7.5 billion question marks

To breed or not to breed? That is the question.

Man, it’s been a tough couple of weeks.  Not that I’d expected this trip to be a piece of cake, but I figured being in Hawaii would be a welcome break after so long in Melbourne.  And yes, at the most superficial level it’s been a change of scenery — I can now see palm trees out my window while interfacing all day, instead of eucalypts! — but honestly, with all the turmoil inside GEAS… Well, all I can say is, don’t think for a moment that we were happy when the survival-efficacy of superstructing had to be revised downward by 90%.

Anyway there’s something that’s been on my mind since well before the “23 years to live” final threat report was released. mrjudkins tapped into it with his heartrending account of having to explain to his kids Jack and Edith (five and seven years old) that they might not live to see their 30th birthdays. Then more recently, a piece by 2019beverly brought it up in another form:

These little people are the ones that will be taking over when our work here is done, it is them that will have to live in the world that we have created – ask yourself this, is this future world one I want the children I love to live in?

The issue is this: is it ethical to have kids?

Maria and I haven’t been talking about it at all lately, but the question is lurking there in the background, unaddressed, and it’s starting to cause me some serious anxiety. I’m being stalked by the stork. Heh.

See, I’m 39 years old. She’s 38. If we’re gonna do this, it’s gotta be soon. With all the moving we’ve had to do over the last ten years or so — Hawaii, New Haven, San Francisco, Melbourne — there was always a reason to “wait and see”, to put our careers first. But then this all happened. And how can we think about bringing a child into a world that’s a ticking time bomb?

As I write these words, WorldRun puts our survival horizon at 2047. Earlier this year, statistics say, the planet officially broke the 7.5 billion population mark, although things have slowed down since then — clearly I’m not the only one wrestling with these questions. In any case, other things being equal, a child born today (and there are fewer and fewer of them, as we all know) would live to be 27 years old. That’s how old we were when we started dating! How can we, really now, ethically and consciously decide to have kids?

I know this isn’t a new issue. When I was in my twenties, collectively people were really starting to wake up to the state of the world — remember that Al Gore doco, An Inconvenient Truth? (And then, a few years later, that totally unnecessary sequel A Really Inconvenient Truth?) But for a long time before the green movement went mainstream, friends of mine would talk about the ethics of having children, of what kind of world those kids could find themselves living in as adults.

And I have to say, I just don’t know. I think about the future for a living, I’ve been wrestling with these issues a long time, and I just don’t know if we could — I mean should — do it. One internal voice says; you need to have a child as an act of commitment to the future you want to see — because not to have kids is a sort of tragic resignation that you must not allow. The other part of me can’t help thinking of Frankenstein’s monster — let me clarify! not because I look at kids as monsters — because the moral of that story seems to me to be that the creator must assume full responsibility for his creation. The difference here, it seems to me in my darker moments, is that it’s the world we’ve created that’s monstrous, and to raise a child in the midst of that is, possibly, to condemn them to witnessing the end of our story.

The question that 2019Beverly goes on to ask has been echoing in my head: “Can you put yourself on the backburner for one day in order to ensure this crazy world of ours has a chance at a real future?” I believe my answer is yes: I’ll encourage all the kids I know — nephews, nieces, family friends — to gear up and get as involved in this grassroots effort, on every front, as best they can. And however hard it may seem to get, of course I’ll keep doing my part, too. But I still don’t know whether I, for one, can countenance bringing another human being into this world, with a clear conscience.

Of course, the whole point of superstructing is that our survival horizon is a moving target — and, with our collective effort it’s already moved out five years. The direction we’re moving in is the right one, but our speed isn’t yet fast enough to put my fears to rest.

What do you think?

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