Oooo it's the end of the world as we know it...

Come on, sing along.

Just finished reading America Alone this weekend and I've kind of got birth statistics on the brain.

This from Binks made me laugh.



Just bought (and yes, watched in its entirety...yes, am a big geek with no life) season 4 of SG1. (Enjoyed the heck out of it, BTW) and was interested to see that they did an episode about the human race going extinct through inability to breed.

It was one of their better ones. The doughty Stargate team meet a nice friendly helpful advanced alien race who helpfully gave the humans all kinds of fancy stuff, (fusion power, snazzy beaming technology, ray guns and whatnot) including, crucially, anti-cancer and anti-aging vaccines that had just the wee side effect of sterilizing us all. The governments had become so cozy with them that they had quietly acquired total control over the media so no one had ever heard that the human birth rate had been cut over 90 per cent in ten years.

The smarty-smart lady on the team figures this out when she finds out that after three years of trying, she can't have children, a fact that her friendly and helpful smiley-face alien doctor just happened to miss. She looks some things up in the aliens' own computer and finds out that the humans are being gently and helpfully herded to their own extinction so the aliens can add planet earth to their collection of holiday destinations.

She confronts her husband, the US ambassador to the nice aliens, who says in shock, "It was only supposed to be 30 per cent!". Turns out that the aliens had helpfully pointed out to the oo-so-willing-to-comply human governments that our population was "unsustainable", and we needed a bit of culling.

Don't worry, the trusty team give their lives to send a message back in time to themselves ten years before so they never go and meet the nice helpful aliens in the first place....I love sci-fi don't you? Anyway, the good guys win again.

Of course, the one thing they didn't say was that it is already happening and it wasn't anti-cancer vaccines, it was just our own ennui and the bait wasn't anything like as cool as a transporter beam.

Just an iPod.

Self-genocide comes pretty cheap these days.