Andrew Sage

But other approaches were very harsh and brutal.

You know, you had sterilization campaigns, forced sterilization campaigns taking place in India and Puerto Rico and in the United States.

China's one-child policy also gets a lot of attention, but...

It was only one example of a widespread brutality around the impositions placed on women, especially in that time.

The fear of too many people and that anxiety leading to the control of women and their bodies.

And it's a scary prospect, especially if you were a minority in this time, if you were a cultural, racial or religious minority, because it made very ordinary human activity, things like moving around, having children, just existing, made it seem like an existential threat to civilization, to humanity that needed to be dealt with by any means necessary.

So they had some positive outcomes of the overpopulation concern.

You know, you had pushes for men's empowerment.

You had the proposal of improved urbanization to reduce the sprawl of human activity.

You also had people proposing things like extraterrestrial settlement, which, you know, is not really realistic as a solution for a multitude of valid reasons.

Yeah.

I think it's really funny, you know, whenever people push that sort of, yeah, humans are destined for the stars kind of narrative.

You know, it's a story, a really powerful story coming out of science fiction.

And it's good that it has inspired people to learn more about space and, you know, dedicate their lives to the study of the stars and that kind of thing.

But this idea that we're going to be shipping off like millions of people off planet to settle on other planets is,

I think is pretty safely in the realm of science fiction.

Yeah, that's a full, like, get back to me in a thousand years.

And we could maybe start talking about moving, like, thousands of people.

Yeah, even thousands or hundreds of people.

I mean, we don't have those massive generation ships.