From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 23:20:57 MDT
At 12:57 AM 10/15/02 -0400, Randall Randall wrote:
>Would you want to live under a system that could enforce such regulations
>for *everyone*, *everywhere* (e.g., no frontiers permitted)?
What part of `dismally conservative estimates' didn't you understand?
But while we're here...
If biological intelligence *did* find itself sequestered on a single world
(absurd, dismally conservative postulate though that is), there quickly
would *be* no frontiers left. Thereafter, social mores would adjust to
limit ad hoc fertility. Regulation need not be imagined as imposed from
without, by and large. We don't now have squads of anti-cannibalism cops
bursting into houses to check the ovens; people have internalized a
revulsion for anthropophagy. I can imagine a world order in which immortal
people who insist on their `right' to have as many children as they wish
are encouraged by hisses and boycotts to emigrate to Fertilia, formerly the
Sahara, where they might exercise their whims for as long as it takes--but
they're not welcome back among civilized people unless they agree to obey
the social compact I mentioned.
Damien Broderick
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