Letters to the Editor
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But, but...
Who gets to be the decider?
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Bravo, Carol
It is nice to dream.
I do think it's ironic how animal shelters are very careful to make sure that animals are only adopted out to responsible individuals (which is exactly how it should be), but we let anyone with a penis or vagina reproduce, even if their personal circumstances all but ensure that their children will grow up in the worst of circumstances and only add to the population of dysfunctional humans on this planet.
Eugenics: it's time.
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Holy Jumping Elitists Batman
So who do we sterilize without consent? People with physical illnesses? People with mental illness? People with less than say 120 IQs? How do we go about it? Do we start screening when individuals become physically able to reproduce?
I see it now, we pull every fourth grader, give them extensive testing and if they don't meet the rules for acceptable human beings we perform castrations and hysterectomies. Just like a round of immunizations. After all, we're doing it for the earth, such a shame it's speckled with so many undesirables.
Sarcasm off, y'all make me sick. Jeez, I'd rather deal with ultra-right-wing fundamentalists trying to impede on my rights to control my body, at least they aren't proposing mass sterilization.
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Fairy tales
Wow. I thought the last panel made it clear that this was a fairy tale. And most fairy tales are somewhat gruesome, with things we wouldn't do in real life. Just like we wouldn't lock a princess up in a tower, or condone a stepmother essentially enslaving her stepdaughter, we wouldn't really perform mass sterilizations.
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Why this will never happen
Take a look at how Hollywood views people who choose not to have kids. They are cold, empty workaholics or adult children.
Neither example being happy.
Thus, they get left a more responsible relative's kids and suddenly grow up.
It is the "Kiddies as prozac" schtick which more than anything else, teaches stupid people that the path to happiness involves changing wet nappies.
This is a reflection of America's cultural values system, and because of this twisted values system, the idea of restricting children to people who can, *gasp* take care of them and raise them into reasonable adults, is an anethema.
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Interesting in theory...
...and fun to argue about, but I believe we won't even get this option. Study population biology at even a basic level and you will learn that Nature itself handles overpopulation by either mass starvation or disease. Mass starvation, in the case of humans, won't help the planet much because those likely to starve (it's already happening) aren't the ones who do the most damage to the planet with overconsumption.
But disease? All the money in the world won't be able to hold off a lethal contagion for long, so everyone is fair game. I've always found it to be morbidly amusing that the animal that holds itself up to be the master of all life on Earth - man - will eventually be brought down by a virus we can't even see.
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The Circuit of life
Once the Marilyn Monrobot is perfected the human population will drop percipitously.
And when the last human dies, the droids that cared for us in our old age will wander off, and build robots to care for their failing circuits.
Robosexuls are the future.
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Eugenics, just a point
You all did notice the thirty year old couple allowed to reproduce were two white folks, didn't you...also an old white guy running the world government...and people wonder why folks get nervouse when the subject of "population control" comes up. Seems it's never white yuppies who need controlling...just them other folks, not up to our standards.
Which raises whole other issues with regard to genomic diversity (something rarely discussed with regard to the environment but far more imporant than biodiversity with regards to the livelyhood of any single species).
Population conrols by their nature prevent genomicdiversity, which in time leads to a weaker species not a stronger one.
Even if we chose by lot to determine who breeds and who does not by blocking out the helpful mutations or potential for helpful mutations in one line, you doom the species as a whole.
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40 YEARS AGO...
we tried to heighten awareness about over-populating the earth. Seems American teenage unmarried girls who breed with a different father every other year, second and third wives and husbands,the Third World, and Catholics did not get the memo.
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In the end - humans will have their numbers forcibly lopped off
It was the science writer Isaas Asimov in one of his essays who first noted that if humans do not consciously control their numbers, nature will do it for them.
At present, teetering on the brink of Peak Oil, there will be no "out" as the plentiful energy resources that permitted the last century's human numbers to double from 3 billion in 1962 to 6 billion in 1988, will be extinguished.
Read more at:
www.dieoff.org
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The inherent problem with Eugenics
Those in power will always define the high standards to favor those people most like them. That might be fine if you had a generation of brilliant thinkers and ethical giants in charge, but governments are much more often made of mediocrities than statesmen.
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Most of the people in the world are poor and filthy and don't consume a lot of resources anyhow
So unless you're planning on running out of dirt and sand soon, it's not really an issue.
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Die Off...dang lions...
Let's just be clear about this...
Nature loves Humanity...if there is a Gia, she just thinks the world of her best and brightest.
All the best lands...all he best prey...they bow down to man and man delights in it.
Man has been generous allowing lions and tigers and bears (oh my) once our preditors now our pets, to continue to live to provide us with amusement. All the "natural world" exists only because man has chosen not to live in those places.
Evolution has made us the dominate species, capable of living anywhere and everywhere, and why would we ever spit in the eye of nature and deny our true self.
Peak oil, will be troublesome and may even slow our net fecundity, but in the end, Natures favorite beast will continue to survive and thrive, and those smart animals and plants that got themselves domesticated will come along with us (until we figure out how to grow meat in a lab).
The world will become overpopulated, when humans can nolonger move freely about lands without stepping on each others toes...then...ON TO MARS!
Unless of course, the Marilyn Monrobot gets perfected...though that whole peak oil thing may derail that.