[ExI] OP-ED: The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 7:53 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> It is worth thinking about: many hold to a model which (reasonably)
> suggests that growth on this planet really isn’t forever.  At some point
> population growth must slow and stop.  We currently quarrel over how that
> happens and how many people will be here when it does, but even ExI people
> need to think about it.
>
>
>
> I picture a kind of Jetsons world where there is enough of everything and
> population growth is somehow solved.  Hope so.
>

It's been widely observed that population growth is naturally slowing as
more people become part of industrialized society, and some places are well
below the replacement rate already.  The current trend would eventually see
human population begin to shrink, which I fear would have negative
consequences for humanity.

This is why some of the science fiction I have written envisions a day when
human population growth is artificially maintained "for the good of
society" (read:  for the benefit of those who already exist) such as via
mass cloning and, more importantly, state-sponsored/natural-parent-less
child raising (with an option for natural childbirth and traditional child
raising for those who want to do so - just, it's something that only a
small minority of people choose to do).  What happens when most people
never had a mother or a father, other than whatever government paid for
their creation?  This might be a self-reinforcing trend: once the first
clones are old enough to vote, they would seem likely to vote for more
cloning, and perhaps investment in improving the raising process.
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