'I’m not having children because I want to save the planet'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Don't get me wrong, everybody is free to make their own decisions (and I would be the last demanding from anybody to go through parenthood), but sometimes it seems as if intelligence is not an evolutionary advantage.
There are whole subcultures of people who spend their life breeding, while especially the DNA lines of intelligent, working women just seem to end there. And it does not help that there are all these seemingly rational argumentation lines against children, e.g. about environmental impact. If you can pass on your education (and maybe some intelligence-related DNA), it may help society more overall in the end. Think of a big birthday party of an educated grandparent you may have visited - this procreation thing is an exponential function.
In my view, to say "you should have kids because then stupid people will win" is as much a rationalization to have kids like "I do not have kids to avoid environmental disaster" might be a rationalization for something else.
I want to point out that the evolutionary mechanisms are always active, and intelligent humans rationalizing against procreation (something that primarily educated humans seem to do) are part of the evolutionary game.
I don't want children because I really don't want to have children. I think children are a ton of work and I really don't think I'd get enough out of it to make it worth the investment. It's a bit of a rational look at things, but that's how I feel about it too. Being gay complicates the whole process anyway.
I often get weird responses from people if I tell them this, as if I gave them a slap in the face, so I get why people would hide behind the environmentalist point of view.
IMNSHO what is completely unacceptable is having children just because you "have to".
Having hardcore opinions on anything causes stagnation, so I pick them carefully.
Emphasizing that one argument of many is a defensive act, inspired by the almost universal subtext that parents are somehow better human beings than the childless.
People with a low IQ will not understand the argument and no one with low conscientiousness will care about it. "Don't have kids, for sustainability" is just an argument that the children of low-IQ low-conscientiousness people should inherit the Earth.
It's an unsustainable practice. It's also the answer to the commentor below asking, "If you're not having children, who are you saving the planet for?"
Smart people need to have more children. Areas of the earth that pollute terribly by dumping garbage into rivers, etc, need to stop. Rich nations need to stop feeding poor nations until they have refugee-creating population explosions, and people need to get over how mean that sounds if they actually want to save the planet.
I'll play devil's advocate and say, maybe they should. Who do you think has a lower ecological footprint - a homeless alcoholic or a successful scientist? There is even a theory that posits that intelligence evolved in order to increase entropy faster.
I have nothing against intelligence; it's a gift, as far as I can tell. But the claim that intelligent people (with few exceptions) are somehow going to live more sustainably is just ridiculous.
So ignorant. It's just blind heart-fullness. Yeah, let's help bring more children into poverty! It was refreshing to read your comment and I hope that other technologists apply critical thinking to their charity.
And if the argument is that animals are happier without humans around, you should watch some nature documentaries. Nature is brutal.
5 billions years from now the Earth is no more.
So long term if you want Earth based life to endure you need it to start getting the fuck out and spread. At the moment it seems the best positioned for this are humans.
Advanced consciousness may be the key thing the universe has going for it.
I realize that sounds like a meme, but it's kinda true, isn't it?
Might be better to have kids so you can rease them as super-heroes that fight the planet-killers?
This is a very un-ycombinator feeling thread.
Please don't. While I understand that you might think that it is unfair to those people who decide not to have kids, they made the decision.
What you're suggesting is arguably worse. I certainly wouldn't want to be raised with onus of having to clean up the planet after the wild party of my parents.
Other peoples children are almost genetically identical to us, and to ours. Depending on how you live your life, people other than your children might carry more of your ideas forward. And in the scheme of things, all humans look like you, when compared to rabits.
Only caring about your own children seems like a strange place to start.
it's not right or wrong, it's just an instinct that has been selected through evolution because apparently it favours carriers of such genes to outnumber those who don't.
That isn't to say that people don't instinctively care for their own children. Although maybe there may be no such instinct and we are just taught from birth to do so by our own parents behaviur - which some may not learn. Maybe. A lot of things seem to be a mixture of nature and nurture I guess.
Just that, it is possible for behaviurs like the one we are discussing to be selected for.
This is just a hypothetical example.
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kn5z9/stop-telli...
