But the new universes also have their own population, though I guess you could colonize universes where humans don’t arise rather than universes identical to this one except I didn’t scratch my nose just now
Bugle
Karma: 31
How about simple spontaneous population stability… I live in a country with negative birth rate but the population is increasing due to immigration nevertheless. This state of affairs hasn’t been legislated into existence, it just happened, and may be a natural behaviour of large human populations. Perhaps once the whole world reaches western standards of living the whole world will stop growing exponentially, with pockets of negative growth being compensated by low but positive growth in others… in the long term the trend could even be for decreasing population...
I guess I’ll be back once I’ve read Permutation city then...
Although if we factor in consequences, say… being distracted by a dust speck in the eye while driving or doing any other such critical activity then statistically those trillions of dust specks have the potential to cause untold amounts of damage and suffering
There is a false choice being offered, because every person in every lifetime is going to experience getting something in their eye, I get a bug flying into my eye on a regular basis whenever I go running (3 of them the last time!) and it’ll probably have happened thousands of times to me at the end of my life. It’s pretty much a certainty of human experience (Although I suppose it’s statistically possible for some people to go through life without ever getting anything in their eyes).
Is the choice being offered to make all humanities eyes for all eternity immune to small inconveniences such as bugs, dust or eyelashes? Otherwise we really aren’t being offered anything at all.
But remember like Alan Moore said “The one place where gods exist unquestionably is the human mind”. Similarly, narratives are a fact of not just your brain, but that of everyone around you, realizing this can be convenient.
The fact is we as large complex mammals are already locked into a low rate of reproduction, sure given the right evolutionary pressures we could end up like shrews again, but that would take an asteroid strike or nuclear war, the scenario you’re thinking of assumes long term evolution within a very long lasting stable society essentially like ours. In those circumstances genes for successful reproduction will spread through the population, but that’s largely meaningless—if I have the gene for super attractiveness and manage to have 100 kids with 100 women we’re still below replacement rate. The way women maximize their reproduction is by having male kids who are alpha males but in these circumstances an alpha is someone who is good at seduction rather than the old style coercion and multiple wives ownership of old times.
tl;dr the bottleneck for overpopulation is individual women’s fertility, and the way women maximize their reproduction is by having high quality sons rather than popping out babies nonstop. So you can still have high reproductive strategies without actual overpopulation.
In any case it’s hard to think in these terms, the feeling I have is memetics will always overshadow any purely instinctual drives.