01-12-2018, 08:38 PM | #51 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Not right now. But a lot of that is rational calculation subject to changing conditions - it isn't unusual for people who actually do want more children to forgo them because they can't "afford" them - and even if it weren't eventually your population consists of the descendants of people who had whatever genes made them have them anyway. Eventually the rate of contraction slows and stops. Sure you may have a much lower global population for a while, but it isn't going to fall to zero.
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01-12-2018, 09:49 PM | #52 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Quote:
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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01-13-2018, 03:22 AM | #53 | |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Quote:
There is no genetic condition that forces people to have children. With proper access to abortion, birth control, and contraceptives, no one in a technologically advanced society will have children if they find them inconvenient. If such a society wants to maintain its population, it needs to subsidize reproduction with financial and social rewards to women to have children. Perhaps a stipend the equivalent of $2,000 a month per child and preferential hiring would be enough to convince women in a technologically advanced society to have children. |
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01-13-2018, 05:46 AM | #54 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Quote:
Cultural aspects can be as important as genetic ones. We live in a society that recently discouraged having children, and in many cases still does. There are subcultures in it that value having large families, and those groups have larger families, sometimes spectacularly so.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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01-13-2018, 07:24 AM | #55 | |
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ronneby, Sweden
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Quote:
For a Sci Fi setting exo wombs, robot nannies and telecommuting might help a lot though. |
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01-13-2018, 08:41 AM | #56 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
I am talking about a stipend for 18 years (which would be in addition to any maternity leave). As for baby hunger, I think that you are confusing a psychological condition (a baby obsession or baby mania) with a genetic condition. I have known two such women, each having produced a dozen children in over two decades (they started at 14), and they make the worst of mothers because they need the attention of a helpless infant (in both cases, their older children were taken from them because they were found guilty of neglecting their older children). Anyway, I doubt that such unfortunates are more than 1% of the female population or else we would not be talking about collapsing birth rates but instead plagues of neglected children in developed nations.
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01-14-2018, 12:16 AM | #57 |
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ronneby, Sweden
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
And I don't think that, on its own, would help much. An important reason for not wanting babies is that it stops the mother from having an otherwise fulfilling life.
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01-14-2018, 09:20 AM | #58 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Unless we tie this back to Greybeard or Children of Men aren't we off topic?
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Per Ardua Per Astra! Ancora Imparo Last edited by Astromancer; 01-19-2018 at 12:29 PM. |
01-14-2018, 01:17 PM | #59 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Try this idea. Alien contact in the 1940s, if you like, at Roswell. The Aliens find humans advanced enough to be worthy of rescue. In the year 2025 a wave of radiation from a botched stellar engineering project will rip through the solar system. Nothing that lacks fifty miles of shielding will survive.
The Aliens offer Humanity a lift. It's now the year 2347. The radiation has subsided and Earth can be resettled. Some terraformation will be needed. Different groups that left Earth feel they should either get first pick of the land, or simply they alone are worthy of owning the Earth. Basically a reworking of GURPS:Alpha Centauri. Different cultural groups fighting for dominance politically and memetically. The simple fact of off-world backing and aid both limits and extends what PCs and their cultures can do. Many things that made no sense in a low population frontier area cut off from the outside world can now be made logical/functional.
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Per Ardua Per Astra! Ancora Imparo Last edited by Astromancer; 01-14-2018 at 04:28 PM. |
01-14-2018, 03:19 PM | #60 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
Radiation does not work that way. You are talking about intense enough energy to strip off the atmosphere, boil the oceans, and vaporize the first fifty miles of crust. Nothing in the Solar System (or any system within a few light years) would be suitable for colonization after that, as everything in the Solar System would be equally baked, because you are talking about levels of radiation equal to a nearby hypernova (or a relatively close AGN). In fact, given a minimum distance of 85 light-years, you are talking about an event that would make every planet within 1000 light-years of the event unsuitable for colonization.
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