You are the only man/woman, and everybody else is of the opposite sex/gender

[Gloomy]

As I said, I'd live alone with weapons. Either I'd kill the people trying to kick me or I'd die trying. :P

What's so important about continuing the human race anyway? If the future generations of humans are never born then they won't know, so it won't bother them. On the other hand if the last person of their sex is forced to reproduce, people will be forced into existence after already not existing for trillions of years, just to cease existing all over again after possibly living a horrible life and dying a horrible death. Sure the people already alive might be sad about their species dying out, but once everyone's dead nobody will be around to give a damn.

[CaptainYesterday]

[deleted]

[ChillaKilla]

I wasn't aware that wanting to keep bodily autonomy made me an edgelord  

[Hermit Advocate]

I'd probably jump off a cliff or something so that the human race would die out. 

[m4rble]

9 hours ago, ChillaKilla said:

Then I'd rather die than have my freedom and bodily autonomy stripped from me like that. And I don't give a flip if I go down in history as the frigid scum who doomed humanity, humanity's already doomed. Why would I need the approval and admiration of people who wanted to rape and use me for their own selfish reasons?

There wouldn't be much history to worry about anyway. 

[ThaHoward]

9 hours ago, ChillaKilla said:

Then I'd rather die than have my freedom and bodily autonomy stripped from me like that. And I don't give a flip if I go down in history as the frigid scum who doomed humanity, humanity's already doomed. Why would I need the approval and admiration of people who wanted to rape and use me for their own selfish reasons?

Maybe, but it wouldn't be up to you in the end. Like it or not. If you are the only female left on earth, people will not care about your feelings, but will do what is necessairy. The same goes for being the only male left. 

[m4rble]

Voluntary human extinction wouldn't be so bad. This is one scenario that would make it possible(and very likely preferable) 

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, m4rble said:

Voluntary human extinction wouldn't be so bad. This is one scenario that would make it possible(and very likely preferable) 

With the amounts of inbreeding this would neccessarily cause... it would make human extinction definitely preferrable to "one man, many women". If "one woman, many men", extinction would be absolutely inevitable anyway. Killing off all those who still are crazy enough to wish to have kids, and would resort to force to have sex, could do absolutely no damage to the human species. Their attempts to breed are absolutely worthless to the genepool and to survival of the species.

Thus, choosing voluntary extinction is the only rational and ethical choice. If you can't accept being childless, and part of the last generation before homo sapiens sapiens becomes extinct forever, you're either recklessly stupid, or a complete sociopath. 

From a biological/evolutionary/species level, no human life would have the least bit of worth anymore - all of the surviving humans are dead (wo)men walking, the species is inevitable fated to die out, and it's on the surviving humans to just accept it already. The only option for the species to survive would be if meditech was advanced enough by then to allow woman-on-woman breeding without sperm involved (which obviously could only be had in the "one man, millions of women" scenario), or mass gene modification/cloning to make women into men by excising an X chromosome and replacing it with an (artificial?) Y chromosome. Both of which are very much science fiction right now.

[m4rble]

3 minutes ago, Mysticus Insanus said:

 

With the amounts of inbreeding this would neccessarily cause... it would make human extinction definitely preferrable to "one man, many women". If "one woman, many men", extinction would be absolutely inevitable anyway. Killing off all those who still are crazy enough to wish to have kids, and would resort to force to have sex, could do absolutely no damage to the human species. Their attempts to breed are absolutely worthless to the genepool and to survival of the species.

Thus, choosing voluntary extinction is the only rational and ethical choice. If you can't accept being childless, and part of the last generation before homo sapiens sapiens becomes extinct forever, you're either recklessly stupid, or a complete sociopath. 

From a biological/evolutionary/species level, no human life would have the least bit of worth anymore - all of the surviving humans are dead (wo)men walking, the species is inevitable fated to die out, and it's on the surviving humans to just accept it already. The only option for the species to survive would be if meditech was advanced enough by then to allow woman-on-woman breeding without sperm involved (which obviously could only be had in the "one man, millions of women" scenario), or mass gene modification/cloning to make women into men by excising an X chromosome and replacing it with an (artificial?) Y chromosome. Both of which are very much science fiction right now.

 

You're forgetting about the possibilities of immortality and artificial wombs. 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, m4rble said:

You're forgetting about the possibilities of immortality and artificial wombs. 

Immortality makes societies biologically/genetically static; so that's not a real concern in regards to children. A society of immortals would, in order to survive, instate a "zero children policy, except under specific license", with draconic sanctions (probably forced sterilisation, or summary execution) for unlicensed procreation, anyway - if not, exponential population growth would be the inevitable result.

