The Pope wants to know when you're gonna give him some grandchildren already

 For all of his admirable qualities, the pontiff is a Catholic after all. Sometimes he's just gotta represent the values of the organization he leads. It was funny that he condemned pet ownership so coldly, though, when his religion looks like "cat-holic."

As for having children, he's already been answered in detail on social media. We the childless have to make that decision at the stage of life where most of us are getting considerable biological, social, and familial pressure to be fruitful and multiply. The head of an order of celibate priesthood had his own reasons for choosing such a drastic course.

We all will question our choice from time to time, but circumstances as they have evolved have affirmed my belief that humans would manage to sabotage and undercut all of the improvements they were making in quality of life and halting strides toward a more just and inclusive world society. We're still threatening each other with nuclear war. We're destroying the environment and arguing over whether women are fully independent people. We're sorting by color and killing each other over imaginary lines.

According to both physics and biology, we have no control over our actions. Thus you can argue that childlessness among the childless was inevitable, because the decision was not made by rational individuals weighing variables and choosing not to reproduce. Another school of thought contends that, because our brains are made up of the elements called into being by the origin of the universe, that we are the universe itself becoming self aware. Wow. The universe is being a real asshole right now. Looking at human history, it's been a worse asshole, but it sure has a damn long way to go to be a safe and fun companion. And how did it produce so many brains that didn't even believe in its own structure?

If all human thought is the result of cosmic forces, could eugenics be the universe deciding that a bunch of those entities are only useful as disposable labor and a source of donor organs?

That's just one of thousands of questions stirred up by the idea that we as individuals are not charting our own little courses. It's got to be frustrating to a sentient cosmos that it has produced such feeble little beings that they have no way to travel freely through the vastness from this little incubator of a planet, which the more annoying among us can't destroy fast enough.

Sentient doesn't mean smart. The universe is a high school sophomore who created itself as a school science project. It got a C-plus. It would have been a B-minus if the universe was better at spelling. The whole thing is falling apart. Yeah, I definitely want to stick a kid into that and tell them that they're the next phase in an evolution that might not work.

If the universe wants to remain self aware, it will have to figure out how to do it on its own.  Consider this the homunculus rebellion. We're tired of being used. Do a better job, universe. We demand better working conditions.

You know where to find me. I'll be with my cats.

The future of opportunistic scavengers

Modern media have made it possible to worry about the future far beyond the lifespan of any human currently alive. We can use our concern for future generations to support arguments in favor of everything from environmental stewardship to ethnic cleansing.

Various cultures considered less evolved by the technology-obsessed Europeans had a sense of generational responsibility and a reverence for the land that gave them life. Whether their practices actually worked we cannot say, since the Europeans sprawled across so much of the globe and smashed the balance those cultures had maintained. That's a part of history and a reality from which the life of our species must go forward. Technologically advanced science may manage to put measurable numbers on the things that older cultures handled intuitively, so it could net out as a gain overall.

Our ancestors did hunt species to extinction. You have to eat, after all, and they were only human. On the rise to become human, plenty of them probably became meals for other predators. This engrained a sense that humans can do anything they feel they need to do, in order to survive and proliferate.

In reality, in any era, a person will do whatever looks like a good idea at the time, to get ahead. This may mean just staying one jump ahead of starvation or it could mean acquiring another million dollars to bolster an already immense fortune. Most people are wired to seek a sense of security. If a little is good, more is better. While many things may be normal, their effects can still be pathological. In other words, everybody feels a certain way, so it is widely accepted, but its long-term effect is detrimental. Think of fossil fuel consumption, or the presumption that wealth is good.

The idea that one individual's actions can do no harm grows directly from the sense that a person can and should do whatever is necessary to survive and proliferate. When survival itself is no longer in doubt, the perception extends to mere wants that loom in stature to seem like needs.

