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Scientifically, what is the best way to ensure that no children are born without government permission?

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ONLY NICE THINGS

18:26 / 01.11.02

This is an adjunct to this Head Shop thread, where a number of quasi-, pseudo-, or just plain scientific ways to sterilise, contraceptivise, spindle, fold or mutilate the population of the US have been propounded, from a simple snip to sperm-eating nanobots.

So, to avoid the thread getting bogged down in ill-thought-out science (as opposed to the ill-thought-out ethics that are its entitlement), I'm opening a second front here.

From a scientific perspective, how would you best go about ensuring that no or a minimum of pregnancies could occur without the permission of a higher agency? That is to say, what is the most efficient, but reversible, way to render an entire country unable to procreate?

19:09 / 01.11.02

Unprotected vaginal-penetrative sex made punishable by death. Combination closed-circuit camera/death-ray units everywhere, monitored by hordes of trigger-happy bureaucrats. Motto: "If it goes in, we're taking you out."

19:36 / 01.11.02

Mandatory castration of all but a small percentage of males at birth (or some latter point to be determined by someone in authority. The remaining percentage, uncastrato that is - and of 'superior' genetic stock of course - would be closely monitored and required only to 'breed on command'.

Or maybe the govt. could just pump birth control hormones into the water and/or food.

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:56 / 01.11.02

But what are these mysterious "birth control hormones"? You need to be a litle more scientific than that.

Possible side-effects of children ingesting doses of hormones? Possibilities of people evading the water by drinking Evian? Come on, try harder...

20:00 / 01.11.02

Fair enough. A kinder gentler solution: state-sponsored vasectomies for most males at the onset of puberty (with the added advantage of *possibly* being reversible).

Or perhaps a virtual reality sex simulator in every home to encourage the end of dating as we know it (to paraphrase Bill Hicks).

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:35 / 01.11.02

Ah, but, as was mentioned in the Head Shop, if just one man slips the net he could impregnate an enormous number of women...

21:11 / 01.11.02

Okay, I went over and read as much of that thread as I could take...a lot of ideas I would mention here, ridiculous or otherwise, already appear there, but I will say this: even if some guy slips the government vasectomy dragnet he would still have to have sex with a buncha women to have such enormous...consequences. Baby-wise I mean. So, assuming the government got a great majority of men at the onset of adolescence (perhaps 'tagging' them with a tattoed bar-code on the back of a hand [at the same time - an adolescent rite of passage] which they would have to present for scanning to buy food, clothing, etc. - just to take this to a new level of total control), the few they missed would still have to be veritable Caassanovas to make the enormous difference.

Of course maybe in a sterile society people would be far more promiscuous (if that's the correct word), thus causing greater consequences for each missed male, but that might be taking the idea too far (as if tatooing bar-codes on men's hands wasn't already). Laughs.

21:23 / 01.11.02

Vasectomy - or even bilateral orchidectomy - at birth. Lump it in with circumcision and American parents will buy it ("It's cleaner, right?"). Successful childbirth applicants will be eligible for cloning or impregnation from a small 'pool' of stored, state-approved semen.

13:51 / 02.11.02

Actually, I've got a new (and even more hideous) idea:

A deadly virus that only affects babies.

I don't know how specifically you could engineer such a virus, but I'm assuming something that no matter how powerful it was, a decent amount of kids would still be born with immunity to it (or just survive it due to toughness).

Of course, the rich would be able to afford air-tight bubbles to raise their kids in, so it would mostly target the poor and middle classes (which would probably make whatever fascist govt. pulls off this atrocity quite happy).

It would be a damn miserable place to live....

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

18:50 / 02.11.02

You could even aim lower than that. Go for the foetus. Foetuses are quite different physiologically to 'born' humans, even further removed than babies. For instance, foetal haemoglobin is different. Make an easily-spread bacteria or even virus which 'eats' foetal haemoglobin.

Your average person in the street may never know they were a carrier, allowing it to spread unchecked.

Pretty gruesome though.

08:18 / 03.11.02

Well, another method of fertility regulation would be at the "other end" of prgnancy - i.e. state control of abortion (up to and including infanticide at birth).

is any currently available form of contraception 100% effective (apart from abstience)?

Of course, the Chinese use financial incentives (that seconf child could mean you get fired or lose your house). How about a ridiculously high baby tax?

01:42 / 04.11.02

Depo-provera (or whatever it's called) in polio vaccines.

Or better yet, implanted in time-release form right under that smallpox vaccine scar.

23:43 / 04.11.02

An all-out study by a reliable agency (?) to establish the optimmum carrying capacity of the land, to coincide with a quality -of-life study. The results to be correlated to establish appropriate population levels for each region. Follow up with massive education programs so that adults of this generation make good, informed choices and succeeding generations build on the wisdom of their forebears. In real practice we'll have to go the way of China. Hormones are utterly irresponsible.

