Capitol Hill Blue Forums Life and Moral Issues Morality & Society Optimum human population

No science, just shooting from the hip, I'd say 500,000,000 max to live within healthy and sustainable ecological balance.

Apparently our American Taliban disagreed.
Anyway, I'd say we could handle a billion and a half.

Okay, let's compromise - an even billion.

Now, how shall we accomplish this objective? War is awfully destructive, I don't favor that. Disease, and pestilence are tried and true. Climate change has promise, but overshoot into full extinction is likely. I used to think that reason and responsible behavior could be the solution, but that's obviously a delusion.

Hasn't there been some evidence that birth rates are slowing? Perhaps we've reached an apex of sorts and the population will dwindle due to loss of natural habitat?

So I googled it and got this...

I suggest we try warming the planet ever so slightly.

How about a virus that makes most women infertile after they have one baby? Not so far-fetched, and we don't have to kill anybody. I suspect it would benefit the kids, too. We could even have a fertility treatment if anybody wanted to try again, but make it very expensive and not covered by government health or insurance.

We actually had something like this with second babies of Rh-negative mothers, until we came up with a treatment for that. I'm a fluke, because I'm a second Rh-positive baby born to an Rh-negative mother from before we had the treatment.

Even if we made some agent that would require a medical treatment to make a baby, so infertility was by default, That would do a lot. It would also demolish the anti-abortion crew. Two birds with one stone.

Warming the planet ever so slightly is much much easier and doesn't require men to force women to comply with their wishes regarding childbirth...

All we have to do is nothing. And the population will be greatly reduced or eliminated altogether. I personally plan to help the effort along by dying in about ten years.