Children of Men: The future is a mirror for the present

Posted by speckx 10 hours ago

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Comment by Balgair 6 hours ago

Watching the movie before kids: Wow, so gritty, so depressing, great worldbuilding, what will become of us?

Watching the movie after kids: My heart is outside of me bleeding on the floor and yet I am still alive and must watch myself suffer forever, this pain that I feel has no place inside me anymore and it burns darkly bright, is this the future my children will have?, what must I do to prevent this for them? I will prevent this for them, as firm as granite I will prevent this, I should have another child and love it and hold it and kiss it and wash it and clean it and smile at it in the warm dark and cozy places of our home and keep a garden with bright red tomatoes and fresh greens and I will feed these children and keep out the bad and the evil and teach them how to survive and love and care and never ever let that world I have just seen come to pass.

Comment by jackdoe 5 hours ago

"It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered."

Comment by trolleski 4 hours ago

The only answer I can arrive at is that we're all in this together. We need actual social media to reconnect.

Comment by jondwillis 2 hours ago

Or, “actual social” (less or entirely unmediated)

Comment by paimapi 4 hours ago

I just had my first and need to give this a rewatch. I think this film, Oryx and Crake, and The Wire spurred me at that point in my life to become extremely involved in movement organizing. First around civic engagement then anti-racism then even further left efforts.

In the decade+ that I've been doing this, I don't think I've ever felt despondent or hopeless in spite of the horror/terror happening in the world. I think a lot about the 'what would you be doing if this were the time of a slave economy/indigenous genocide/segregation/etc' and it's something that I can answer proudly, honestly.

There's also a deep, abiding sense of satisfaction you can have if you don't hold yourself to the perfectionist idea that you must win at all times. It's healthier, much more so, to re-orient yourself in the long historical view, that liberation is a millenia+ long project, and all the work we do now is work that future generations won't have to. The opposing forces are so much better funded and entrenched so every small win is a monument to be cherished and all the battles too even if the war is lost.

Plus, doing this work, I'm picking up a lot of very useful skills and knowledge and critical frameworks. And all of this will be taught to my children who will do better than me and be kinder than me and make the world an even better place than I can.

No pressure, kids :)

Comment by throw0101c 2 hours ago

> Watching the movie after kids […]

After you seen Villeneuve's Arrival?

Comment by rbanffy 2 hours ago

Or Spielberg's AI...

Comment by julianpye 10 hours ago

I went to the Biennale in Venice last weekend and thought about the movie intensely after visiting the Japanese pavilion. If you don't know about it - the Biennale features artists representing specific countries as they transform a fixed pavilion building into their vision. When you walk across the Giardini site, you walk through themes of the globe. Often these themes are overly political and identity-themed, but the simplicity of the Japanese pavilion this year was refreshing.

This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.

Comment by Joeri 4 hours ago

The econtalk podcast did a deep dive into the fertility crisis recently, and later on I dug deeper into the topic with claude in research mode. I had always thought people were having less children because they value them more in modern times (“children are precious”), but this doesn’t match the data in recent times. You often hear dropping male fertility as the cause but this also doesn’t match the data all that strongly. You also hear that people can’t afford children anymore and while there is some truth to that, you also see the fertility drop in places where this isn’t the case.

What does match is people partnering later and less often (the loneliness epidemic) and thereby delaying children. Once a woman starts she follows the same path as before for their age bracket, but starting later runs out the clock on their fertility. We went from 3 as the standard to 2 as the standard, and more women ending up with one or none, making 1.4 the new “default” total fertility rate. There are many theories for the causes of the global trend, and some cultures buck the trend (the Amish are on course to become a powerful voting block in a few decades), but there seems to be no theory that the data is a strong fit for.

All attempts so far by governments to reverse the trend have failed. Some countries spent multiple gdp points on fertility, and only saw minor gains.

Comment by yboris 9 hours ago

YouTube short of the space: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gww1RtyEwww

Comment by khalic 10 hours ago

I keep marveling at art's capacity to elicit deep thoughts and feelings, universally

Comment by 41353aab 9 hours ago

Especially installation and concept art- as its obviously hard to package and sell for the parasitic art market.

Comment by golergka 9 hours ago

> "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts."

One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring. I don't think that people realize that they're doing this choice, but there must have been enormous evolutionary pressure for this to evolve, and a lot of data shows exactly that.

Comment by 10111001 8 hours ago

> One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring.

I don't think that's true. There's a lot of crisis and uncertainty today, but fertility is still going down. Many people are investing their resources in zero offspring.

Comment by anyonecancode 4 hours ago

When I'm thirsty, I walk over to the tap and pour myself a glass of water. Virtually no uncertainty over if I'll then keel over and die from pathogens in the water, and no crisis of typhoid or cholera or diptheria where I live in living memory.

I think people underestimate the depth of crisis and uncertainty that exists outside the modern developed world.

Comment by 10111001 3 hours ago

> When I'm thirsty, I walk over to the tap and pour myself a glass of water. Virtually no uncertainty over if I'll then keel over and die from pathogens in the water, and no crisis of typhoid or cholera or diptheria where I live in living memory.

