Re:Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
by eridius on Thursday April 28, 2016 @09:06PM
(#11593114)
My belief is that advanced civilizations would naturally end up with what is effectively population control, without any actual active work towards that goal. As birth control becomes easy and prevalent, unwanted pregnancies stop happening. And it seems reasonable to me that, given greatly extended life span / effective immortality, people will naturally choose to wait longer before having children (if they have any at all) and will have relatively few children and/or will have a long duration between children. So this does pretty much amount to population control, without having any actual restriction on any given individual's ability to have children.
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Re:Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
by stcredzero on Friday April 29, 2016 @02:58PM
(#11597937)
So this does pretty much amount to population control
From the POV of an outsider or a different species, would any entity care about the difference between "effectively/pretty much" and what you deem to be "actual" population control?
I doubt it.
So basically, you haven't been disagreeing with me, just splitting hairs on what the words "population control" means. I'm using a more generic criteria: Is the population controlled?
Re:Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
by eridius on Friday April 29, 2016 @06:05PM
(#11599069)
I think I'm drawing the distinction between "active population control" and "passive population control". I define "active population control" as anything where the goal is to control population and active steps are taken in that direction, typically with the effect of reducing freedom of individuals (e.g. a simple control would be "no more than 2 children per couple", which means an individual cannot decide to have 3 children). Whereas "passive population control" is basically where population growth ends up controlled as a side-effect of other changes, generally without any limits on the freedoms of individuals (for example, eliminating unwanted pregnancies would be a form of passive population control; the goal isn't to control the population but rather to eliminate an undesired situation, and no individual's freedom is curtailed, but the overall effect would be fewer children across the entire population).