Mass infertility - what if no more babies were born?

[Clabber Girl]

Hypothetically, what would happen if no more children were ever created on this planet, on earth's last days like the movie Children of Men. In my opinion this seems to have a likelihood of happening, as many people today do not wish to have children and changes to the environment/global warming can affect a womans ability to get pregnant. 

Mass infertility due to pollutants, food, or something else unexplained seems to be the premise of the show A handmaids tale as well... My thought is that this may be a way humans will go extinct, not now but somehow in the future... Thoughts?

[Yarco]

Cool premise for a novel

I'll give some guesses as to what would happen (admittedly all conjecture, I'm no expert.) But first I'll say that it's incredibly unlikely, almost zero chance of happening, and normally I'm very much gung-ho about financial collapse, apocalypse, end of the world type stuff.

Both the Earth, humans, and life in general deserve more credit. The Earth has survived asteroid impacts where the vast majority of land probably flooded for days, and the sky was probably blocked out by ash for years, and life still finds a way to come back. Most of Europe and northern US states were covered with glaciers during the last ice age. 60%+ of humans in an area have been wiped out by plagues at various times, and we always bounce back. The Earth is constantly destroying and rebuilding itself through forest fires, land folding back into itself and becoming lava, then becoming new land again.

So I think you could wipe out 90% of humans and we'd bounce back over a few hundred or thousand years.

If only 5% of humanity is left out of 8 billion, that's still 400 million people. Right now in the world there are less than 200,000 giraffes, about 600,000 black bears in North America, only 1.5 million moose in the world.

Basically you can wipe out 95% of people and there are still more of us than most animals you can name, with a few exceptions, mostly rodents like squirrels and mice. Plus we have the knowledge and intelligence to quickly rebuild.

If it was going to happen, I think it'd have to be a pollutant like phthalates or nuclear radiation that could spread all around the world, and lower birth rates even in areas where they're currently high.

Even then, it'd gradually drop off and not be like one single generation would never have kids again. Even if the birth rate drops by half, or 25% of people start dying of cancer before age 50, lots of people would still reproduce.

First thing to happen would probably be that most economies would fail. Stock valuation, GDP, and lots of other numbers require perpetual year-over-year growth. So a lot of ponzi schemes like pensions would come to an end.

Eventually we wouldn't have enough people for more specialized jobs, so some advanced things would have to be abandoned. We could probably keep electricity, water, and sanitation going well into civilizational collapse. But there wouldn't be people to run nuclear power plants or more specialized things like satellites and GPS. Eventually that'd spread to a shortage of nurses, doctors, and surgeons, and other fields that are specialized and require a lot of education. Eventually it hits little quality of life things, like only having 3 varieties of potato chips to choose from at the store, instead of 50.

At some point, cities would need to start downsizing. Whole areas of cities would likely be abandoned and become ghost towns, and big cities would be divided into several smaller cities. The occasional skyscraper or apartment building would probably start to crumble after a few hundred years of disrepair and lack of maintenance. The good news is the cost of housing would be pretty low or maybe even free. Probably some kind of improved squatting law would be created, because there'd be more old people dying than new people to fill their former homes. Same with cars and other items that would be in abundance. The problem is this would cause companies to stop building new homes and cars, and if they stop for long enough, humanity might forget how to do it, once we run out of running cars.

To answer the original question though.... what if no more children were ever created on this planet and humanity hit 0. Not much. Earth would go on and thrive without us. In a few hundred years, even the biggest urban centers would be covered in weeds and small trees.

Most ghost towns you've seen are usually in desert or tundra biomes. Any abandoned city in a temperate or tropical climate would get eaten back up by the earth pretty quickly.

If people stop raking up leaves every fall, they just stay on the roads and start breaking down into a thin layer of soil on top of everything after a few years. Tree roots can aggressively break through concrete and bring the soil back. To the point that in 10,000 years, if the next intelligent species that pops up explores where LA or New York used to be, there might not be anything left for them to find. Even steel beams get turned back into dirt with exposure to the elements on that kind of timescale.

Edited October 18, 2022 by Yarco

[Raze]

So you mean the plot of children of men?