EPOCH6

I've missed most of this thread and will probably end up repeating things that have already been said but it looks like there are a few people in here ready to keep the train rolling on for however many more pages it goes.

I think it's a rushed conclusion to say that the primary innate driving force in a human is successful reproduction, but I wouldn't argue with the notion that our primary innate driving force is survival. And survival does not exclusively depend upon extensive breeding. Extensive breeding has played an incalculable role in getting us to the stage we're currently at, but the longer we exist as a species the more complex our behavior and abilities become, the more we learn about the world around us, and the more it becomes clear that our goals as a species are much more complicated than we knew while we were playing fecal dodgeball in the African Savanna however many years ago.

Strength in numbers only goes so far until either the numbers become the problem or a force greater than your own comes along and stops everything below it in its tracks, AKA an astronomical disaster completely out of our control, like an asteroid impact or solar activity. Like DwnWthVwls said a page back or so, survival may be more complicated than endlessly bulging the population forever. You can blindly **** your way into a massive civilization, but you can't blindly **** your way into a massive stable civilization. There are way too many factors at play to give every Lemming the same role, all angles need to be worked simultaneously, and some of those angles can't be worked by full-time parents.

Countless brilliant scientists and accomplished professionals of many other fields have been saying for countless years that the more we learn about the universe the more it seems like we must shift our focus towards evacuating our home and developing strong skills as a space-faring species. We must spread out if we want to survive the sweeping catastrophes that we know are coming, some of the same sweeping catastrophes that we know have come in the past, annihilating those powerful species that were here before us (T-Rex & Friends). And that means that some of us, some percentage of the population, must stop having children and devote their time to pushing progress in the other fields that bolster our chances at long-term survival, fields like science, technology, medicine, health care, and the many trades. Fields that can progress much faster with some percentage of the population focusing more of their attention on the work than on raising the global head count. And of course the rest of the population must continue breeding, there obviously needs to be some population of humans raising families to keep the system fueled.

It's wildly narrow sighted to believe that one approach to survival can lead to an ideal outcome for a whole in a system with so many factors at play. There are many roles that need to be filled, and some of those roles require hours that would otherwise be spent raising children. There are many ways to contribute to society, 1 of those ways is raising healthy intelligent children.

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