“Did you decide what actions to take?”, I asked.
“We did, later on. It took some time. Experiments were made and tested. More studies were commissioned. Reducing the population by billions of people is no simple task. Out of the solutions which we discussed, most of them could not be carried out effectively.”
“Like what?”, I asked.
“For example, a solution of mass sterilization, which was highly recommended, would not work. It would have to happen quickly, before people caught on, and figured it out. Our projections showed, that it might make a slight correction for the future, but the problem is not the birth rate, it is death rate. People are not dying the way they used to. More children are living to adulthood and adults are living longer. Death, for consumers, is currently a long slow process. The market economy depends on a slow decline of an individual’s health, in order to keep the market functioning. The market is only healthy with a growing number of consumers. Their wealth must be extracted before they die. So limiting the birth rate or increasing the death rate, both go against market needs. Our whole system of control would come to an end.”
“So, Reducing the human population either though births or deaths would mean ending capitalism. In order to minimize the risk to us and the environment, we would have to reduce the population in a short period of time, and end the game at the same time. Solutions that would take generations were removed from discussions.”
“Some of the remaining solutions would be too damaging to the earth and the surviving population. Diseases would leave a large mess to clean up. Even an engineered disease can be unpredictable once it starts evolving. We could immunize ourselves against any disease we created, but it could evolve to counter our resistance. Particularly, if it was as aggressive as it needs to be, to spread in the required time span and reduce the population.
“Similarly, there is no way to physically murder billions of people. The Nazis had one of the most efficient systems for human extermination, and it took them years to kill millions of people. We need to reduce the population by billions within a thirty year time frame. I think the projections for mass executions came to something like eight to twelve decades to reduce the population, and that was if we build large scale factories to exterminate people. It would also direct aggression toward us. There is no way to explain it away, or blame consumers for it, even if we used dictators and other puppets. It is just not feasible. Afterwards, humans would be too disturbed and distrustful to function as a society. Our estimates showed that half the remaining population would commit suicide, because they would feel guilty for surviving.”
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