The latter is probably true but not germane. Nobody else was talking about sterilizing the planet, and there are many much less severe possible futures that still qualify as nightmare scenarios. Some of them could even conceivably happen, unlike total sterilization.
Not really, tens of millions would line up for it; it'd be vastly better than surgery and plenty of pills can kill people now but we deal with that just fine and death is much scarier than sterilization. What you're doing there... it's called fear mongering. If you're really scared of something like that, you probably have some issues you need to resolve because that's a silly thing to be afraid of.
Yes, it is the difference between a sterilization level event and one that is probably survivable. But it would still be the most significant impact in all of recorded history and to get to a larger one you'd have to go back a long, long time.
I vaguely recall hearing about an effort to release sterilized males that would effectively reduce the population local to where they're released. That seemed to be a very safe way to change the environment. The only difference might be the scale by which we could execute that method.
I don't see us doing that to ourselves. Climate change won't accomplish that, nuclear war won't accomplish that, biological warfare gone wrong wouldn't likely accomplish that.
I just don't see it happening. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
Sorry, by "here" I didn't mean in the sentence I quoted, just in this field.
I just don't buy the apparent absolute certainty it won't kill everyone. Then anything else would have been preferable to the "stable equilibrium" we were assured was necessary. But we won't be around to talk about it. That eternally living under MAD is 'the only way' seems to me more like a religious belief than a realization of a fact. A uniquely insane/evil one, however you want to describe killing everyone on Earth. Perhaps it's not considered so evil or insane to do that if you meant well?
It would be interesting to see how humanity would react if that were true. If people had to worry about their actions now causing consequences later for themselves and not just other people's children, I'd imagine we wouldn't be polluting our planet so much. Maybe it would also cause us to take expanding civilisation beyond earth a lot more seriously. Or maybe it would just make wars more vicious. It wouldn't be enough to control other countries, the goal would be extermination to make room for children.
You don't need industrial machinery to produce penicillin. You can sterilize equipment a variety of ways, such as with horseshoe crab blood, fire, alcohol. Now, would it work well for 7 billion people? Hell no. I'm hoping the apocalypse knocks out a significant chunk of the population, and that at that point we can focus on sustainable, simple living, rather than industrialization.
If that's the goal, we can reduce fatalities to zero by all being sterilized. Once we're all dead, there will be no humans left and the human death rate drops to zero, permanantly.
The sterile-insect technique does work, but it's not going to achieve the kind of eradication people in here are talking about. Wild-eyed ideas about mass pesticide application and CRISPR gene drives are more the sort of thing that actually concern me, or would if I thought anyone talking about them was anywhere near the required levers of power to actually make them happen. As it is, I just wish people had enough sense of history to understand the import, although I suppose in the age of alternative facts that's far more than can reasonably be expected.
"Horrific" enough to have our population approach the carrying capacity of the planet, though I guess that doesn't take the danger away on an individual level.
That said, I think "just ignore it" is the proper thing to do in this case.
If I put on my evil genius super villain hat, I think it can be done in a realistic and mundane way, though. It just takes money, and some skill at deception. Rather than military weapons or viruses, the simplest method of ensuring no survivors would be figuring out how to adjust the biosphere to be unsuitable for human life, especially agricultural civilization. Turns out it's easier to do than we thought, and we're not trying to do it. The ozone layer would be the easiest first target.
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