You are absolutely correct. But it's even worse. The fertility rate required for populating a new colony would have to be higher than 2.2, probably much higher. Because of course, in most sci-fi or fantasy novels, there are wars or enemies or illness or other factors that lead to people dying that would imply the necessity of higher fertility to replace the population. Plus, of course, a colony on a new world would imply that they would run into things they couldn't have predicted that would affect the survival rate of infants and children, totally apart from potential effects on fertility itself. It is extremely rare (I think) to find sci fi or fantasy that takes fertility and child-rearing seriously.
The "two years without getting pregnant" is a bit of a new angle that I don't remember from about a decade or two ago before I stopped reading sci-fi, before I picked it up again. Back then, they always had magic birth control, for fantasies, or technologically perfect birth control, for sci fi. I didn't realize they'd moved on to believing that healthy couples didn't get pregnant at all.
You are right that people would start worrying if a woman didn't get pregnant within a couple of years. People would start looking at whether she was getting enough food, or high enough quality food, or whether she needed more rest, or whether she was over-worked, or under too much stress. All of those factors affect ability to achieve or maintain a pregnancy.
All of my writing takes those factors into account. That's why the "married" soldiers in "Cloak and Stola" talk about whether their wives have "caught" yet (gotten pregnant) and deal with their wives having obvious stress and probably nutrition caused delay in achieving pregnancy. And women regularly miscarry as well.
You might want to check out Laura Montgomery's colonization series "Martha's Sons." People have large families, and the requirements of raising families are taken seriously. As are the actual issues with terraforming planets.
The prevalence of sci-fi and fantasy stories which are just The Current Year But With Spaceships/Dragons is dismaying. It indicates both a collapse of creativity and a decrease in intellect. Population dynamics is something that even popular franchises do not understand at all. Take, for instance, the size of militaries quoted for supposedly highly militaristic evil empires embroiled in galaxy-spanning war. One Star Wars book said the Empire had 10,000 Star Destroyers (read: capital ships) at its height, which is much less than one per inhabited star system. An entry in an old Warhammer 40,000 Codex describes a particular planet as having a planetary defense force of "8 million men...as well defended as any in the Imperium." Really?! Who knew that the Galactic Empire and the Imperium of Man were decidedly under-militarized compared to present-day Sweden.
My favorite story... imagine you are in a huge field, in the pitch dark. You and another guy, both with rifles. One of you has a flashlight. Would you use it?
To be fair, sf has always reflected the time it was written. Maybe the problem is worse now, if only because people are worse now--hard for me to say, as I don't read much sf any more--but the bare problem, if it is a problem, is hardly new.
Well, yes, people have always written from their perspective, and what they know. But this is something they know... it is obvious math that people have known since forever. But they seem psychologically incapable of applying it.
Je suis heureux de vous trouver. Je suis anglophone, montrealais, and j'apprecie vos ecrits. I will follow you henceforth, and I agree that even basic math isn't properly understood or used by people without a propensity for quantification (i.e. most people).
Nice to have another French speaker. I'm literally writing a book, right this second, about some kids from Vermont in 1889 who go to France. Would love to have a beta reader :) I love speaking French, but I'm not fluent. Especially not written French.
In this particular post I'm not thinking it is actually a math problem for most people... but a cultural one. They simply can't wrap their mind around a sci-fi story where people have lots of kids.
Honestly my French is OK, but not good enough to proof read, but I am sure you can find willing Quebecers on Substack. Yeah, agree,. its the math per se (although a LOT of people don't intuitively get things like geometric or exponential growth) its as much about expectations and cultural norms. There a bunch of writers I have been seeing that are writing on the abysmal fertility rates in North America.
Why care about children and/or math if you have education, nice career, fun travel, tasty food and cheap entertainment? Raising kids is not evil, it is just boring and too much responsibility and too much relationship readjustment. And people with kids are boring because all they do is talk about their kids. Modern fiction is largely written for kids that happen to live in adult bodies and it is only natural that it seeks to comply with their detached views.
Someone commented on immigration. Immigration does not change the calculus here, it just shifts its focus. If a colony were to start with 10,000 people and do well, but have a birth rated of 2.2 (ie static), it would not help to say 'immigration'. That immigration would have to come from somewhere, and those people would have to be producing enough for themsleves AND to support the new colony.
And it is almost provably mathematically impossible for a space colony to truly grow via immigration. The difficulty of walking from Venezuala to the US would pale in comparison to having to travel to another STAR! Spaceships almost by definition have to be small. There is no way for them to handle the billions of people needed for even one colony, let alone several.
