A sterilizing virus

I recently came across a link to a short story by Gregory Benford, A Desparate Calculus, about a group of scientists who create a contagious virus that has an unusual side effect: it renders its female victims infertile by triggering their ovaries to release all their eggs at once. The virus is generally not fatal (though vulnerable groups such as the elderly might die, as they can in ordinary flu outbreaks every year). The ultimate effect of this is that it will stop most of the next generation being born – though a few women will likely be resistant to its effects.

Given my outlook you can safely guess I didn’t see this scheme as a bad thing :-). I wonder if it would be do-able in reality; obviously it would have ethicists and the general public in hysterics should they find out, so it would need to be implemented surreptitiously. I feel the situation with the world’s rapidly growing population and ongoing biodiversity loss to be urgent enough to justify such a drastic course of action. It would not involve killing vast numbers of people already here, but would prevent (most) future people from being born.

I suppose that measures such as IVF from stored embryos, cloning and artificial wombs could be used to get around the virus, but the last two technologies are not developed and the first can be difficult to achieve.

There would also be issues of body autonomy; the few fertile women might become valued for their wombs, and lose reproductive rights such as access to contraception.

While there are some worthy efforts to give women access to family planning and education in countries that don’t have or allow these, these are just too slow – they may take decades to achieve, if ever. And even in developed countries, women’s access to contraception and abortion are at times under thread from conservative governments – some states in the USA have currently been trying to overturn laws allowing access to these.

Melbourne most livable (again)

Melbourne was voted most livable for this year again for health care, education and infrastructure. Which bemused many, including me, as there is much to be improved in all these areas. It is certainly a better place to live than many other cities, but far from perfect.

I dislike this sort of publicity as this makes people more inclined to want to move here when the city and suburbs are already bursting at the seams and struggling to cope. Another article came out this week saying Melbourne was undergoing rapid population growth, which is dismayingly obvious to anyone who has lived here for a while – infrastructure is not coping with the influx.

Melbourne’s population is swelling by 2 per cent a year, adding more than 900,000 people since this century began – and putting it on track to be a city of 8 million people by 2050.

The Bureau of Statistics estimates that in mid-2012, the city’s population was about to hit 4.25 million, after six boom years in which it grew by almost half a million.

Recent bureau figures imply that Melbourne today is home to 4.35 million people – and 27 per cent bigger than the city it was at the start of 2000.

With a rapidly growing population squeezing into road and rail systems that are barely growing at all, this would intensify the strain on the city’s infrastructure, leading to increased congestion on the roads and overcrowding on trains.

The figures will probably seem miniscule compared with many major cities – Wikipedia has a list of these, where population for the highest is into the tens of millions. High density living is promoted as desirable because amenities are close together, but there is a tradeoff in loss of open space, stress from overcrowding, noise and other pollution, and limited access to nature. A properly-planned city might alleviate some of these negative factors, but few if any urban centers are; they tend to grow haphazardly over decades as more people are crammed in.