11:17 / 05.11.02

I appreciate that my above reply is not in keeping with the abstract. I do feel that we need to grow as a race; to make informed, responsible decisions. Children raising children is a downward spiral. Any government instituted program for population control will breed resentment and a whole new level of repressive laws. (IMO)

16:05 / 05.11.02

Make an easily-spread bacteria or even virus which 'eats' foetal haemoglobin.

Your average person in the street may never know they were a carrier, allowing it to spread unchecked.

Pretty gruesome though.

What's so gruesome? If it acted soon enough, it wouldn't be that different from regular menstruation. When do foetii start making haemoglobin? You could distribute a temporary blocker to women who qualify for child-bearing.

Pepsi Max preempts my less-than-scientific suggestion -- taxation. But it needs to be balanced by a lottery, with the odds based on a controlled population growth.

12:40 / 06.11.02

Don't know if this is scientific, but it seems logical:

Once menstruation starts, you could take a couple of eggs for storage, then destroy the ovaries but not the womb. Then when pregnancy is allowed a fertilized egg could be implanted in the womb.

Or you could destroy the ovaries earlier, and provide eggs from special donor women, though that wouldn't give much genetic differentiaton.

16:21 / 06.11.02

The optimal procedure for woman would be to block the filopian tubes, as is commonly done today (tube tieing). That has a fair chance at reversability, though still requires surgery, which is messy. There's another procedure I've heard of where they put a ring inside the womb which can be removed, which prevents a fetus from attaching to the womb walls and this causing every pregnancy to be miscarried within the first couple of weeks. That might be a better approach.

Though if you wanted to be particularly fascist about it, you could just kill any unregistered humans created outside of government permission or something draconian like that. Cruel, but effective, in a horific sort of distopian way.

19:02 / 06.11.02

Not to derail this too far, but a draconian system is not neccessarily fascist.

Son of the Soil (aka Joe Dirt)

19:02 / 06.11.02

sexcrime

is this the orwell board?

20:59 / 06.11.02

Vasectomies, tying "tubes" and destroying ovaries? Are you guys stuck in the dark ages or something? Why don't you try some humane solutions that wouldn't have seemed backward to an 18th century surgeon.

All you need to do is introduce a superstring that intersects space-time within the woman's uterus, with a bio-tracing point of emergence. This point would stay fairly stationary relative to the body in question but transfer any introduced sperm, via the singularity, to a convenient output point. Thats all fairly elementary with M-theory, and the ultra-product topological variants, especially given the verification of the technology at Roswell. The added advantage is that you can genetically trace any fertile sperm, so you always know who is trying to do what.

And before anyone tries to get smart, no you can't use nanobots either for creating the original quantum distortion or for anything else, since the dimensional tunneling disrupts function. *Obviously*

12:43 / 07.11.02

MJ-12, could you expand upon that over here?

20:20 / 07.11.02

I thought bio-tracing was a. a proven carcinogen and b. easily "hacked" by almost anyone with a mind to, as long as they could get a hold of DNA (a safety pin?) and a transmission source (a garage door opener).

12:18 / 08.11.02

Grant, you are the postmodern MacGyver. And that's one of the reasons why we love you...

14:18 / 08.11.02

Another option is to go the other way and ban contraception. Simply withdraw it from use in any form.

Allow people to get pregnant as often and as many times as they can.

All babies are then taken away from natural parents at birth, and are doled out by the government to carefully screened potential parents.

The remaining babies are killed and used for food.

17:21 / 08.11.02

Introduce colourings and preservatives into children's food products that make them irritable and prone to random violence(1). Simultaneously pollute their environment and restrict their exposure to disease organisms to make them asthmatic and plagued with allergies and minor ailments. Fewer and fewer adults will wish to have sickly violent children, and those few that survive until early adolescence without choking to death will shoot each other.

(1) The children, not the food products. Although CheeseStrings on the rampage might be entertaining.

17:26 / 08.11.02

Addendum: You might find it useful to introduce stimulant drugs into their food as well, in order to give them the energy and motivation to pick up guns and make them even more prone to mood swings etc. Or, you could have some sort of system whereby stimulant drugs are recommended by medical professionals, and perhaps even mandated by schools as a condition for entry. They could be prescribed to treat the conditions caused by your other measures.

Professor Silly

18:59 / 08.11.02

How's this:

Using mass-communication, encourage within the population homosexuality, which does not result in pregnancies. Make it taboo and dangerous to encourage more and more individuals to move their practices into this non-reproductive area of human experience. This gives the state a percentage that simply won't procreate as much. They could also use "random" violence on pre-sexual children such as molestation and rape (from authority figures of course) to encourage nuerosis and whatnot.

