Holy Blasphemy

Utopia: Is Mass Sterilization the Answer to OverPopulation?

Posted on February 19th, by Derek Murphy in Modern Culture.
Utopia: Is Mass Sterilization the Answer to OverPopulation?

I’m watching Utopia, Season One Episode 5. A small band of unlikely heroes are chasing down a conspiracy. They have one of the badguys tied up to a chair and are asking him questions about a dubious new super-vaccine called Janus, created along with a flu-epidemic panic. The gang thinks the bad guys are trying to eliminate a certain race.

Not so.

“We are now past 7 billion on this planet. When I was born it was a little over two. Food prices are rising, oil is ending, when our resources end in 20 years, given everything we know of our species, do you really think we’re going to just, share? Janus affects 90 to 90% of the human population, leaving only one in 20 fertile. We predict the population will plateau at 500 million in just over 100 years. By then, normal breeding rates should resume, but on a planet that will feel… empty.”

“You’re fucking insane.”

“You accuse us of being genocidal. Not acting is genocidal. 1/3 of the world’s farmland is now useless due to soil deprivation, and we keep producing more mouths to feed. What’s your solution to that, energy efficient light bulbs? Not to do something is to condemn billions of people to starvation and misery.”

The scary thing about Utopia, is that it all feels to probable. The world is in a dangerous place. There are too many people, and we’re still adding to population at an enormous rate. There will be a massive depletion of resources, including food, oil and water, in the next 20 years – our current lifestyles are unsustainable. What’s anybody doing about it? As far as we know, nothing. What’s probably going to happen? Violence, war, starvation, and lots of other terrible things.

The Religious response to all of this is that it’s God’s Will – symptoms of the coming apocalypse, and it doesn’t matter, because the world is ending anyway. What’s the Rational response? If you could join a government thinktank and decide for the entire human race, what would you do?

Personally I think a completely random, universal vaccine that sterilizes us for 100 years is a pretty good solution.

So does one of the main characters (Wilson, the “weird” one) who after listening to the speech, says… “Well, what he’s saying, isn’t it… right?”

The other two, “normal” characters are adamantly opposed. “Sterilize the human race? No, that’s not fucking right. We need to stop him, now!”

Here’s my hypothesis. The government is ALREADY doing this…. and this TV show is showing it to us, to make us more tolerant and understanding, so that we can see all sides of the issue, so that when it happens, we will say, “Oh Yeah, I saw a TV show about that once.”

What do you think? What’s the answer?

Derek Murphy is a writer and artist from Oregon, currently working on his PhD thesis on revolutionary literature while traveling the globe. He writes about comparative religion, popular culture and literary theory. If you’d like to hear about his upcoming projects or books, you can follow him on Twitter, join the Facebook page, or subscribe by RSS.

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  • http://v1car.wordpress.com/ The Vicar

    Nah. I don’t think the government is sterilizing us. They aren’t smart enough to do that; the only way they would ever go for that would be to link the sterilization to race. I can completely see the U.S. government sterilizing everyone who wasn’t white, or the Chinese government sterilizing everyone who wasn’t asian, or any government in the middle east sterilizing anyone who wasn’t semitic. (Semitic, remember, includes both ethnic arabs and jews.)

    (In fact, the Israelis apparently already studied the question of whether it was possible to craft a biological weapon against the Palestinians. Fortunately for all concerned, it turned out that the Palestinians are genetically effectively identical to middle eastern Jews, so the project had to be abandoned.)

    No, what’s going to happen is that sooner or later, one of the biological weapons facilities which nobody is supposed to have by international treaty but which the U.S. in particular has in large numbers will have an employee who gets desperate and pops out some smallpox, or something worse, leading to mass deaths and chaos. This will not only be bad in itself, but it will come too late to prevent the environmental and humanitarian damage which the perpetrator was intending to avoid.

  • MadMarchHare3

    Well, when we have couples spending thousands of dollars on fertility treatments when we already have thousands of existing babies needing parents, you might say our priorities could be a little misplaced. Also, I think if the government were sterilizing people, that would just create a market for the fertile few to become baby machines and sell their offspring. One woman can have a dozen children, if not more, in their life if they make a marketable career out of it.

  • John

    Derek,

    You are not being very logical or realistic. Why haven’t you considered that the Judgement foretold in the religions might be over the resources, God coming to preserve His planet for an advanced civilization intended to last the five billion years remaining to us here? If you had any insight into spirit you would see the soul is not an overnight creation, therefore rebirth is reality. Then you’d know damnation would be a return to animal bodies of those souls who have displeased God by despoiling the resources. It puts a funny twist on Jesus’ promise of eternal life, since nobody asked about the quality of the life being offered. It puts a funny twist on many Christian hymns, like “shall we gather at the river,” which sounds like animals peaceful on a field. You call yourself a revolutionary, but without this level of logic in your mind, are you even real?

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