Sure, overpopulation has brought us to the “one in, one out” stage of human procreation. But ancient pathogens unleashed by the melting permafrost have also put us on the verge of any number of global super-pandemics, and if my baby-child survives the Reckoning, she’s going to benefit from some very interesting real-estate opportunities.
Listen, I get it: A.I. neural networks are self-replicating while ours atrophy from overreliance on digital assistants. But my little bambina will take the Hyperloop to an integrated school in San Francisco where the robot-to-child ratio is one-to-one, and she’ll form some useful alliances there.
Of course it’s increasingly plausible that we’ll run out of potable water while fleeing from a slow-motion tsunami of rising seas, and the irony of that is no comfort. But we put a state-of-the-art desalination pack on our baby registry and our daughter is pre-enrolled in surf camp. Trust me, it isn’t exactly ideal that our firstborn will take her first steps amid a nuclear standoff with a demented dictator who wants to melt California with a super-mighty preëmptive strike, but we also have a guy like that, and I plan to read my infant to sleep with passages from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”
I hear you: the last thing the planet needs is another green-washed super-consumer who generates fifty times her own weight in organic food-packaging waste annually. But her contributions to the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre may be looked at differently once it’s solid enough to support people displaced by climate change.
There’s no getting around the fact that the President of the United States is a human asteroid hell-bent on single-handedly bringing the anthropocene to its fiery conclusion. But my little bundle of joy will be so freaking adorbs that Jeff Bezos will have no choice but to accept her into his escape rocket at the last second. With any luck, she’ll touch down decades later on an Earth-like planet, meet a nice boy, and splinter off from the Bezosian cohort, whose obsession with extracting the exotic minerals on Kepler-186f will be their doom.
Yes, we’ve gone a little overboard during the last half millennium and now the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are pounding on the gates. But never forget: the best part of any party is right before the cops show up.