From a more positive standpoint, studies have shown that those with a University education won't have as many children than those that don't have such education. So the state could effectively reduce procreation by making sure as many of its citizens as possible have a formal college education. This would incidently (according to "Bucky" Fuller) raise everyone's standard of living and make the whole country both richer and happier.

Food for thought.

The Photographer in Blowup

10:05 / 12.12.02

This is my first post, so please bear with me.

Possibly the best solution would involve nanotechnology: injecting women at birth with microscopic robot colonies would be the first step; since nanotechnology involves rearranging atoms, such robots could perform a laparoscopic sterilisation (the cutting of Fallopian tubes - nanotechnology is expected to transform cancer cells into benign cells, so it's actually a mundane use of this technology), to impossibilitate reproduction. and the microscopic robots could 'heal' the tubes when reproduction was demanded.

Plus, as the robots would reproduce themselves inside the bodies, they would pass along to each new infant through pregnancy, thus keeping the next generation in control (such control would be obviously applied by the government, i suppose)

Phex: Dorset Doom

20:02 / 13.12.02

Nanotech seems to be the way to go, but instead of fallopian tube cutting nanos that Rosa escribes (I'm not a woman, but the thought of my insides dissolving at a molecular level is a lil' scary) how about anti-sperm nanos? Remember that Itchy and Scratchy episode where Itchy makes a Scratchy Cloning Machine that churns out Scratchy clones? And he has to build a Scratchy Killing Machine to kill each clone as it's born? Weeeelll... Imagine the cloning machine is your balls (if you have balls), simply put Hunter-Killer nanomachines around the whole ball-area (ball park?) to seek and destroy any sperm.
The only problem is that nanomachines will probably work a little like viruses (only much harder to detect, being molecular) and they have no way of telling whether they're in the body of a citizen of nation A or of nation B, so infertility could easily spread worldwide and cause big diplomatic greif. Also, deactivating killer nanos would probably be a little like deactivating the security tags shops put on their goods, and it's probably something that could be 'hacked' by anyone with the right technology, allowing ambitious couples to illegally have children. Imagine rogue fertility doctors charging to swipe a guy's scrote through the magic anti-nano machine... (The film/novel rights to this concept are MINE! MINE YOU HEAR!)

00:54 / 15.12.02

Legalise prostitution as the only means of having penetrative sex without a State-approved contract, combined with tantric training in all schools to show everyone that getting your end away is not the only way.

The Photographer in Blowup

09:49 / 15.12.02

Legalised prostitution will never work as there will always be people breaking the law. The point of this thread is to come up with an efficient way of controlling birth and population growth.

You guys talk of turning kids into food, and legalised prostitution and using viruses to kill foetus in wombs, but the answer to this thread relies on finding a way where foetus don't come to the point of existing without impeding people from having sex, which no one would ever give up (forget all that you read in 1984 and find new ideas, of your own by the way)

So, if microscopic robots could prevent women's sexual organs from working, sex would still exist, but the government would be in full control of who would be allowed to give birth and when and how many would be born

Now, i don't mind someone refuting my idea, but please get something more original than all those dystopian rip-offs ideas you read in scifi and get a viable idea

13:41 / 16.12.02

gee, Rosa, isn't it your idea that's the stuff of science fiction? I mean, how many decades are we from any kind of sophisticated nanotechnology?

The Photographer in Blowup

18:43 / 16.12.02

But if nanotechnology existed, it would be viable - now these guys talk of legalised prostitution, as though that stopped accidental births; and transforming kids into food (what is that?)

The point is making sure foetus/accidental births don't exist/happen, and that means having sex without the possibility of getting pregnant - which having the Fallopian tubes cut by microscopic robots would provide

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:03 / 17.12.02

FWIW, Rosa, somebody advanced the nanobot idea earlier, in the Head Shop thread. They did it very badly, but the main problem was that nanobots n this context are a deus ex machina - we might as well have an army of wizards teleporting the sperm right out of our testicles, or a clond army of sterile Overlord Xes occupying all te ladeez.

Also, since somebody else has already proposed nanobots, here, you might want to avoid chucking insults like this around:

(forget all that you read in 1984 and find new ideas, of your own by the way)

It's likely to annoy people. So why don't we look at phex's question: why the fallopian tubes? Why not nanos that, say, use a low-level electric pulse to kill all the sperm in the testicles when a series of biological indicators suggest that sex is about to happen or is happening, for example? Or both, just to be on the safe side? And before Gridley can point to the greater cost-effectiveness of only sterilising girls, why not assume that nanobots, as well as being real, are also dirt cheap?

12:18 / 17.12.02

but, you have to remember--

oh, never mind....

so, when those robots in my scrotum shoot electricity into my spermbanks, would it hurt? would it feel good?

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