And do people "outside the modern developed world" perceive that as "crisis and uncertainty" or "just another Tuesday"?

> I think people underestimate the depth of crisis and uncertainty that exists outside the modern developed world.

Crisis isn't defined by parachuting in a person from a Western developed country, and seeing how they feel about living in those conditions. It's a subjective feeling based on what you're used to.

I think the GGP is wrong, and the "people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty" is not a reaction to "crisis and uncertainty," it's a side effect of move primitive technological conditions, not some kind of conscious or unconcious reproductive strategy.

Comment by anyonecancode 2 hours ago

> Crisis isn't defined by parachuting in a person from a Western developed country, and seeing how they feel about living in those conditions. It's a subjective feeling based on what you're used to.

First, I'll note that I meant "modern, developed world" in a temporal as well as geographic way. Second, I'd note that "a subjective feeling based on what you're used to" applies just as much to the modern, developed world, so I don't really understand the contrast. Finally, I'd argue that high levels of child mortality are still traumatizing, even if you're "used" to it.

Comment by pixl97 5 hours ago

I think kicking you back about 125 years would change your mind.

Before chlorination of water, everyone, everywhere was at risk of getting sick at any time. Same with infections and death at childbirth. The amount of uncertainty compared to that is far lower, not saying it's great, but on average far better.

Also, note that humans had an absolute population explosion. I'm not saying we are or are not overpopulated, but if we are the following would be a good explanation of what is happening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

Comment by boelboel 8 hours ago

I don't think this is true. Steady employment causes people to get more kids. Just take a look at Korea, its new administrative capital with most public workers has the highest fertility rate.

Comment by Slow_Hand 4 hours ago

Isn't South Korea experiencing a massive demographic crisis right now due to a record low fertility rate?

Comment by boelboel 4 hours ago

Yes but the places where this is least the case are those with the most stable employment, I believe Sejong, the location with most public workers, has a whopping 1.2-1.3 tfr, 40% higher than the rest of the country and 80% higher than seoul. Obviously you can't make your whole country public workers but it shows that there's some benefit to stability.

Comment by lotsofpulp 9 hours ago

Babies have always been expensive. The expense just happened to not be fully accounted for until recently.

Although, perhaps it could be better framed as the short term expense was not accounted for, whereas now, the long term expense is not accounted for.

Short term being less than a few decades and long term being more than a few decades.

There is also a collective vs individual expense aspect.

Comment by forgotaccount3 9 hours ago

> Babies have always been expensive.

They have always been expensive, and they have never been as expensive as today.

More than any other resource, babies require time. Talking purely from a US perspective, inflation adjusted income has never been higher.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n

When we earn more, the time spent to care for a baby 'costs' more because it's time not spent working. It's time not spent continuing your education. It's time not spent doing some expensive bougie luxury like paying someone else to cook you a meal.

It's a similar reasoning as to why working hours have only dropped a bit. When we earn more per hour, we can afford the same quality of life with fewer hours worked. However it also means each hour we choose not work is costing us more in opportunity cost. So we choose to work more.

Still, considering how many years we spend in education with little to no employment, and how many years we are currently able to live after we have retired, the % of our lifetime spent working has never been lower.

Comment by ForHackernews 8 hours ago

They only require lots of time if you want to be a good parent. We should be celebrating the fact that there are fewer latchkey kids and more involved mothers and especially fathers today.

Comment by nemomarx 5 hours ago

Also less teen parents, which represents a significant share of the change in fertility in the US at least.

Comment by nradov 1 hour ago

I'm not convinced that's something to celebrate. I was a latchkey kid for a while. That was a net positive in teaching me to be more independent and self sufficient.

Hot take: some parents should neglect their kids more.

Comment by bschne 8 hours ago

I also just feel like the basic calculus of this aspect for parents has changed as economies move up the value chain — I have relatives and childhood friends who grew up on farms, and they regularly helped out during busy times from a relatively young age (even if today they do all the schooling they are supposed to and don't go work full-time early one); meanwhile many people today will be in education with limited earnings until well into their twenties

Comment by mindslight 7 hours ago

One difficulty is that "accounting" is not a neutral thing. Rather, once something becomes legible to the paperclip maximizers, it is something that can be optimized away in favor of more paperclips. And sure, we can make the case to the paperclip maximizers that perhaps their accounting isn't correct, and that there could actually be more paperclips in the long run by not optimizing away this one particular thing. But that is still a Faustian bargain, in that the paperclip maximizers may very well just find a different way of creating paperclips that simply sidesteps the need for humans in the first place - rendering your last-ditch attempt at appealing to their interests irrelevant.

Comment by jmyeet 8 hours ago

This depends heavily on what time frame you're talking about.

For much of history people would often have children to work on farms and support the parents when they're older. Sometimes this support system was nuclear. Sometimes it was broader in society. So how do you account for "expensive" here? I honestly don't know.

