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.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

That cannot be interpreted deterministically. Ideologies change as does the proportion of space to population. And any number of factors.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

People do not have children because they are expensive emotionally and financially. Just as importantly, people who do have children delay having children until they have done everything else that they want to do (and delay having a second child until their first child is old enough to go to school). It is not uncommon in the USA for people to wait till they are 30 to have their first child and 40 to have their second child.

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.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

That's not shown one way or another. There is a state I've heard called "baby hungry" where an individual wants a baby of their own. I've seen it in multiple individuals. The drive to reproduce is not entirely sexual. Though I will admit there are also possible counter measures for that, like virtual babies and pets.

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.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

I doubt that would be enough. Sweden have a fairly long paid maternity leave, ~16 months, and various other benefits. But staying away from work still mean you miss out on career opportunities and so on.

For a Sci Fi setting exo wombs, robot nannies and telecommuting might help a lot though.

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.

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.

Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds
 

Unless we tie this back to Greybeard or Children of Men aren't we off topic?

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.

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.