The most egregious for me was Mass Effect where the Quarians (a race of people who live in spaceships) was said to be practicing one-child policy because of limited resources. By the way, they're also on the verge of extinction because of an incident involving their robotic creations that rebelled against them, killed most of their population, and kicked them out of their home planet. You'd think given the situation, the Quarians would focus on having more children to prevent their people from going extinct. But no, let's deliberately limit our fertility. No wonder these people are dying out, lol.
I have an idea. A tool that shows # of years to 99% gone, given a sub-replacement birth rate generation length.
“South Korea is at .68 babies per woman” doesn’t quite convey how dire the situation is. Perhaps more impactful to say South Korea is at X years to 1% of people left.
I’m afraid that would take longer than I have right this second, so remind me later. But I have written a whole bunch of posts about marriage, and patriarchy, and one on depopulation solutions, so they would give you a hint anyway.
Most writers of Romance, or Fantasy think Single guy, single girl, guy gets girl, they have sex, and that's it. It's a rare author that thinks that sex leads to babies and more sex equals more babies.
You did a great job in "Marriage Contract."
I'm planning on the same thing as my stories progress. It's not a family if you don't have children running around.
A lot of old families prosperity was judged on how many sons and daughters they had, and the more, the better.
Science fiction writers are about the same, all the tech gets in the way of the human factor.
Here's case that can make your point. Star Trek Voyager. They were stranded 70 light years from the Federation, and yet in eight years of the show, only one set of people paired up and had a child. A single child.
Heck, the borg did better than that, they had whole Maturation wards, where they grew their replacements. Whole wards of thousands of children.
But yes. Modern women don't care, they just want to have the bump and grind and not have responsibilities for what happens.
I'm not sure that modern women don't actually care. I am inclined to think that they have had their ability to show they care ground out of them by the prevailing culture.
You are absolutely correct. But it's even worse. The fertility rate required for populating a new colony would have to be higher than 2.2, probably much higher. Because of course, in most sci-fi or fantasy novels, there are wars or enemies or illness or other factors that lead to people dying that would imply the necessity of higher fertility to replace the population. Plus, of course, a colony on a new world would imply that they would run into things they couldn't have predicted that would affect the survival rate of infants and children, totally apart from potential effects on fertility itself. It is extremely rare (I think) to find sci fi or fantasy that takes fertility and child-rearing seriously.
The "two years without getting pregnant" is a bit of a new angle that I don't remember from about a decade or two ago before I stopped reading sci-fi, before I picked it up again. Back then, they always had magic birth control, for fantasies, or technologically perfect birth control, for sci fi. I didn't realize they'd moved on to believing that healthy couples didn't get pregnant at all.
You are right that people would start worrying if a woman didn't get pregnant within a couple of years. People would start looking at whether she was getting enough food, or high enough quality food, or whether she needed more rest, or whether she was over-worked, or under too much stress. All of those factors affect ability to achieve or maintain a pregnancy.
All of my writing takes those factors into account. That's why the "married" soldiers in "Cloak and Stola" talk about whether their wives have "caught" yet (gotten pregnant) and deal with their wives having obvious stress and probably nutrition caused delay in achieving pregnancy. And women regularly miscarry as well.
You might want to check out Laura Montgomery's colonization series "Martha's Sons." People have large families, and the requirements of raising families are taken seriously. As are the actual issues with terraforming planets.
https://www.amazon.com/Marthas-Sons/dp/B081QLX6BK?ref_=ast_author_dp
Ah, available on KU too!
The prevalence of sci-fi and fantasy stories which are just The Current Year But With Spaceships/Dragons is dismaying. It indicates both a collapse of creativity and a decrease in intellect. Population dynamics is something that even popular franchises do not understand at all. Take, for instance, the size of militaries quoted for supposedly highly militaristic evil empires embroiled in galaxy-spanning war. One Star Wars book said the Empire had 10,000 Star Destroyers (read: capital ships) at its height, which is much less than one per inhabited star system. An entry in an old Warhammer 40,000 Codex describes a particular planet as having a planetary defense force of "8 million men...as well defended as any in the Imperium." Really?! Who knew that the Galactic Empire and the Imperium of Man were decidedly under-militarized compared to present-day Sweden.
And don't even get me started on space warfare!
My favorite story... imagine you are in a huge field, in the pitch dark. You and another guy, both with rifles. One of you has a flashlight. Would you use it?
To be fair, sf has always reflected the time it was written. Maybe the problem is worse now, if only because people are worse now--hard for me to say, as I don't read much sf any more--but the bare problem, if it is a problem, is hardly new.
Well, yes, people have always written from their perspective, and what they know. But this is something they know... it is obvious math that people have known since forever. But they seem psychologically incapable of applying it.
