I think limiting the number of kids a person can have is a good idea -  better would be for the government to provide free sterilization to anyone who wants it (maybe a cash bonus for welfare recipients to accept it?) The 3rd world really needs something like this - I mean, birth control isn't as available there, and without cable, DVD's, the internet, etc there really isn't much besides fucking to do there. Maybe provide extra tax incentives for having a kid for scientists and such. Also, reducing or even eliminating the child tax credit for most people might help (starting with kids born at least 9 months after the law is passed - any before that get the old credits.) Not increasing welfare for having more kids would be a good idea, too.

Using the country I grew up in as an example;

The vast majority of Zimbabweans live in the rural areas. If they are not employed by commercial farmers (precious few are now) they are, for the most part, subsistence farmers who can not afford to employ labourers of their own. The only pool of labour available to them is their children. The more kids they have, the more hands there are to work the land. The flipside to that coin is that the more kids there are, the more mouths there are to feed.

What mitigates this to a large extent right now is life expectancy. Average life expectancy in Zimbabwe is the lowest in the world at 35 for men and 32 for women, AIDS being the biggest contributor to that mortality, but even before the shit hit the fan over there and AIDS was not as prevalent, life expectancy was in the mid 50's, so considerably lower than retirement.

Of course, nobody plans to die young, and if you have a lot of kids that survive in rural Zimbabwe, you can be assured that when you do get too old to work in the fields, your kids and grandkids will look after you. It is part of the reason we are taught to venerate our elders.

And overcrowded cities in most of the third world is down to urban migration as people do a Whittington & go to the big city to find their fortunes/a better life.

That model exists in countries & cultures as diverse as India, Vietnam and Brazil, indeed it is the very model the welfare state is built upon.

The same balance between contributors of working age and retirees exixsts in countries where life expectancy exceeds retirement age. Where it gets fucked up is when you have a situation like the one we have right now, where baby boomers are retiring, and far from all of them have private pensions or adequate savings for that retirement, leading to big holes in various state and private pension schemes.

Birth rates in the developed world have been on the decline for a significant chunk of time. Part of a welfare state's function is to support the retired who can not afford to keep themselves, and unless there are sufficient contributors to that welfare state, it can not afford to maintain the elderly in its care. Hence tax breaks/credits for people who have kids.

What further fucks this up is people who can work & can contribute, but don't because they can't be arsed to, and because they know they'll be guaranteed a cheque and a roof over their heads come what may.

Having said all of that, this situation is symptomatic of our unsustainable population growth. If previous generations had forseen this, we may well have come up with the solution before the problem manifested. However, the answer is not in preventing people from breeding either by force or incentive. Frankly, I find the idea that we might apply that within the context of a person's intelligence abhorrent and would cry Godwin if I didn't think it were a cop-out in this instance.

The answer lies in education. A third world country with a well-educated population stands a far better chance of developing out of simple survival mode into a state whose population have the luxury of being able to focus their consciousness on the global whole and base their decisions on that. Zimbabwe has this potential, it just needs a series of fuckstick removals.

A first world population that is taught to do the same will be better able to elect leaders to represent that.

**Disclaimer - this all makes sense to me after about half a bottle of Bushmills.

Try educating yourself about this topic before you spout your oversimplified, comic-book version, nonsense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Eugenics_and_the_United_States.2C_1890s.E2.80.931945

Well,I think that we need some sort of law against overpopulation.The truth is,there are too many humans on the planet...and most of humanity lives in poor areas...so,when you don't have money,make baby's...or so it would seem.

Now,the big problem is that if someone was to introduce a breeding law[in lack of better word],that would be considered unconstitutional and illegal.But need is mother of all inventions.

Eugenics is not the answer,what is the answer is population control...here in Canada or the States we don't have a population problem yet but we might have one in near future...if current trends continue.

Not quite true - "average" can mean mean, median or mode. Most people by average mean the mean. "Median" is the exat middle of all values, while "mode" is the most commonly occuring value (and the least often meant by "average&quot In fact, in most math classes mean actually is taught as "average" - the others are only introduced in statistics classes.