But a lot of people focus on more modern times, particularly post-WW2, because the trend here is pretty much straight up. Education, housing and medical expenses have far exceeded inflation and real wages.

In more developed Asian countries (eg South Korea, Japan, China) the number of children has gone down in part because it is so expensive. In South Korea, so much is spent on tutoring to get into a good university to get a good job. The entire family's income is devoted to that. In China, for a man to be marriageable he often needs to pay the bride's family, have property, have a good job and so on. China has actually tried tackling some of this by popping the real estate bubble and outlawing private tutoring. Still, competition is intense and the bride price is still very real.

I think about the Fermi Paradox. What if the answer to why there are no galactic civilizations is as simple as "because capitalism"? Birth rates in developed countries are generally falling off a cliff as the barrier-to-entry gets increasingly higher.

Comment by mrngld 5 hours ago

I think the Israeli experience is a big warning sign that everyone wanting to blame economics has it wrong. It's come down, but it flattened in the 2000s and remains strongly above replacement. You see the same in certain demographics elsewhere in the rich world.

It's culture. We (in the west) have created (and exported) a culture that undermines the family and family values, tells people there's things that are more important (or in the past, that kids were to be actively avoided), and then we try to talk about dollars instead when that leads to what it has. That reveals part of the problem; our hearts are focused on money, not the family, but money isn't the problem, we are.

Comment by derektank 2 hours ago

Culture is too broad. It’s pretty obviously religion, specifically. Secular and Reformed Jewish Israelis have birthrates near replacement; it’s the Haredis driving the birth rate.

Comment by ericmay 5 hours ago

I enjoyed reading your commentary but didn't find that it supports your musing here: "I think about the Fermi Paradox. What if the answer to why there are no galactic civilizations is as simple as "because capitalism"? "

That wouldn't make any sense, because if it were true then we wouldn't have seen the population explosion take off under a primarily dominant global capitalist economy in the first place. The ability to distribute goods and services in a decentralized way and accompanying technological advances which are supported by market opportunities focused on profit have paved the way for the 8+ billion people on the planet who are almost all living in much better conditions than most human beings throughout history. I'd argue if anything capitalism enabled overpopulation, not the inverse.

With respect to birth rates I believe there are a lot of factors at play, but one which is perhaps the largest is the substitution of the family unit with the state. Even as little as 100 years ago we were a lot more family-oriented with much of that seeming to dissolve recently. We don't need a child or 5 to take care of us when we're older, we have a 401k and an HSA for that. There are pros and cons there.

The mix of factors influencing declining birthrates I would argue depend on the country. South Korea is a homogenous country of 50+ million about the size of Indiana. There are too many people for too few opportunities and everyone wants the good life. That's why people are spending their life savings on tutors for their children, unlike the United States perhaps where while we have quite a number of people living we are the world's most diverse country and here we have (for now) enough opportunity for folks to pursue careers, start new businesses, and such.

Comment by lotsofpulp 5 hours ago

>We don't need a child or 5 to take care of us when we're older, we have a 401k and an HSA for that. There are pros and cons there.

Automation notwithstanding, a 401k and HSA merely represents a portion of labor from someone else’s child(ren).

Comment by ericmay 4 hours ago

Well you can abstract it a bit and just say that anything you buy or own is a portion of someone else's labor, even automation, because someone owns the machine or built it.

But I think that it's still different from having kids who help you. The 401k (and similar style schemes) are primarily a western phenomenon. Without them we'd have to have a lot more children, I think.

Comment by jacquesm 9 hours ago

One of the best movies I've ever watched, and one of the few that I could only watch once. It alternates between a gut-wrenching view of a very plausible future and scenes that have you sitting on the edge of your chair. To call it roller coaster would be an understatement.

If you haven't watched it: don't read the rest of the comments here, go watch the movie, then read the comments.

Comment by piloto_ciego 8 hours ago

It's the best movie of my life, I watch it about once a year (that's all I can bear to do), and I see the modern world reflected from it constantly. We're living in that universe right now.

Comment by copperx 2 hours ago

Do you mind explaining? When it came out I watched it and the movie seemed completely implausible, and it looks even more so today. Why do you say we're living in that universe? Maybe I missed something important.

Comment by cl42 2 hours ago

I think there are two ways of looking at what the universe the movie is set in.

The first is the literal one: no fertility, no babies being born, authoritarian government, etc. Not implausible, in my opinion --- imagine if COVID made people infertile? I still remember the lockdown days, when the first strain of COVID was prevalent, and people weren't sure if it would give you permanent brain damage.

Then there's the more metaphorical take, and I think this is the one people point to when suggesting the movie represents our reality. It takes place in a dystopian future with extreme income inequality --- think of Theo's (the main character) cousin living in the Tate Modern, and Theo being driven to see him in a fancy car, past parks with zebras and camels. Most people in England see a world full of hate, violence, and lack of purpose.

The extremely bleak lack of purpose, though, is the key part. This is a future that also implies there is no future. It's why you have ads for Quietus (the suicide system). The infertility isn't just literal infertility; it implies a deep hopelessness; that there is no future at all.