Je suis heureux de vous trouver. Je suis anglophone, montrealais, and j'apprecie vos ecrits. I will follow you henceforth, and I agree that even basic math isn't properly understood or used by people without a propensity for quantification (i.e. most people).
Bon, on parle francais ou anglais?
Nice to have another French speaker. I'm literally writing a book, right this second, about some kids from Vermont in 1889 who go to France. Would love to have a beta reader :) I love speaking French, but I'm not fluent. Especially not written French.
In this particular post I'm not thinking it is actually a math problem for most people... but a cultural one. They simply can't wrap their mind around a sci-fi story where people have lots of kids.
Honestly my French is OK, but not good enough to proof read, but I am sure you can find willing Quebecers on Substack. Yeah, agree,. its the math per se (although a LOT of people don't intuitively get things like geometric or exponential growth) its as much about expectations and cultural norms. There a bunch of writers I have been seeing that are writing on the abysmal fertility rates in North America.
Why care about children and/or math if you have education, nice career, fun travel, tasty food and cheap entertainment? Raising kids is not evil, it is just boring and too much responsibility and too much relationship readjustment. And people with kids are boring because all they do is talk about their kids. Modern fiction is largely written for kids that happen to live in adult bodies and it is only natural that it seeks to comply with their detached views.
Someone commented on immigration. Immigration does not change the calculus here, it just shifts its focus. If a colony were to start with 10,000 people and do well, but have a birth rated of 2.2 (ie static), it would not help to say 'immigration'. That immigration would have to come from somewhere, and those people would have to be producing enough for themsleves AND to support the new colony.
And it is almost provably mathematically impossible for a space colony to truly grow via immigration. The difficulty of walking from Venezuala to the US would pale in comparison to having to travel to another STAR! Spaceships almost by definition have to be small. There is no way for them to handle the billions of people needed for even one colony, let alone several.
The most egregious for me was Mass Effect where the Quarians (a race of people who live in spaceships) was said to be practicing one-child policy because of limited resources. By the way, they're also on the verge of extinction because of an incident involving their robotic creations that rebelled against them, killed most of their population, and kicked them out of their home planet. You'd think given the situation, the Quarians would focus on having more children to prevent their people from going extinct. But no, let's deliberately limit our fertility. No wonder these people are dying out, lol.
I have an idea. A tool that shows # of years to 99% gone, given a sub-replacement birth rate generation length.
“South Korea is at .68 babies per woman” doesn’t quite convey how dire the situation is. Perhaps more impactful to say South Korea is at X years to 1% of people left.
Based Camp podcast often speaks of fertility and culture. Malcolm and Simone run pronatalist.org
Interesting. I think that we need cultural/religious change.
If you want to be fertile, join a fertile culture.
They are out there and they are the ones that will survive and thrive.
There are also infertile parasite cultures that can survive by pulling people from fertile cultures.
The mainstream urban monoculture is sub replacement and will change or perish.
Well, as for me and my house, we don't need to join anything we aren't already part of :)
How many kids do you have
6, all married, 23+ grandchildren
Big win. What would you credit for contributing to the success
I’m afraid that would take longer than I have right this second, so remind me later. But I have written a whole bunch of posts about marriage, and patriarchy, and one on depopulation solutions, so they would give you a hint anyway.
Ok, so, lets see if I can craft something:
1) Marry young (I didn't but my kids did)
2) Work hard at getting your kids married
3) Be physical and overt and unashamed
4) Teach against birth control
5) Examine your children's potential spouses vis a vis birth control
6) Arrange your life to help your children with their children
7) Pray.
That's part of it, anyway.
god bless
Most writers of Romance, or Fantasy think Single guy, single girl, guy gets girl, they have sex, and that's it. It's a rare author that thinks that sex leads to babies and more sex equals more babies.
You did a great job in "Marriage Contract."
I'm planning on the same thing as my stories progress. It's not a family if you don't have children running around.
A lot of old families prosperity was judged on how many sons and daughters they had, and the more, the better.
Science fiction writers are about the same, all the tech gets in the way of the human factor.
Here's case that can make your point. Star Trek Voyager. They were stranded 70 light years from the Federation, and yet in eight years of the show, only one set of people paired up and had a child. A single child.
Heck, the borg did better than that, they had whole Maturation wards, where they grew their replacements. Whole wards of thousands of children.
But yes. Modern women don't care, they just want to have the bump and grind and not have responsibilities for what happens.
I'm not sure that modern women don't actually care. I am inclined to think that they have had their ability to show they care ground out of them by the prevailing culture.
Are you enjoying Article 17?