consideration. If he didn't, then his theory is pretty much full of holes as you stated.

However, by you not taking that into consideration, you're also missing a very big point wrt the transition from an agragrian society to an industrial/technological society imo.

 

Hey now, I alluded to Logan's Run first. Don't steal.

What?? If you think I'm saying it's "bad for social security" and "something could go wrong" for humans to live longer healthier lives, you're really missing the point of everything I've written. :?

I don't agree with curtailing people's life spans. I do however see that extending life spans as well as the inevitable extension in reproductive time frame (due to our increasing reproductive technological capability), will cause a population explosion problem.

I'm still baffled as to how you're reading something that I'm not writing.

And then you could have China Redux. 1 Kid only? Ok let's make sure we kill the baby if it's a girl so we can have a boy.

 

What matters is the statistic birth rates per unit time - deaths per unit time.

Increasing age just adds a constant to an exponential eqn. If someone has 4 kids in 200 years, instead of 2 in 100 years, its not going to affect things very much. Sure there will be a increase in population over a short time interval as the new technology kicks in (since people will be dying less), and the eqn will be askew. But it will self rectify in the long run and we'll be back to what we have now