Theo and his cousin are also relevant here. Theo asks his cousin how he thinks about the future, given that humanity is expected to die. The response is "I don't think about it."

Comment by jacquesm 2 hours ago

There is a pretty significant link between pollution and infertility:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6396757/

Comment by jacquesm 8 hours ago

Not quite, but it's getting there. You're braver than me. I didn't sleep for days.

Comment by piloto_ciego 8 hours ago

There's just so many good scenes? And the long takes are truly art in every way.

Also, the bit where the kid is just scrolling / playing on his device while his dad yells at him is some kind of crazy fever dream from right now.

Comment by sandinmyjoints 4 hours ago

Second this. I saw it in the theatre knowing nothing about it, am so glad I did. For one thing, the sound is fantastic -- it is perhaps the only movie I've ever seen where I noticed how great the sound was during the movie, how much it reinforced the sense of being present in the reality presented on the screen (I realize there is a bit of contradiction in saying that :).

A few years ago I noticed that I think about this movie that I randomly saw in 2006 (or whatever year it came out) at least once a week, if not more. Some real staying power.

Comment by rbanffy 2 hours ago

> the sound is fantastic

Indeed. The café explosion.

Comment by aquariusDue 8 hours ago

Seconding, I caught it late one night on HBO when I was a bit too young to understand what was going on and follow the plot but the movie stayed with me for many years until some time ago where I rewatched it and came to really appreciate it.

Comment by nitwit005 1 hour ago

> All science fiction is political, and all stories about the future are actually about the present.

It's hard to say something is "not political", but some older science fiction was genuinely fiction about science or engineering itself. The humans can be side characters in your story about a cool space ship and interstellar travel.

Science fiction evolved over the decades away from that. People realized you may as well have a decent story and discuss society in your future setting.

Comment by siavosh 6 hours ago

I think I dragged my family to see this movie on xmas day, and felt bad for depressing everyone. But it's stayed with me ever since. One scene regularly comes to mind, the one where the rich guy's kid is just on some futuristic version of the iPhone at dinner. Too real.

Also the fact that humans mysteriously lost the ability to have children always seemed to me some unimaginable sci-fi trope, but given many countries now have negative population growth, I can see that too is very real. Growing pockets of humanity where entire towns have more old people than young.

Comment by justincarter 2 hours ago

I remember watching this when it came out and liking the filmmaking part of it but disagreeing with the "this is our future" view others had.

Now that it's been a few years and I have a few kids, there is a lot of it I don't like unfortunately (although the camera work, sound, and editing is still pretty amazing).

I don't understand how people say this is similar to our world today. It still seems more like Mexico transplanted to another country. I'm not in the UK so I can't say if the UK looks more like this (or was like that 20 years ago). But certainly I can't see any parallels between this movie and the USA where I live, either in 2006 or 2026.

Comment by Danox 3 hours ago

Great movie. I was getting all nice and comfy watching it when Julianne Moore’s character had an unfortunate circumstance, (right out of the blue) it is probably Clive Owens best role, all the city scenes were very well done and all city civil war scenes were top notch, Alfonso Cuarón the director/writer did a fantastic job.

I remember thinking that if you ever wanted to portray what war was like on the eastern front with the Germans and the Russians Alfonso Cuarón is your man at the time, watching a movie I didn’t know who he was but he and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did a great job.

Comment by trevithick 9 hours ago

This is a great movie. There's more tension in the low-speed car chase scene than any high-speed chase I've ever watched.

Comment by sva_ 9 hours ago

There is also imho one of the best one-shot scenes ever made

https://youtu.be/g2vX7IHg_SE

Sits on the throne with the one in True Detective S01E04

https://youtu.be/vnRTITzYnXs

Comment by throw0101c 2 hours ago

Not single-continuous takes:

> However, the commonly reported statement that the action scenes are continuous shots[53] is not entirely true. Visual effects supervisor Frazer Churchill explains that the effects team had to "combine several takes to create impossibly long shots", where their job was to "create the illusion of a continuous camera move". Once the team was able to create a "seamless blend", they would move on to the next shot. These techniques were important for three continuous shots: the coffee shop explosion in the opening shot, the car ambush, and the battlefield scene. The coffee shop scene was composed of "two different takes shot over two consecutive days"; the car ambush was shot in "six sections and at four different locations over one week and required five seamless digital transitions"; and the battlefield scene "was captured in five separate takes over two locations".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men#Single-shot_se...

Comment by dekhn 9 hours ago

It appears as one take, although I think it's actually several different scenes with a seamless transition.

To me it's one of the best scenes if not the best scene I've ever seen in a movie: from a small intense escape scene to a full battle, followed by a revelation that brings people to their knees. All shot basically first-person, with extremely complex action and emotion. Absolutely gutting.

Comment by thevillagechief 8 hours ago

I only watched this movie once, maybe 15 years ago, and that scene has stuck with me. Rewatching it brought tears to my eyes again after all these years. That was some of the best, gut-wrenching movies ever made.

