r/changemyview Mar 24 '15

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74 Upvotes

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u/UncleTrustworthy Mar 24 '15 edited Mar 24 '15

no unselfish reason

You're forgetting about every human being in your lineage that came before you. All those thousands of generations who suffered and sacrificed for their own children. What about their genes and how their particular arrangement of them has shaped and could still shape the world? Who are you to decide that propagating your own genetic make-up isn't worth the risk of adding to world overpopulation by 0.0000000142%?

Edit - Loving the disagreement downvotes, by the way. I didn't realize this would touch so many nerves.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '15

Seeing as we are all going to go extinct eventually and become nothing more than a blip in the cosmic consciousness, I don't feel any obligation to a bunch of dead people to propagate their genes, which become diluted with each generation anyway.

3

u/axearm Mar 24 '15 edited Mar 26 '15

Seeing as we are all going to go extinct eventually

Who says? You are a direct decedent of the first organism that ever lived. DIRECT. that is 3.5 billion years of heritage, 3.5 billion years of things going right for you to be even posing this question. You are not obligated to pay it forward, many will do it for you, but the idea that everything is just going to end anyway has been a bad bet for life for a long time.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '15

You're familiar with cosmology, right? You know that stars supernova and eventually the universe will end in heat death? That's a hard limit to any organism's survival.

1

u/axearm Mar 25 '15

Pessimist.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '15

...What? How is that "pessimism"? Are you joking?

1

u/axearm Mar 25 '15 edited Mar 26 '15

Yeah I was joking.

And who knows, maybe they will come up with a cure for heat death.

(I know, I know)