For artificial wombs... the problem is that you still need egg cells. At the absolut best scenario, you could harvest from one woman a few thousand of those, all of which share the same DNA. You'd face the exact same problem of inbreeding/degradation you would face in the "one man, millions of women" scenario, but with even less of a population in generation two (one man could, in theory, impregnate a few hundred thousand women, if his sperm were efficiently harvested, compared to the few thousand children bred from a woman's eggs).

[m4rble]

1 minute ago, Mysticus Insanus said:

 

Immortality makes societies biologically/genetically static; so that's not a real concern in regards to children. A society of immortals would, in order to survive, instate a "zero children policy, except under specific license", with draconic sanctions (probably forced sterilisation, or summary execution) for unlicensed procreation, anyway - if not, exponential population growth would be the inevitable result.

For artificial wombs... the problem is that you still need egg cells. At the absolut best scenario, you could harvest from one woman a few thousand of those, all of which share the same DNA. You'd face the exact same problem of inbreeding/degradation you would face in the "one man, millions of women" scenario, but with even less of a population in generation two (one man could, in theory, impregnate a few hundred thousand women, if his sperm were efficiently harvested, compared to the few thousand children bred from a woman's eggs).

 

If there was only one man or one woman anyway immortality would be a solution to human extinction. Of course, there would still be less humans every year due to accidents(and things that indeed weren't accidents) even if all diseases and age related problems were eliminated. For artificial wombs you would still need egg cells, but possible in the future we could dispose of the DNA inside of an egg cell and replace it with the DNA from a male human. This could be a solution if there is only one woman left on earth. 

[deltaX]

Immortality could potentially be a solution to the re-population problem, but it doesn't exist right now.  If this were to happen today, then there really isn't too much that could be done, especially in the one woman scenario.

[nanogretchen4]

Inbreeding in animals is not usually a serious problem in the wild since those with serious genetic illnesses don't survive long enough to reproduce and the most dangerous recessive genes become increasingly rare. If the one surviving male is a carrier for a fatal recessive disease, each of his offspring has a 50% chance of also being a carrier. If two half siblings marry, there is only a 25% chance that they both are carriers. If they both are carriers, on average only 25% of their offspring will get two copies of the bad gene and have the serious genetic illness. So for any given child of half siblings there is a one in sixteen chance of having whatever disease their mutual grandfather was a carrier for. And it's not inevitable that the last man would be carrying any lethal recessives in the first place. The one man scenario wouldn't be pretty, but it probably wouldn't result in species extinction like the one woman scenario.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, m4rble said:

If there was only one man or one woman anyway immortality would be a solution to human extinction. Of course, there would still be less humans every year due to accidents(and things that indeed weren't accidents) even if all diseases and age related problems were eliminated. For artificial wombs you would still need egg cells, but possible in the future we could dispose of the DNA inside of an egg cell and replace it with the DNA from a male human. This could be a solution if there is only one woman left on earth. 

Actually good points, I hadn't thought of it that way.

Still, this immortality would over time transform humanity into a very incestuous species where all individuals are closely related. However, it would take milennia to reach the problem where inbreeding would become problematic, and meditech that can make people immortal is in all likelihood advanced enough to make incestuous procreation completely safe, too - repairing any damage from recessive genes/inbreeding through gene therapy, maybe even in utero. 

As for the egg cells... the problem still remains where the egg cell comes from. Even without using the DNA in it - which, yes, could theoretically come from two sperm cells, as long as you can ensure you don't get two Y-sperms... in other words, you would have to select for sex of the child, at every birth - you still need the structure of an egg cell, as that one makes up 99% of the mass and structure from which the embryo will grow. Unless you can build a (DNA-less) egg cell from scratch, or use cells from other species (more likely to be genetech pigs than chimpanzees, simply by law of numbers!) that you "carved out" the nucleus from, two sperm cells just won't cut it. Fusing two egg cells together to create an embryo without involvement of sperm will, without doubt, become meditech reality much, much sooner than creating an embryo from two sperms without involvement of a human egg.

[m4rble]

2 minutes ago, Mysticus Insanus said:

 

Actually good points, I hadn't thought of it that way.

Still, this immortality would over time transform humanity into a very incestuous species where all individuals are closely related. However, it would take milennia to reach the problem where inbreeding would become problematic, and meditech that can make people immortal is in all likelihood advanced enough to make incestuous procreation completely safe, too - repairing any damage from recessive genes/inbreeding through gene therapy, maybe even in utero. 