Comment by ForHackernews 8 hours ago

The car chase scene mentioned above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOyAXPn1V9k

Comment by justindz 9 hours ago

Also an incredible long shot. Adolescence did amazing work with the technique recently, too.

Comment by 4dregress 9 hours ago

The single shot action sequence in the immigrant camp is my fav scene.

Comment by hi41 8 hours ago

I saw the movie soon after it came on Netflix. At that time, Netflix would mail the DVD. I found the movie soon after interesting back then but thought population collapse could never happen given the size of world population. Now I see so many countries in Europe where the population is decreasing and they need to shutdown schools because of low count of students. I remembered Children of Men and how prescient it was. I feel the same about the movie Her. We will be so lonely that it will no longer be shocking to have fall madly in love with an AI bot and mourn when the bot gets shutdown on the cloud somewhere.

Comment by scheeseman486 9 hours ago

Children of Men was released very early here in Australia. There was very little prior buzz for the movie, almost no advertising at all. Hype was minimal, there was a little bit of buzz from the Venice International Film Festival but it was barely advertised and I had only vaguely known about it in passing based on reading some film discussion forum posts at the time, the concept sounding interesting to me. No one in that discussion had actually seen it.

I didn't even go to the movies to see it specifically, I went for The Departed, but I saw that Children of Men was showing and figured, what the heck.

Imagine going into that movie with zero expectations. I felt shellshocked afterwards. I go online, no one is talking about it. I watched what I still consider one of the greatest movies ever made and over the next few months it's like it doesn't exist.

I did eventually see The Departed, it's pretty great. I think I made the right choice though.

Comment by flerchin 10 hours ago

It's a real gem. I've only seen it once, but I still reference this movie at least a couple of times a year. With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline, it only becomes more relevant.

Comment by swiftcoder 9 hours ago

> With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline

As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive (i.e. >2.0 children per woman), and birthrates are only really low in very affluent demographics.

There's nothing particularly sinister going on either - since most children with access to adequate nutrition and healthcare now survive into adulthood, these societies are not losing a ton of population to wars, very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

Comment by cael450 9 hours ago

Yeah, it is very weird to me too. It's only a problem in a handful of countries that have really, really low birthrates and can't/won't attract immigrants.

Comment by 627467 11 minutes ago

Its really weird that exporting unsustainable practices is seen as unethical/immoral but not exporting demographic deficits to other countries

Comment by danielvf 9 hours ago

In 2024, 171 countries had birth rates below replacement rates. That's gotten worse since then. 70% of people live in countries with birth rates below replacement rates.

So not just a handful of countries.

Comment by ballmerpoint 9 hours ago

It’s a handful of countries that have 1) “really, really low birthrates,” i.e., not just below replacement but very below replacement AND 2) do not have relatively permissive immigration policies.

That most countries are 3) below replacement rate by some amount is a separate third thing.

Comment by 41353aab 8 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by Qem 9 hours ago

What is worrisome it's not the instant figures. It's the trend.

Comment by flerchin 8 hours ago

The rates are declining everywhere, although still positive.

Comment by ido 9 hours ago

> very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

But reproduction is below replacement rate.

Comment by swiftcoder 9 hours ago

And? It's only a few years since folks were deeply worried about overpopulation, and whether the earth could support 10 billion people...

Comment by stavros 8 hours ago

Yeah, I don't understand how we can be worried about both things at the same time. In my view, it's good that reproduction is below replacement. Yeah, pensions won't be great, but at least we won't spread like a cancer onto a strained planet.

Comment by jacquesm 7 hours ago

That's one of the weirdest realizations I had in the Northern Territories of Canada. There are people living everywhere. Of course they must have looked at me the same way, so I can't really complain.

Comment by clarionbell 9 hours ago

Are Ireland and India considered affluent now?

Comment by swiftcoder 9 hours ago

> Is Ireland considered affluent now?

Ireland is the richest country in Europe by GDP-per-capita[1] (apart a few uber-rich city states).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

> India...

India has been struggling to get its population growth control under control for decades. I think we can excuse a brief overcorrection as they stabilise.

Comment by jacquesm 8 hours ago

Ireland's figures are wildly unbalanced compared to other EU countries because so many companies decided to formally register their headquarters there. They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up there but the positive effects are not as you might expect from that (if they weren't actually negative).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

This is now mostly a thing of the past but there are still lingering after-effects.

Comment by Supernaut 8 hours ago

> They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up

What do you mean by "the income stats are way up"?

Comment by jacquesm 7 hours ago

That the GDP stats are skewed but the taxes aren't there. So it looks as if Ireland is doing much better on paper than what is happening in reality. Normally with that kind of GDP you'd also have a solid tax base to go with it, here it is the opposite, Ireland has that GDP because their corporate taxes were super low.

Comment by swiftcoder 6 hours ago

Yeah, I mean, all the city-states on this list are playing this game too - Monaco, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg aren't paradises for the poor either.

