“So what’s the plan to reduce the population?”, I finally asked, reluctantly. I was doing everything I could to keep my emotions under control.
“We call it an orchestrated collapse.” He explained, “We have to reduce the population before the use of fossil fuels and capitalist consumption, destroys the planet. We have to do it in a way that protects our legacy. All the factors involved can all be calculated. There is a time limit set by our pollution, and based on population growth. By factoring in technological advancement and use of resources, we have come up with targets to meet.”
“We also still needed human labor to produce the things we need. So the plan was devised in the 1980’s to continue using the human population, up until the point where technology could develop and survive on it’s own. Robots and automation would replace human labor, and ultimately, do the research necessary to advance technology. We are also reaching the limits of human capacity for understanding in regards to technological complexity. Which is where artificial intelligence comes in.”
“We began implementing some mitigation processes. We introduced a partial sterilization program distributed through vaccines in Africa, in an attempt to slow the population growth. The vaccines did not sterilize people outright, just reduce fertility rates. At first, this increased miscarriages and some people noticed. After refinement and testing, the use of these vaccines expanded across the globe.”
“We also started to discourage hope in the future, by funding fundamentalist extremists and creating economic uncertainty. We created a sense that full scale war was just a few years away. In the west, media campaigns, like the nuclear threat of the cold war, kept people focused on the present and deterred them from having children. After the cold war, terrorism became the threat to feared by consumers. This uncertainty led to reduced births among the consumer population. With a declining consumer population, capitalism would not survive. There would be no going back.
“We needed capitalism to continue without stop up until the end. We began raising awareness of the benefits of capitalism and consumerism. We tried to ensure that no one questioned the market economy. If someone did question it they would sound crazy. At the end of the 1990s, we assessed our efforts and found that our experiments were not enough to reduce the population on the necessary timescale.”
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