We really need population control. Government should decide how much should be born every year.

For example: Where I live, there is negative birth rate. Also majority of people are either young or old. Lots of them are not capable of working and supporting country's economy. So we need to increase our population.

So I guess it would be something like this:

All the couples who want to have a child should enter a sort of contest. Every couple gets credits for health, intelligence, wealth and so on. And then the top couples gets the right to conceive.

How much more control over your life do you think the government should have? How many born every year? Just randomly selected numbers? Do you know how expensive it would be to maintain a Department of Procreation?

I guess I'm really quite a pessimist when it comes to this sort of thing.  It's my opinion that there is nothing that can be done to stop humanity from devastating the planet with overpopulation.  Our incredible adaptability and omnivorous diet, coupled with our long lifetimes and incredibly low infant mortality rate virtually ensure that we're going to continue our habit of driving our food sources extinct.  The current thinking, by the way, is that it's virtually certain that early humans drove the mammoth extinct.  We've been at this a long time.

I'm not alone in this opinion.  I count many scientists among my friends, and away from the classroom, many of them readily admit that they believe the damage we're doing is irreversible, or might as well be, given the likelihood of humans making a concerted and global effort to reduce our population and consumption.

As for rights, it's my opinion that rights only exist if you have them.  In other words, we can dicker about the philosophy of innate rights for months, and we'll always get around to a stalemate, where the reality is that philosophy is only good if you have permission to talk about it.  In other words, if you're born into an oppressive society, you can believe you have rights as long as you want, but you don't.

I've said before that I'm not just pro-choice.  I'm pro-abortion.  I believe that if you don't want a baby, the only responsible thing to do is have an abortion.  I also believe that every single anti-abortion activist ought to put their actions where their piety is, and adopt a baby from a girl who wanted an abortion but was talked out of it by religious nut jobs.  I'm not sure there are enough activists to go around, so they'll probably have to adopt two or three apiece.  Oh, and this doesn't count the number of young children in foster homes who might never get adopted, or the babies born to women who wanted them, but had them taken away.

If legislation was put on the table to restrict the right to have children, I'd have to know specifically what it was before saying whether I'd support it or not.  I don't think this will happen in America, so it's pretty much a moot point.

Again, I fall on the side of pessimism.  It's not that I don't think there are intelligent lifeforms or earthlike planets on which humans *could* live.  It's that we don't just need earth-like.  We need a LOT like earth. 

Consider:  Imagining that we have an incredibly advanced method of space travel that includes enough fuel and life support to travel at near light speed to the nearest earth-like planet, we are still faced with several monstrously big problems.

1) With no magnetic field, we would die from radiation long before reaching our target.

2) Generating an earth-strength magnetic field on a spaceship light enough to leave earth orbit and travel near light speed?  Another huge hurdle, if it's at all possible.

3) Space dust at those speeds would be lethal, no matter what the ship was made out of.

4) Zero gravity would kill us long before reaching our destination.

5) No matter how good our telescopes are, we're going to be dealing with a planet that will be a LONG way away.  At best, we'll know within some very wide parameters, what it's possibly like.  If we get there and it's a hundred degrees too hot, we're fucked.

6) Space travel would not be like on Star Trek.  In order to reach Jupiter, we need a specific launch window that allows us the proper trajectory, and we need to know literally all the significant variables... any object with gravity in our path.  For an object so far away as another earth-like planet, we could not know all the details before leaving, and even if we did, our next launch window might not be for centuries.

7) At best, we could send a few people at a time.  The cost of doing this would be staggering.  The chance of disease, accident, or other catastrophe would be huge.  How would we transport large industrial machines to build large shelters?  Where would the very heavy materials come from?  Who would do the work?  What if we get there and there is life, but it is poisonous to us?  Do we kill everything to make it habitable for us?  It's Europe invading America all over.