Comment by Supernaut 6 hours ago

> Normally with that kind of GDP you'd also have a solid tax base to go with it, here it is the opposite

You are badly misinformed. The Irish state is actually in receipt of colossal quantities of corporate tax each year, which has placed it in a significantly stronger fiscal position than most other EU nations.

Whether this state of affairs is sustainable in the longer term is another question, but for the last ten years or so, the strategy of encouraging FDI has unquestionably paid off extremely well.

Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft 4 hours ago

>As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive

Sure. Imagine that central Africa (the only place with positive fertility rates) somehow never changes in that regard. What will happen? Will they be able to power the entire world's population replacement, they who made no AIDS medicines of their own. They make no John Deere tractors. No industry at all, really. Will they even be able to feed these people they are creating?

I think once the developed world goes extinct, so too they.

>There's nothing particularly sinister going on either

Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer). Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.

>very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

That's not even the argument. The argument is, why isn't everyone terrified that we're well below the replacement rate (where population neither grows nor shrinks), and that we could raise it back up to the replacement rate if we wanted to.

Comment by 10111001 2 hours ago

>> As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive

> Sure. Imagine that central Africa (the only place with positive fertility rates) somehow never changes in that regard. What will happen? Will they be able to power the entire world's population replacement...

Yeah , total fertility is dropping worldwide, and is only barely above the replacement rate (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?c...). I expect it to drop into negative territory soon.

> ...they who made no AIDS medicines of their own. They make no John Deere tractors. No industry at all, really. Will they even be able to feed these people they are creating?

I think their high fertility rate has a lot to do with them being poor and underdeveloped. And there are serious ethical challenges with keeping them that way so those populations and provide the rest of the world with needed workers.

Once they hit higher levels of development, their fertility rate will decline like everywhere else. There's no getting around this without dealing directly with the fertility problems western-style development causes.

> That's not even the argument. The argument is, why isn't everyone terrified that we're well below the replacement rate (where population neither grows nor shrinks), and that we could raise it back up to the replacement rate if we wanted to.

I think it's ideological. A lot of people hold very dear to many of the social changes that have fueled the drops in fertility, and to admit that fertility rates are a problem means admitting their ideology is wrong (and perhaps their opponents are right). A lot of people are so focused on winning these short term ideological fights, they see everything in terms of them.

Also there's also the hangover from the previous overpopulation scare(s). It's hard to shift your outlook based on new data.

Comment by AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago

> Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer).

I would love to see your basis for claiming this, because I don't believe a word of it.

My personal take is that, as population declines, we eventually won't be able to produce birth control pills (or plastic, if you believe that microplastics are the cause). A couple generations after that, the population decline will halt.

> Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.

This I could at least see. Society requires a certain level of specialization in order to advance, and that requires a certain number of people. More technologically advanced societies may get by with fewer people, but there's still a lower limit, below which technological progress halts (or at least massively slows down).

Comment by OkayPhysicist 9 minutes ago

> Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer). Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.

This is one of the most comically insane predictions I've ever witnessed. The population would have to halve 24 times for the population to be too small to sustain itself. That's 24 generations of less than one child per woman. That's taking our existing birthrate, nearly halving it, and then imagining that nothing would change that number as the amount of available resources per person doubles every generation.

Comment by arjie 8 hours ago

Haha, funny. Do all articles these days end with the appeal to engagement? I shall try it.

A couple of things I like about the film are the fact that babies are wonderful and children are wonderful, even if that world realizes it only through their absence. I think the practice of this is going to be simply people substituting this experience with other things they consider luxuries, and then supporting a shifting tax burden so that the few productive and reproductive carry the weight of the machine.

The shift from relying on one’s own children to take care of one in one’s old age to other people’s children doing so is that fewer people need allocate any of their effort into it. Free-riding off other people’s children is now fairly typical. Simply having paid someone else’s social security isn’t actually good enough. The agreement only worked when you did that and created the means in aggregate for your generation’s social security to be paid for by successors.

But the old parasitise the young in the West (at least, not exclusively). “Tax exemptions for the rich” primarily takes the form of older people just being free of various forms of society’s needs. Already the median French pensioner has a higher income than the median French worker, with the latter eager to try to make his way into the formed class so that he too may transform from the stepped on to the stepper on.

The other thing I like is that the movie is unambiguously hopeful. Kee and her child reach the rescue ship, hurray! Movie’s a bit bleak so nice to have a happy ending.

But I really wonder about what happens afterward. Is it Kee’s responsibility as the only fertile woman to have as many children as she can? Mother of Modern Man she’ll be remembered as. Fun thought.

So what do you think about what the movie implies and about the factors that bias society against the young?

Comment by pixl97 5 hours ago

>But the old parasitise the young in the West

I mean it starts to happen everywhere where life expectancy dramatically raises. If before you died in your 50s or early 60s you didn't have much time in your life that was unproductive by age alone. When you add that the uplift in life expectancy occurred in a time of just massive technological change, a rapid acceleration in the industrial age where the work of labor was shifted to machine capital.

