Vasectomy For Transhumanists
I was asked what went into my decision to get a vasectomy, especially considering I’m hoping to live at least thousands of years and people change.
When I project out my future over the next 10 years, I can't see wanting kids at any point in that time period.
Plus there's not much of a possibility for it even if I did want it.
The threat of maybe accidentally making a kid was super stressful. Vasectomy removed all that fear/stress, with very little near-term downside.
In the far term - after more than 10 years out, I don't think I would be realistically able to have children anyway. Either I'd be too old for it to be practical, or whoever my mate would be at that time would be too old to bear children, or both!
If we reach the transhuman future and I live a very long time and slowly change in a way that leaves me desiring children, then having a vasectomy won't matter anyway, because that should be super easy for incredibly advanced tech to reverse or work around.
Finally, just to be safe and really put myself at ease, I got some sperm frozen before I got the vasectomy. It was several hundred dollars, which isn't nothing. But imagining the worst-case scenario of future-Eneasz wanting kids, I'd rather pay that than screw future-Eneasz very badly cuz I was too cheap to part with a few hundred dollars.
I would guess that the cost of gamete freezing and ongoing storage and a vasectomy in youth is comparable to the costs of some forms of female contraception. (IUDs may be cheaper, though.) Using this as a contraception method would still make reproduction more of a pain, and involve trust in a clinic which many people would reasonably not want to be too confident in, so it's not really viable, but it is an interesting thought. (Also, using younger sperm would plausibly have a eugenic effect without, uh, telling anyone not to have kids or having to use fancy gene-editing tech, in that it'd have fewer mutations, but there could easily be some other effects that I'm not accounting for.)