So What if I Condemn 65% of the World to Die?

You know what we need? A plague.

I'm not talking about influenza, or SARS, or AIDs, or whatever. I'm talking about a real plague. And not like the Bubonic one, because we can fix that now. No, we need a disease which:

-Is a virus. This will make things a lot easier because viruses are harder to fight.

-Has a gestation time of several years in which there are no real symptoms, ensuring it reaches everywhere on earth.

-When it stops gestating, a person dies quickly and relatively painlessly. Basically, if you get symptoms, you're dead. That way I won't feel bad about how people are in agony because of this plague I engineered people won't have to suffer too much.

-Spreads really easily, through breathing the same air or touching the same surfaces; lives for a long time outside the body (like 24 hours or more), and is resistant to disinfectants.

-Reduces the population by 65% worldwide and renders an addition 15% impotent. 20% means a little less than 1 billion people left.

-Attacks the elderly and the severely ill (cancer-weakened immune system, AIDS, etc) most of all. Not that I don't like old people, but if we're slicing up the population of the planet it's probably best that we not have more of them than we have people to care for them.

-Affects people less if they get good health care but still have a strong immune system-- so a person who was raised on antibacterials isn't safe, but the people who played in dirt as kids have a bit more protection. That's pretty much a given, a strong immune system always means more resistance and good health care too. This can't make us go extinct, and honestly, as terrible as it seems, the world would be better off if a little bit more of the deaths were coming from third-world nations that can't support their massive populations anyway.

-Has a lesser impact on Native Americans, gypsies, aborigines and other such underrepresented races; it still needs to affect them, just at a decreased rate so they aren't obliterated. Affects the Chinese and Indians a bit more, but not by much. Absolutely can't affect Caucasians differently from Africans, though, that would be disastrous politically. Also, Ashkenazi Jews will have high resistance, because I'm so sick of Ashkenazi Jews always being the highest-risk group for everything. Plus Ryter's Ashkenazi and it would be nice if he didn't die.

-The bodies have to still carry enough traces of the virus after death to warrant cremation just to be sure. Otherwise, the world would be a cemetery.

-Can't have any affect on non-humans.

-After a few years, scientists need to find a vaccine that can be mass-produced inexpensively and administered to new children, so the outbreak doesn't happen again.

What's my reasoning for the need for this plague? Well, think about it. The world never comes together as well as it does while recovering from tragedy. So there would be looting and panic, and then afterwards people would start to band together on account of not having anything left.

There would be more food and first-world nations would probably give their massive amounts of excess the first couple years to the third-world nations, with the alternative being to let it rot. After a season or two they'd stop producing as much, sure, but the land in third-world nations can often support 20% of it's current human population.

It would be centuries before we'd have to seriously worry about population again.

Countries would throw money into sciences, trying to ensure we were prepared for another such outbreak.

Huge tracts of land would be left unused. Eventually nature would reclaim it. People would start to clump, especially from towns and cities that lost huge amounts of their population; they'd probably head to a few key areas in each country and build new lives there. Like in this country, suburbanites would move towards the coastal cities. That would offer even more land that would be reclaimed.

Also, it would be several generations before people would return to ideas of real war, because their armies would be so reduced.

Maybe this wouldn't all happen, but that's how I see it going down. I don't know, a worldwide plague, maybe not one with this many deaths but a big one, might do us a lot of good.

Window seat?

I rented Idiocracy, Night at the Museum, and Thank You for Smoking last night. Night at the Museum was really fun, but I expected it to be; I suggest people see Thank You for Smoking, because it's very funny and good. Idiocracy, though, was interesting not because the movie itself was good-- it was kind of moronic most of the time. But it had an interesting idea behind it-- that in the future, people will be less intelligent because natural selection no longer applies and the intelligent people don't breed as much.

The problem was, I watched it with my parents (it wasn't my idea, they sort of decided they were going to watch it with me) and Daddy spent the whole time mocking my taste in movies. Despite the fact that I had no idea what the content was like before I saw it, I mean, I didn't expect it to be riddled with literary references but I didn't realize just how idiotic the future-society was going to be.

Anyway, then afterwards we were discussing the population explosion, and how the way to fix the problem presented by the movie should not be for the educated people to have more children, but for everyone else to have less. Mummy then said that she could be excused for having three children instead of just replacing herself and Daddy on the grounds that my uncle is childless, so I laughed at her (it's okay, she was joking anyway) and tried to explain to Mummy the concept of Quiverfull. Daddy then interrupted and said, "Oh, that sounds like the Catholics."

"No, it's actually the Protestants," I replied, "See, it's--"

"That's not a Protestant idea."

"Well, yeah, it--"

"Nope. Catholics. Protestants aren't the ones overbreeding."

"It's just a group of Pro--"

"That's no Protestant group I've ever heard of."