Yeah, yeah.  I know we're working on wormholes.  From what I understand, even if it is theoretically possible to create a stable one across vast distances, the energy requirements for moving a few molecules from one place to another would be staggering.  I can't imagine where we'd get enough energy to 1) put a spaceship into space, 2) generate that kind of energy on board the spaceship, 3) have enough data to be able to accurately predict the other side of the wormhole, 4) have enough energy to do it all again to get back to earth and tell people what we found.

I'm afraid that unless we find some way to get to Mars or a moon in the outer solar system and somehow terraform it (highly unlikely!) we're stuck with what we've got.

Actually, I'm arguing from physics.  It's not technology so much as physical limitations.  No matter how good your technology is, for instance, you can't violate physical limitations of matter and energy.  To get off the earth, you need a certain amount of energy.  To get to near light speed, you need a certain amount of energy.  To get energy from matter, you need a certain amount of energy.

Terraforming Mars is certainly the most possible scenario, but I don't know that I'd say we can do it rather soon.  Payloads are going to have to go up significantly, which means a dramatic upgrade in propulsion systems, not just ion drives.

It sure does.

When I worked for the Province of Ontario, in finance, at one point I was in a group that calculated subsidies for different municipalities. The methods for calculating those subsidies had remained arbitrary (and I mean completely arbitrary) for years. Changes made later to the system decreased how arbitrary the whole thing was, but ultimately, all of the changes took place outside of a citizen's capacity to affect them. There was no change in policy because of a change in government, it was strictly on the strength of the people working as bureaucrats at the time. I remember that idea scaring me a bit, since it didn't matter who any of us voted for, the same bureaucrats could either do well, as my colleagues in finance did, or screw it up.

This already happens on an informal level with many physicians.

The implication here is that we could control genetic disorders that already limit a person's capacity to procreate. Why not let it go, and treat that which requires treatment, instead of pre-emptively aborting fetuses because they might exhibit a disease they're genetically predisposed to? That assumes a lot of foresight on the part of an OB/GYN. 

There's the system getting expensive and arbitrary again. Now you have to come up with a policy of determining who gets sterilized. In your program, it seems as though the criteria are vague. Genetic predisposition is a broad and vaguely probabilistic notion. You simply can't predict what a child will be like.

That doesn't strike me as a "positive" resolution at all, since you're making the judgment call that it would be better if you never existed. I believe that judgement call to be outside of the scope of your personal reflection. It assumes that somehow you would know if your "net" effect has not been positive. I don't think you can possibly know that, and I personally disagree.

Not to steer away from Mars, my second favorite planet.

But an interesting fact is that where the literacy rate in women goes up, birth rates go down. Pretty easy approach to eugenics don't you think?

Yea, it is, probably even first. We need a manned mission. I would agree to join it even if I knew there was no chance of ever comming back But I know that only USA could currently do it, so you should stop spending money on a war and start spending on that. But I can clearly see, that after your giant leap you started going back. :/

I'll call GW at once and make him get the scientists to start working on this(and of course the tube technology). You know I'll bet no one has even mentioned to him that this war is costing a lot of money. It will blow his mind I'm sure.

...Then why bother mentioning all of these issues, given that - if we can make what breakthroughs would be necessary for theoretical wormhole travel - all of the points you mentioned would be moot. Well, except for point 5, give I can't help but laugh a little at that one. We arrive at our destination...

"Oh. Well. Looks like this one got smacked by an asteroid somewhere along the line, and we hadn't seen it yet. Heh. Who saw that one coming, eh? Hey - don't give me that fucking look..."

Again, just as we could (in theory) with Mars, we should be able to terraform a fairly wide margin of planet types into suitable living spaces. Or, in the worst case scenario, why just just build our own environment? Manufacturing a network of space colonies is hardly outside the realm of possibility (though said colonies would still be in rough waters when the Sun began to enter the next phase of it's life cycle).

Also a terrific idea. Again, assuming the necessary breakthroughs can be made.