"For the action 'have one fewer child,' we relied on a study which quantified future emissions of descendants "
Now imagine people taking the plane, say 40 times in their life : 401.6 = 64 and living car free half during, say 40 years : 2.4 0.5 * 40 = 48 => total = 64+48=112.
So by changing the way of life, you can make as much as your "one child fewer" proposal. What I say is that the "one child" scenario is not much better than changing the way we live.
We're not going to magically fix climate change.
If it can go both ways there's no reason to not have children because of it. There needs to be another reason.
> Anyways, the heroic model of progress is flawed.
I disagree, but it would be too offtopic to discuss here.
What I fear most is intelligent people having fewer children creating a even dumber society.
The root cause is how we live and treat our enviorment, our society with it's consumerims uses mostly non regenerable energy sources to produce mountain of useless junk that breaks fast or it's out of fashion, driving big polluting cars and eating lots of meat that leads for deforestation to provide land for the crops that are eaten by billions of animals that are slaughtered every year and many other irational things the modern man is doing to it's planet, it's home.
Reducing the numbers while keeping this insanity going will no help much, it will only slighly delay the inevitable.
Population reduction is not sn overnight fix, no, but it is not in effective practiced at scale. Even a 5 % reduction in population over the next couple years would likely offset any flagrant increases in resource usage (equally distributed across earth, of course).
Enough people die every second to make simply not adding to the human population a viable solution.
And it will happen anyways, if enough smart people don't exist, laws of the universe are such that all the stupid ones will get into a resource war and kill each other off.
I guess I should appreciate when people choose to leave more resources for my DNA to exploit. I plan to make the most of the sentience that my genetic ancestors wrested from the muck.
I'm unsure how much viewership and engagement they expect to get from these articles, but they obviously think it's a story that other people should at least read (if not live by). At the expense of other matters, naturally.
She won't save the planet acting this way
Obviously, selfishly, my own child is inherently invaluable to me. But that kid could also grow up to make a positive change in the world, or at least make the change which leads to a positive change in the world.
On the other hand, consumption in Western countries is already and increasingly way too far in excess of what's necessary or healthy. So if my kid ends up simply getting by in life, even raising them to be "eco-conscious" wouldn't be nearly enough to offset the normal bite each person takes out of the environmental pie. And that's just trying to break even.
I'm optimistic about this and do plan on having kids, but the goal is to raise them to make a real positive change in the world, at a high level. That way the cost they incur on the world will be seen as a worthwhile investment, not a waste of resources!
It’s because we’re acting like humans.
We grow food where it’s not supposed to. We survive disease, natural disasters, shortages. We live too damn long—not only as a species but as individuals. Think of one natural check or balance we haven’t either turned off or are actively working to. Even minor inconveniences like boredom or unwanted facial hair we’re putting coal to flame to destroy.
If you want to save the planet, have lots of babies, live a simple life, and die young. And if you’re wondering where I got this from, watch Disney’s The Jungle Book. It’s all you need to know.
No thanks, I'll just not have babies.
She could better have 10 kids, so her kids can "out-vote" the kids that don't give a shit, and they can put their head together to make a real change.
For a lot of people, they will have more effect doing things today and informing future generations than they could by having their own kids.
That being said, if anyone is at all serious about carbon footprint reduction, the message should be clear - your job in life is less about how many kids you have, and more about how many other people you can stop having kids.
Birth control is one big step, desensitized sex is another big one (more porn!), even more effective would be a child tax or even limit. A tax is more humane and would allow those who have generally lived better to produce more, anyways, than those idiots who 'dont care'
Although in the interviewee's case, it seems she personally didn't want to have children anyway, and considers environmental concerns to be a justification for that preference.
Articles like this are encouraging the most intelligent and highly conscientious of us not to have children and, in the long run, will destroy the planet rather than save it.
The right attitude is one of stewardship: we have a sacred duty to preserve the planet and a sacred duty to produce intelligent, thoughtful children to enjoy that planet and to carry on our work.
The real deal nowadays are people having 3 or more children. Once you realize that we are consuming 1.5 times what the earth can renew every year, it is a complete non-sense to make more than 2 children.
Choosing between living in a really nice city and having kids is a difficult choice.
I am doing it for selfish reasons, it's cheaper not to have them and the entitled shits would never look after me in retirement, so why bother?!