>takes the form of older people just being free of various forms of society’s needs

Again, before this a lot of old people died terribly in the streets of starvation and other easily solvable things.

Comment by debrisontrack 10 hours ago

I'm just at beginning of the article, but I immediately have to disagree with something :) "...this remains one of the absolute best sci fi movies of the 21st century."

I'd say it's not just one of the best sci fi movies, it's one of the best movies of the 21st century, period. Definitely one of my all time favorites, despite some of its flaws, it wastes no time, has great pace, is a fully contained story and gets its point across very well. And I'm not even talking about how relevant some of its themes are.

...anyway, back to reading.

Comment by bagacrap 8 hours ago

Not that it matters but it feels closer to historical fiction than science fiction. Yes, this history happens to be in the future rather than the past, but in either case there is a lot of speculation about a culture or context removed from the present day. I suppose the difference is that there's an implied message of, "this can still happen if we let it" vs assuming that humanity is currently too enlightened to ever fall back into whatever old way of being. It feels like a failing of how we teach history that kids come away from youth thinking things like, "well nazis were bad but that was the olden days, now we all know better."

Comment by bluegatty 9 hours ago

It's a nativity story; faith overcoming nihilism. Explicitly in the book, obliquely (but frankly obviously) in the film.

Comment by thrownawaysz 9 hours ago

Interesting how the article is not mentioning the (inverted) Christian allegory as if that doesn't even exist. It's not even subtle if you actually watch the film, like that's almost the point of it.

The original book is even more explicit about that, like Theo does a makeshipt baptism on the infant amidst all the fighting.

Comment by throwaway_7274 17 minutes ago

Bizarre omission. My whole takeaway from this movie was astonishment that such a thing as good contemporary Christian art is possible.

Comment by kettlez 9 hours ago

I was going to say the same thing, there is so much Christian symbolism in the film that to not mention it at all makes me think the author is just not aware of the things the film is referencing.

Comment by oldsklgdfth 5 hours ago

Joke and spoiler here: my favorite scene is when the guy needs to navigate the pregnant lady out of the prison, through an ISIS rally barefoot.

The one time in his life, this man was called to do something significant and he didn't even have shoes. Absurd framing.

EDIT: he takes his shoes off and gives them to the pregnant lady. Nuts subtle detail.

Comment by plemer 32 minutes ago

Every time someone mentions Children of Men, I recall hearing the dumbest possible take when leaving the theater: “I don’t know… for me, the stakes just weren’t high enough.”

Comment by abhiyerra 4 hours ago

The last couple of years I have felt like we are converging on a Brave New World, meets 1984, meets Children of Men, meets cyberpunk...

Comment by rbanffy 2 hours ago

It's a great movie, but it's devastatingly sad.

Comment by O-K 8 hours ago

One thing not mentioned in the write up, is that there is an animal in (almost) every scene of the film. Guess with no children attentions turned to pets. For me, helped to reflect that humanity continued to want to care, if not for themselves/immigrants/‘others’…

Comment by elteto 8 hours ago

I loved that in the movie the high level ranking official, the cousin, works/lives at the Battersea Power Station, the same place in Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover :) makes a lot of sense when you listen to Pigs.

Comment by Finnucane 8 hours ago

Also, now the building has been converted to expensive condos.

Comment by pbalau 4 hours ago

It is a mall. The expensive apartments are in the new buildings.

Comment by arkensaw 9 hours ago

Tangent time:

I love Children of Men, I think its dark, prescient, moving and a fantastic technical achievement. Easily one of my top five movies.

I found myself nodding along with everything until I hit these lines:

> Many excellent movies are chase movies! The Terminator (1984) is a chase movie. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) is a chase movie. One of the greatest movies ever made (according to me), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), is the purest distillation of a chase movie.

Why do people love Fury Road so much? I watched it in the cinema, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was very colorful, had great stunts, etc. A bit derivative of the second and third movie but whatever. George Miller has a format that seems to work. I was shocked when it was nominated for best picture. Best Picture! Years later I listened to a podcast on the making of it, and got a lot of insight into the struggle behind the scenes, and how difficult it was both on set and in pre-production. I had new found respect for everyone involved. I watched it again with new eyes, and... nope. It's fine. It's got some great set-pieces, but I just don't understand the hyperbole. It is, at best, the 3rd best Mad Max movie

Comment by pbalau 3 hours ago

I'd wagger because the story works on multiple levels and some characters are quite multidimensional.

Take the main bad guy, Immortan Joe.

On one hand, he gate keeps access to water, he keeps sex slaves and he doesn't blink sending his War Boys to die.

On the other hand, there is nothing in the film pointing to there being a large reservoir of water, yet he does share some with the people around his citadel. He is also portrayed as quite sick and having only two surviving children: a deeply physically flawed one and a dimwit (and they made this one a pedo in the prequel). Maybe all he wanted was a sane and healthy offspring to eventually take over in running the community he built.

There is quite a bit more to talk about, like the war boy's arc, or the lack of gratuitous sexiness, or how Max is not that relevant for the entire story, but I believe this film works so well is because it gives so many opportunities to overthink things and that's always a fun thing to do.