At this point I was very frustrated, because a) Quiverfull is most DEFINITELY Protestant, Catholics allow natural family planning and Quiverfillers don't; besides, they're Protestant in origin; and also, of course Daddy's not that exposed to Quiverfull philosophy, he's Congregationalist and that's as 2 kids and a dog New Englander as you get (That's not an insult, Congregationalism is one of the Christian groups I like best on the grounds that they've usually read the Bible, or at least the SparkNotes version). Anyway, I was more than a little irritated that Daddy was basically accusing me of lying about something that it would be pointless to lie about. Finally I told him to just LET ME FINISH and I explained the Quiverfull idea to Mummy, and he said, "Oh, that's like southern Baptists, they're not really Protestants."

Oooooookay...

Anyway, he proceeded to say, "Either way, it's their right, they can do whatever they want as long as they aren't hurting anyone."

So I pointed out that the population is currently 6.6 billion on a planet that can really only sustain about 1 billion, and that we will eventually run out of arable land even if we DON'T increase the population.

"Don't be ridiculous," he scoffed, "There's tons of land lying fallow in the US right now because the crops won't sell."

"Okay, so the US might be okay," I replied. "At least for a while. But what about all the other countries, like on other continents? I mean, Africa's environment wasn't really designed to sustain cash crops."

"Africa's famine problems have nothing to do with the land, it's just that they have government problems. I mean, they used to farm there all the time. It's just that the farmers don't understand crop rotation."

"No, they farmed for a few decades, the land dried up and died or lost the essential nutrients needed to sustain the crops, and the Europeans moved on to new land." (Keep in mind I was stammering through all of this, so it didn't sound very powerful).

"You have no idea what you're talking about. All of Africa's problems stem from the fact that they have poor leadership. With the right techniques they would be fine. I mean, the land had all those rich rain forests, of course they can support crops."

"Totally different set of nutrients and distribution of them though the soil, Daddy. If sub-Saharan Africa was so ideal for farming, why didn't the Africans have large-scale farming before the Europeans came?"

"There was agriculture for centuries in Africa. The problems with the land are recent developments. You just aren't going back far enough."

"I'm talking about BEFORE THE EUROPEANS CAME. I'm going back tens of thousands of years, how far back are YOU going?"

"Look, people have been saying we'll all die out in fifty years for centuries, and it hasn't come true yet. Look at Malthus."

"He had a point, he just didn't take into account other factors, like technology. The fact that he thought the end was coming like a century ago doesn't mean that it's not coming eventually. We can't sustain our current population growth forever. At 10 billion it will become impossible to sustain ourselves unless we get some incredible technological marvels in the meantime."

At this point my dad just shook his head. "Where are you getting your information from? It's ludicrous."

I raised my eyebrows and retorted, "The latest biological and ecological studies, as learned about in my classes at school, you?"

I really, really wanted him to say something about the corn industry or something, but he just shook his head and went off about how short-sighted I was and how I was underestimating the human race, and I was just getting madder because every time the human race fixes it's problems it creates three more for it's kids and twenty-five for every other species. So I gave up, said, "You know what, I can't talk to you about this, I'm done" and left the room.

My dad's Libertarian and into personal responsibility. I am too. The difference is, he figures "if it doesn't hurt anyone but yourself immediately it doesn't hurt anyone but yourself," and I think about the long-term effects of things. And not just long-term in one person's lifespan, which he sometimes does consider. Really long-term. He sees no problem in people having 20 kids because that's their right and they aren't breaking any laws, and they're only hurting themselves. I think first of the fact that the kids might be harmed, but I'm willing to admit that the brainwashing most Quiverfull kids get is the same as they would get if they were raised by non-Quiverfull fundies, and a lot of kids from ultra-conservative backgrounds turn out okay. More importantly I think of the fact that they're both contributing to the over-religiousification of America, by outbreeding the people (like my dad, come to think of it) who want separation of church and state, and they're causing the drastic overpopulation of our planet thanks to the fact that Darwin still hasn't produced a sufficiently dangerous predator to slim down our numbers. So yeah, I'd say they're hurting people.

Do I think having kids should be illegal? Of course not. But I'm a firm believer in a two-child limit, which, combined with the fact that many people don't have kids, would slowly decrease the population (but this can't be done just by the US, it would have to be done by everyone, and would be hard to enforce either way-- yeah, I'm not stupid enough to think it would work, don't worry). Me? I will give birth to ONE child, if all goes according to plan. That way I get to experience the miracle of childbirth and pass on my genes and blah blah blah. Then, because I am also a firm believer in sibling-less children being a VERY BAD IDEA, I will adopt one or two extra kids who need homes.

Do my part to decrease the population AND take care of the abandoned loinspawn of people who aren't doing their parts? That ought to make up for the fact that I fought with my dad on Father's Day.