This idea is great. I would like my body changed, to be more advanced, very much. But the problem with that is religion and stupidity of mankind. Engenered people wouldn't look like human at all, so they would be disrespected and hated by those religious freaks.

... towards the goal of eliminating genetic traits that you believe cause harm. The opinion on several issues of adaptation would have to be considered. For instance, there is the notion that sickle cell anemia is an adaptation to malaria. (I don't think that's a "lifeboat situation", as in "cannibalism is bad ... unless you're starving in a lifeboat".) It's a good illustration that we can't anticipate which mutations will be useful.

I misunderstood you as advocating abortion. My mistake.

It's just that the amount of work this creates, not to mention the privacy issues, is simply not worth it. You'd also have the issue of appealing the decision, which adds yet another layer of bureaucracy.

... and the complete genomic mapping of every individual, regardless of their consent. It's untenable in a society that would like to consider its citizens free. The policy in practical application would be a nightmare. Have you ever stood in line to get a passport or replacement birth certificate?

The predisposition alone? To artificially bottleneck the population would not necessarily have the desired results, since biology just isn't as black-and-white as math. The algorithm you'd have to create would pressupose a complete knowledge of the function of the entire human genome, which we don't have.

The cost to whom? To the parents who decided to have a child? Does society suffer so much from having people with genetic disorders in it? Do we know what the cost would be in pre-emptively eliminating depression (and eliminating someone like Van Gogh) or schizophrenia (and eliminating someone like John Nash)? We're just not sure what we'd be doing, and we'd be putting that decision into the hands of people who may or may not be able to make that decision.

You determine the value of your own life, but a commitee can determine the value of other's lives? That seems a bit off, doesn't it? I'm not being a smart-ass, and I honestly didn't expect you to say that. If your idea is that you alone can determine the value of your own life, what commitee could qualify to judge the potential lives of others?

Assuming humans can get to mars in large numbers, what are you going to do for a magnetic field?

My layman's answer would be, "...Make one?"

I would presume that we know how the Earth creates it's own magnetic field. Presumably, assuming we had the technology/resources, we could simply duplicate the process (if on a smaller scale)?

Beat me to the punch.

The point I've been making is not that any one problem is necessarily insurmountable in getting people onto another planet.  It's that there are so many individual problems, any one of which would be effectively insurmountable, that it's pretty much a pipe dream.  I'd say that if humans pooled all available resources into science, and worked together as a species to find another earth-like planet, there might be an outside chance of finding it, and then a really, really remote chance of actually getting there with live humans, but if humans could muster that kind of collective effort for the greater good, we wouldn't need to get off of the earth, would we?

I'd like one infused with the sweat of small Cuban children, if you don't mind.

Frankly, the older I've gotten, and more importantly, the more I've learned about the human animal, the more I realize that it is simply not in our nature to get off of this planet.  Nevermind that we aren't going to be able to overcome all the technical hurdles and genuine physical limitations of matter and energy.  Humans are incapable of making a concerted effort for anything that defies basic human nature.  If everybody in the world agreed to only have one child, and to wait until they were 30 before doing so, population would no longer be an issue. 

And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Oh, and while we're talking about technical hurdles, suppose the closest earthlike planet is oh, I don't know, 20,000 light years away.  How, precisely, are the astronauts going to communicate with earth when they get there?  If it takes light 20,000 years to get here, humans will have evolved into a whole different species by the time a radio signal gets back to tell us to come on over and have a picnic.

Well (in theory):

We already know where the closest habitable planet is. We're standing on it.

If a wormhole, as string theory suggests (...as I understand it. What follows may, in actuality, be a complete butchery of astro-physics), allows us to traverse not only distance, but dimension and time, it could very well be that we only need to cross the proverbial threshold to arrive on a brand-spanking 'new' planet Earth. Say, from a few billion years ago.

Now that's good sci-fi.

Yeah... trust me... everybody who goes through the swirling cloud ends up on earth a billion years ago... yeah.. yeah... it's a wormhole.  Trust me...

In any case, it'd be a great way to weed out a couple billion really gullible people.