If people stopped having babies, how long would it be before humans were all gone?

Antinatalism: The people who think the world is better off if ...

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If people stopped having babies, how long would it be before humans were all gone? – Jeffrey

Very few people live beyond a century. So, if no one had babies anymore, there would probably be no humans left on Earth within 100 years. But first, the population would shrink as older folks died and no one was being born.

Even if all births were to suddenly cease, this decline would start slowly.

Eventually there would not be enough young people coming of age to do essential work, causing societies throughout the world to quickly fall apart. Some of these breakdowns would be in humanity’s ability to produce food, provide health care and do everything else we all rely on.

Food would become scarce even though there would be fewer people to feed.

As an anthropology professor who has spent his career studying human behavior, biology and cultures, I readily admit that this would not be a pretty picture. Eventually, civilization would crumble. It’s likely that there would not be many people left within 70 or 80 years, rather than 100, due to shortages of food, clean water, prescription drugs and everything else that you can easily buy today and need to survive.

Sudden change could follow a catastrophe

To be sure, an abrupt halt in births is highly unlikely unless there’s a global catastrophe. Here’s one potential scenario, which writer Kurt Vonnegut explored in his novel “Galapagos”: A highly contagious disease could render all people of reproductive age infertile – meaning that no one would be capable of having babies anymore.

Another possibility might be a nuclear war that no one survives – a topic that’s been explored in many scary movies and books.

A lot of these works are science fiction involving a lot of space travel. Others seek to predict a less fanciful Earth-bound future where people can no longer reproduce easily, causing collective despair and the loss of personal freedom for those who are capable of having babies.

Two of my favorite books along these lines are “The Handmaid’s Tale,” by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, and “The Children of Men,” by British writer P.D. James. They are dystopian stories, meaning that they take place in an unpleasant future with a great deal of human suffering and disorder. And both have become the basis of television series and movies.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many people also worried that there would be too many people on Earth, which would cause different kinds of catastrophes. Those scenarios also became the focus of dystopian books and movies.

‘The Last Man on Earth’ is an American postapocalyptic comedy television series about what might happen after a deadly virus wipes out most of the…

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