An Alarming Decline in Sperm Quality Could Threaten the Future of the Human Race

Do you have a particularly well-developed or reliable intuition for the sustainability of food production? How did you come by it?

There is no reason to assume there is binary choice there.

Also the infertility crisis only affects developed countries, whose birth rates were already low. Under developed countries , whose populations have been booming and already outnumber developed countries are not affected by this crisis.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-lan...

In 2050 the robotization of the military will likely be even more pronounced.

For the first time in history, the capacity to wage war does not directly depend on having a large count of young men at your disposal. This is likely to change the entire balance.

I don't agree. Look at the statistics on food waste, resource consumption of meat production, energy consumption in developed countries in general,... We are using farmland to produce fuel...

Food production could be much more sustainable if we wanted. We are very far away from an efficient usage of the available resources. Current methods of food production look unsustainable because we are not even trying.

Edit: Just to give you a number: In 2010, the postharvest food loss was estimated to be 1250 kcal per capita per day in the US.

Cue the pandemic and everybody ordering takeout, because restaurants are closed.

My parents always taught me to be careful with plastic packaging and especially heating up things in the microwave in plastic containers.

I was at a friend's place and I saw them reheating rice in a plastic tub, which for me was appalling. I lost appetite right then and there.

I only buy glass tupperware for home use (the lid is plastic, but i just leave it out).

Also I avoid using plastic bottles. Glass is usually an alternative.

Thinking with new evidence that my parents had the right intuition here. With food we really should move to guilty until proven innocent.

This is just not true. If you are a woman, it is told to you over and over and over and over again. And women do occasionally talk about it when they talk with each other. Women even know that with age the risks are higher! Shocking, I know.

Also, average age of first birth in united states is 26.9 years old.

Yet also, those who have kids soon suffer lifetime consequences.

You reminded me of an article about the major high-altitude adaptations of the world. There are three; one set occurring in Ethiopia, one in the Himalayas, and one in the Andes. The Andean suite of adaptations is much more evolutionarily recent, and, as you might expect, is of lower quality.

So the article covered that basic framework and then opined that, if you were the government of Peru, one obvious way to improve local health and productivity would be to introduce Tibetan DNA into the local gene pool.

"Some young Tibetan men could probably even be persuaded to volunteer for this important work."

Anecdotes are not data, but I had a vasectomy in my early 30's. We didn't want more kids, and the wife informed me she wasn't planning on taking the pill for the next 25 years.

I wasn't told to "keep it a secret" but equally it wasn't something other men spoke about, so there was some reluctance (on my part) to do it. I, and some others in my cohort of a similar age, though decided to not hide it, but be honest - yes I'm going to be out of work on Tuesday, going for a vasectomy. It did encourage a few folk to come talk about it when it was topical for them.

Men (naturally) have a fear of anything that interferes with their privates. But we do need to be more honest about it - vasectomies are ultimately cheaper, less invasive, and have fewer side effects than other forms of contraception. Yes it is permanent - but if you're ready for that then I encourage you to ask around - you may find others around you have done it, and that it's really not a big deal.

And if you have had it, well, perhaps it's not really something that needs to be a secret. (Especially if you are the first in your social circle to do it.)

Lower birthrates are happening across the board, so if somebody told you you were targeted they would see enough evidence to confirm this. You have to ignore that this affects the whole world, but that's easy.

"You need only one man with healthy sperm and 1000 women to repopulate the world."

While true, our societies are based on long-term pairs having children, not a set of elite sperm knights who go around and impregnate wives of everybody.

Both effects can happen at the same time. Yes, female fertility goes down with age. But male reproductive health isn't what it used to be either, and provably so. Taken together, those effects cause a significant problem.

We must care more about phthalates and other hormone mimicking stuff in our food chain. Humans aren't even the only species that has the same problems.

It is specifically about male infertility, based on an objective measure of fertility (sperm count), which has indeed dropped over the past few decades - no one is trying to "blame everything on men".

Seems like a surefire way to end up with genetic bottlenecks galore.