I think most of us agreed with your stating of the issue as information overload causing reactionary response and a fall back to “traditional” religions.
Assuming we had some way to screen for those to the right of the index, we could go one step further and possibly avoid the worst of the damage that would be done in allowing all-out war. We could sterilize everyone to the left of the index. I do mean everyone. In fact, we might choose to sterilize everyone but a few from the far right. This would have the effect of reducing the population load dramatically over the next 50 years. It would reduce the pain and suffering of war, but it would generate its own problems with respect to mental anguish over childlessness, loss of new workers to support the aging population, etc. The question might be posed as which is the lesser of two evils?
I think this possible solution like some others on the board is implausible for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the moral implication, after all, the ones you would have to sterilize would be by default the most religious, so umm…who would have the power to do this? And wouldn’t sterilizing so many actually make extinction more likely? And since we don’t fully understand the workings of DNA or mutation, wouldn’t we risk actually steriziling OUT a possible mutation we would need? And how many years would it take to develop a screening process? And say you do this, and we get hit with some pandemic? Don’t we risk even more extinction?
I think your thesis was accepted, your solution was not.
Frankly there are other people who seem to think mass sterilization seems to be the way to go, however, as a woman I see a different world wide trend, and that is to less population.
Figures already are starting a show a dramatic decrease in population over the next 100 years.
Given choices, most women do NOT choose to have alot of children for economic and health and reason of self fullfillment. So there is another problem really, which is who is actually breeding? It isn’t the US or China or Europe, who have actually fallen behind in replacement rates.
Given the age issue on reactionary responses, then it is to the younger people being born now that we need to reach out to, and part of the problem goes away as the older “boom” generations die out.
And where are these younger people? What countries are still above replacement curve? Won’t the importation of workers to the US and to Europe in the coming generations be a viable way to share social progress?
And is there a way to develop a less dangerous reactionary response by “evolving” the concept of God to get away from the old books, which still leaves the masses with purpose and comfort to fall back on but a more flexible philosophy that would cause less social fragmentation as technology continues to progress?
And hasn’t this idea of creating a “super race” been tried before?
The idea of royal blood lines? That worked out well during the middle ages !!
Who decides who and what traits to breed in or out? Who polices this? While I think Genetic Engineering is important to our survival as a race, and things may come to pass as you say, I find your solution also reactionary, short sighted, more immoral than war, and potentialy more dangerous to the species as a whole.
In fact, the more I think about war, it seems to me that war itself is a force in natural selection and expansion of gene pools and has been for all of our history. Would we go so far as to make the earth unihabitable and drive ourselves to extinction? I for one don’t think so.