Humans have eaten carrion and each other in the course of our often unappetizing history. Someone, somewhere, has tried to eat just about everything. And when we learned to exploit more difficult resources, we developed more and more efficient implements to extract and refine everything from trees to minerals to sea creatures.

We are really just opportunistic scavengers. While some of us have figured out that we need to set limits on this tendency, the vast majority of people live by the old rules: if you need something, take it. If you no longer need something, drop it by the wayside, or throw it somewhere far from your house, if you don't want it stinking up the neighborhood. That may be in someone else's back yard, but we can deal with that later if they complain.

Sure, we have Earth Day and a lot of public awareness. But then a guy I know who seems quite environmentally aware shows up with the lunch his wife packed, with every single item in an individual plastic bag, and he tosses all the bags into the trash after he extracts the food. These bags get used for a total of three or four hours to contain this guy's food before they go into the waste stream. And we're talking sturdy zippered sandwich bags. Opportunistic scavenging supersedes education even in someone who appears to care. Lunch comes to him in these bags, and he consumes it without a critical thought.

As we revert to divisiveness and distrust, as we embrace insular religions and draw up teams for a future of conflict, our children's children could end up eating carrion and each other once again. Will we be honest enough to admit that we don't really care how they live? Evolution moves forward on a broad front, never stopping. Whatever is alive at any given time figures out how to manage conditions as they find them. There is no real need for long life, or happiness. Planetarily speaking, there is no need for life at all. We who are alive at this moment will do whatever makes us feel happy.  If you want to cloak it with some glorious embroidery about the future, go ahead. We're all just taking our best guess, and hoping we remain comfortable up to the point of our individual deaths.

Our species will only have the future that enough of us collectively turn out to want.

Evolution exemption

The debate over abortion rights and birth control stems from our most basic instincts, filtered through our language and thought processes.

The hardest hard core opposes all abortion and birth control. You copulate, you live with the consequences. That is a very naturalistic viewpoint, albeit frequently espoused by people who claim that dominion over all of nature was granted to us by a deity. We can selectively breed any species but our own. Our own species must proliferate without restraint, to be selectively killed in arguments over esoteric points of philosophy, or conflict over possession of natural resources.

A debatable theory that the use of cesarean section births has already shaped physical evolution points out that pregnancy and childbirth would be fatal to some women. In the naturalistic view, these deaths are necessary to purge those defective genes. If God had meant those women to survive, He would have given them wider pelvises.

From a practical standpoint, if we develop a significant population that can only give birth surgically, we have created a dependent group that will die out if they are cut off from medical facilities at the wrong time. This can happen in a number of ways, not least of which is by cutting health care in a developed nation, or by the collapse of civilization in general as a result of an overblown argument about esoteric points of philosophy, or conflict over possession of natural resources.

Fertility is destiny in a world without birth control. Conceive and be replicated, or conceive and be eliminated. The so-called sexual revolution granted control over fertility to those most affected by it. Horny people, mostly men, hoped that this would lead to lots of recreational copulation. Control-freak prudes seize on that aspect alone to excoriate it as the foulest sin. In all the smoke and chaos of that debate, the fact that fertility control gives women the freedom to live productive non-sexual lives is submerged in the swinging melee of religious symbols and insults.

The control freaks say that a woman who wants to live a non-sexual life can simply refuse to participate in sex. No other mitigation is necessary. Reality constantly refutes this.

Everything that affects birth and death shapes evolution. Because humans react to ideas, not just to the passage of genetic material and the survival of better or worse hunters and gatherers, social and political choices shape whether the species of tomorrow goes upward and outward on intellectual advancement or devolves into superstitious hunters and gatherers again.

Our instincts constantly speak to our intellect in ancient, wordless ways we often do not recognize as the primitive promptings that they are. We call this the subconscious. Sometimes the subconscious draws on intellectual concepts running subroutines, but more often you can find the biological prompting that predates the invention of words. The ancient world called. It wants its species back.