> These trends do not lead to a sustainable future - it is like global warming, slow but indicative of bad things coming down the line, but manageable in the immediate.
I wonder how many times this could have been said in the ~4 billion year history of life on this planet, and then life just keeps going anyways in some new form.
It's just evolution. You have a changing environment, decreased hormones or what not, and some parts of the population will develop ways around it and others won't. If you have a set mindset on how life should propagate, as in "we need so-and-so hormone", then you're probably going by the wayside in terms of an evolutionary perspective.
What's the most obvious answer here? The emergence of technology. We might not even have sex hormones in the future. There might be some completely new way of genetic propagation (if genes themselves are even a thing in the future) that we can't even dream of right now. The concept of sex, hormones, etc., might even disappear as whatever new form of "information" propagation takes hold. We just have no idea. We could be in the middle of the change right now, or the bare beginnings. Maybe those new forms of life will be resistant to the effects of global warming and other things as well, and so on.
It's like how organisms such as cyanobacteria changed the composition of the atmosphere billions of years ago, and wiped out previous forms of life as oxygen become abundant. A whole new ball game got started, and we're here now.
In other words, a present solution might no longer work well for the current environment (a specific sex hormone), and so it begins to filter out of the 'system'. The issue here though, as is obvious on this forum, is that we can get attached to so-and-so hormone from an emotional standpoint, since we've been fooled into believing that it's our identify, and then get angry when we see it no longer "useful", even though that hormone is just one interchangeable part of our identities.
> I am quite disappointed in the author to be so dismissive on a topic she is an “instant expert” on. Only on hacker news does a physicist who spends their days criticizing string theory (and whose expertise there makes sense) make the front page doing an analysis on testosterone.
I'm new to hacker news, and am quite surprised by the amount of ad hominem arguments on here.