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Comment by gxon | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I've recently been thinking of something similar as a form of population control in a post-aging world. Rather than individual resource consumption, every time you reproduce, you jump forward in the euthanasia line. I suspect this would not work very well.

There's got to be some more formal line of research or thought about population management in a post-aging world.

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Well the general Sci-Fi solution is some form of galactic expansion, sometimes preceded by a massive die off before people get the point that their planet has exceeded maximum capacity.

As per our current science, we're forever limited to our galactic local group. Exponential growth tends to consume even very big things surprisingly quickly.

I also question whether a mass die off event on this planet won't lock us out from ever rebuilding a spacefaring civilization. We've already used up all the readily accessible fossil fuel that was necessary for us to get this far.

Could you give any government the power to euthanize innocent people and trust them to use it for only that one narrow purpose?

Like I suggested, it's highly problematic.

But what are the alternatives if people stop dying of old age? If the birth rate is even marginally higher than the very small death rate, we eventually over populate. The only way to resolve that is some kind of culling mechanism. War, starvation, and disease are what usually happens to humanity when resources get too constrained.

But now we have nukes.

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