As for the egg cells... the problem still remains where the egg cell comes from. Even without using the DNA in it - which, yes, could theoretically come from two sperm cells, as long as you can ensure you don't get two Y-sperms... in other words, you would have to select for sex of the child, at every birth - you still need the structure of an egg cell, as that one makes up 99% of the mass and structure from which the embryo will grow. Unless you can build a (DNA-less) egg cell from scratch, or use cells from other species (more likely to be genetech pigs than chimpanzees, simply by law of numbers!) that you "carved out" the nucleus from, two sperm cells just won't cut it. Fusing two egg cells together to create an embryo without involvement of sperm will, without doubt, become meditech reality much, much sooner than creating an embryo from two sperms without involvement of a human egg.

 

In the scenario with one woman left you could harvest the cells from the remaining woman and replace the DNA in many of them to prevent in-breeding. 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, m4rble said:

In the scenario with one woman left you could harvest the cells from the remaining woman and replace the DNA in many of them to prevent in-breeding. 

Which would just be a few thousand in the best of cases, dangerously close to the minimum of individuals neccessary for a generation to allow for survival of a species. Remember that unlike men, who keep producing new sperm cells through most/all of their adult life, the number of egg cells a woman has is a fixed reserve she is born with.

Testicles are factories that create sperms; ovaries are just egg banks that activate their assets, bit by bit. 

[ChillaKilla]

12 hours ago, ThaHoward said:

Maybe, but it wouldn't be up to you in the end. Like it or not. If you are the only female left on earth, people will not care about your feelings, but will do what is necessairy. The same goes for being the only male left. 

Again, I'd die first. 

[CaptainYesterday]

[deleted]

[m4rble]

43 minutes ago, CaptainYesterday said:

I was referring to all of the "maybe the human population doesn't deserve to continue" style comments.

Except for the handful of species that benefit from human activities, human extinction would be beneficial to nearly every species on earth. That's not being edgy, that's just being honest. 

[SorryNotSorry]

Hmm, I wonder how many of you have read the 10-volume comic book series Y: the Last Man?

 

I wouldn't want to be the last man. I'd swallow every bit of poison I could lay hands on.

 

In a world without men, science and technology would likely go back to the Dark Ages, STEM education nonwithstanding. Pretty bleak.

 

But in addition to being a hell of a lot stinkier and less polite, a world without women wouldn't remain womanless for long. Some male geek would figure out a way to extract males' one X chromosomes and cross them with each other to produce baby girls with no inbreeding.

[ChillaKilla]

16 minutes ago, Woodworker1968 said:

In a world without men, science and technology would likely go back to the Dark Ages

ಠ_ಠ You really have a low opinion of women don't you?

 

17 minutes ago, Woodworker1968 said:

Some male geek would figure out a way to extract males' one X chromosomes and cross them with each other to produce baby girls with no inbreeding.

And a female totally couldn't do the reverse. You really do have a low opinion of women...

[NerotheReaper]

Probably lock myself up in my room, and hide under the covers. I get cat called enough, if I was the only opposite sex I feel like everyone would want an orgy. And I choose life. 

[SorryNotSorry]

17 minutes ago, ChillaKilla said:

ಠ_ಠ You really have a low opinion of women don't you?

 

My opinions of other men ain't so great either.

[The Mechanic]

Create clones of myself with varied enough genetics to prevent inbreeding issues and let them repopulate the world

[m4rble]

3 hours ago, ChillaKilla said:

ಠ_ಠ You really have a low opinion of women don't you?

 

And a female totally couldn't do the reverse. You really do have a low opinion of women...

It's concerning that Woodworker liked this post.

[Larkaloke]

Well, I would've said that I'd just go about my business as usual (while being sad about all the people I know and like who would have mysteriously vanished/died), but this thread apparently took a darker turn...

 

... So I guess I'd make sure I was ready to kill anyone who came at me. I mean, really, all I'd want to do would be to keep living my life in peace, but if anybody tried to stop me from doing that I'd have to take them out. 'Twould be unfortunate. Maybe I'd just try to blend in and hope for the best.

[WhenSummersGone]

I also have a feeling the last woman would get raped for sexual pleasure as well as reproduction, not to mention actual rapists. So ya I'd rather kill myself somehow.

[ChillaKilla]

10 hours ago, Woodworker1968 said:

 

My opinions of other men ain't so great either.

Judging by the fact that you believe women incapable of continuing scientific progress I can safely say your opinion of men is probably far more favorable than yours of women.

[Nidwin]

I don't think there's going to be a lot that I'll be able to do vs 3 billion dudettes.

[ChillaKilla]

8 hours ago, m4rble said:

It's concerning that Woodworker liked this post.

Agreed. It's like they're proud of that fact... ಠ_ಠ