Robin Hanson first proposed the idea of a “Great Filter” that has stopped any species from colonizing the galaxy. I’ve mostly heard it thought of as either something that prevents planets from reaching civilization levels close to ours (the leap to multicellular life is extremely improbable? too many planet-killer asteroids?), or disasters that destroy civilizations like ours before they’ve had a chance to expand past their home solar system (global nuclear war?).
Hmm, I don't believe this trap is stable over the long term, though it might work through a few cycles.
It's true that in the short and maybe medium term cultural evolution effects like this would dominate.
Over the long term though regular evolution would intervene. It seems like in our past it was sufficient for evolution to encode
1) Desire for sex / sex being fun
2) Loving your children and fighting for their survival once they exist
Everything else took care of itself.
Now that we're intervening in that cycle we should expect new adaptions to develop. In the near future that might only manifest in things like more widespread allergic reactions to birth control or it being less effective than expected. That's probably not sufficient though as we could easily adjust the birth control faster than evolution can get around it.
In the far future I see different possibilities:
- strong inborn desires for having many children/descendants
- what we would now consider pregnancy fetishes - non procreative sex just not feeling that good in comparison
- pregnancy itself becoming easier and more pleasant
- the way children develop/grow up becoming less burdensome for parents
- basically any other change that leads to people having more children
(This all obviously assumes that we won't have massive technological advances that make all of this not matter.)
If society at large were more supportive of parents, families and children, I'd probably have some. But for all their talk, politicians don't seem interested in moving society in that direction. There seems to be a lack of political will to keep humanity growing. I'm not personally invested in the survival of humanity, so instead of going through the enormous hassles of having children, I'm also comfortable with living long and dying out.
First, while the description of the process may be very true about Earth, and while some similar pattern may be possible for aliens, saying "this is the reason" is based on assuming the aliens are improbably similar to humans not only biology, but also sociology.
Second, while i believe the described cycle is possible, the cycle is not everything. The golden age is not in our past. Not even "perhaps". The social structure of society is very important, not only it's technology and supply chains. A world with the technology of the 90s, or maybe even worse technology, but an egalitarian society that actually works and not causes any pointless suffering would be far better than the 90s, or our current time. And that's without mentioning the fact different places in the world have both different technologies and different societies. "Children in Africa" and all that.
Hmm, I don't believe this trap is stable over the long term, though it might work through a few cycles.
It's true that in the short and maybe medium term cultural evolution effects like this would dominate.
Over the long term though regular evolution would intervene. It seems like in our past it was sufficient for evolution to encode
1) Desire for sex / sex being fun
2) Loving your children and fighting for their survival once they exist
Everything else took care of itself.
Now that we're intervening in that cycle we should expect new adaptions to develop. In the near future that might only manifest in things like more widespread allergic reactions to birth control or it being less effective than expected. That's probably not sufficient though as we could easily adjust the birth control faster than evolution can get around it.
In the far future I see different possibilities:
- strong inborn desires for having many children/descendants
- what we would now consider pregnancy fetishes - non procreative sex just not feeling that good in comparison
- pregnancy itself becoming easier and more pleasant
- the way children develop/grow up becoming less burdensome for parents
- basically any other change that leads to people having more children
(This all obviously assumes that we won't have massive technological advances that make all of this not matter.)
If society at large were more supportive of parents, families and children, I'd probably have some. But for all their talk, politicians don't seem interested in moving society in that direction. There seems to be a lack of political will to keep humanity growing. I'm not personally invested in the survival of humanity, so instead of going through the enormous hassles of having children, I'm also comfortable with living long and dying out.
Two things.
First, while the description of the process may be very true about Earth, and while some similar pattern may be possible for aliens, saying "this is the reason" is based on assuming the aliens are improbably similar to humans not only biology, but also sociology.
Second, while i believe the described cycle is possible, the cycle is not everything. The golden age is not in our past. Not even "perhaps". The social structure of society is very important, not only it's technology and supply chains. A world with the technology of the 90s, or maybe even worse technology, but an egalitarian society that actually works and not causes any pointless suffering would be far better than the 90s, or our current time. And that's without mentioning the fact different places in the world have both different technologies and different societies. "Children in Africa" and all that.