Comment by xyzzy_plugh 9 hours ago

I remember seeing Fury Road in theatres with tempered expectations. It was a phenomenal experience. We were very surprised at how good of a movie it was.

Mad Max is big shoes to fill, and Fury Road managed it in a way that was so fresh I barely thought about the previous films. It truly stands alone and that's no easy feat. I do not find it derivative at all. If anything it pulled the franchise in a new direction.

Everything is just awesome. They made an awesome movie. The cars are awesome. The characters are awesome. The sounds and practical effects are awesome. The pace is awesome. It's just great stuff.

It surpasses mediocrity across all metrics. That's why it's more than "fine".

Comment by righthand 9 hours ago

It was the first intro to Mad Max for a lot of people is why.

Comment by stavros 8 hours ago

OK, now that we're here, isn't Mad Max a pretty weird revengeish movie? I watched it a few years ago, trying to get into the vibe, and it was nothing like what I remember, and nothing like Fury Road.

I know the other movies were what made Mad Max Mad Max, but the first movie was just a weird "child gets killed" revenge film, if I remember correctly?

Comment by nemomarx 4 hours ago

It's got a bit of a hint of "society is falling apart because of the oil crisis" in the background, which is an interesting period thing. But mostly a revenge film, yeah.

Although I think most American viewers don't really know about it at all and only think of the second mad max film, which was marketed here without the 2? And almost all cultural references about "mad max" are about the road warrior vibe specifically, or thunder dome / fury road now.

Comment by stavros 4 hours ago

Yeah exactly, and that's why I was confused waiting for all the Thunderdome craziness that never came.

Comment by arkensaw 4 hours ago

Fun fact, Mad Max actually started out as a script about a journalist covering car crashes, who becomes desensitized to the gore and horror. It was not dystopian or post-apocalyptic at all.

It was only later revisions that added the dystopian future angle and made him a cop.

Then when Mad Max 2 came along it retconned the first movie as post-apocalyptic

Comment by enaaem 9 hours ago

Sci-fi has always been the perfect vehicle for social commentary, because it does not instantly trigger anything inside people. It is an impossible story in an impossible world, so relax. If you want to write something about black and white people, you should write a story about purple and green people instead. That's how X-men escapes all the woke allegations.

Comment by Cthulhu_ 9 hours ago

I wonder if this is why people don't consider it a sci-fi story, no high tech and no stand-ins for real societal issues (like aliens in District 9)

Comment by 4dregress 9 hours ago

I’ve been saying this for over a decade.

The parallels between that film and the UK as it currently is are harrowing.

I always joked I was going live in a house like Michael Kanes character, only to end up doing it.

A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.

The way the film depicts the treatment of immigrants was what always got me, I would joke (half) just wait till climate change makes southern Europe too hot to live in…

I hate being right!

Comment by 15155 9 hours ago

> A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.

A nice idea, if it weren't for the fact that the tax man can still get to you.

Comment by 4dregress 9 hours ago

Not if I can hide our lane with bushes lol!

Comment by mig39 9 hours ago

Meanwhile Southern Europe (especially Spain and Portugal) is complaining about all the UK immigrants.

Comment by 4dregress 9 hours ago

Don’t worry about them, they’ll be back when having a Sunday Roast in 45c heat isn’t fun anymore!

Comment by nickdothutton 8 hours ago

All my life I've been interested in dystopias. Firstly post-nuclear annihilation dystopias as I grew up in the 70s and read books far beyond my age group. Then Crichton's "science-gone-wrong" dystopias in book and film form. 2000AD ethnosectarian block-wars and quasi-religious cults. Since the millennium, biohazard/pandemic/pathogenic dystopias. I suppose I've waited all my life for the collapse. Now I think that for the most part T.S.Eliot had it right in The Hollow Men. "Not with a bang but a whimper". I might not have to wait that much longer.

Comment by scotty79 10 hours ago

> One particularly brilliant aspect I keep thinking about is how the movie ends. We don’t know what will become of Kee and her baby. [...] We want to think Kee and her baby will change things, but we don’t know for sure because the future is—quite literally, in the final scene—shrouded in fog.

When I first saw this movie, I think the last scene was just her with baby and dead protagonist in a boat, in the fog.

But when I rewatched it more recently, there was also the ship they were trying to reach appearing out of the fog.

Did this movie have two different ending versions? Or did I just misremeber or watched a damaged copy? What ending have you seen?

Comment by haunter 10 hours ago

Mandela effect. The ship was always there, there are no alternate ending versions

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/iea5it/children_of_...

Comment by scotty79 8 hours ago

That's amazing. I think the ending without the ship is just better. So that's why brains of many people, including mine, made it to be that. I reject your reality and substitute my own.

"There was an interview with the cinematographer who had argued for a more open ending with the two of them in the boat and you don't see or hear the rescue ship. So that was under consideration for a while. Maybe you read the director or someone taking about it?"

It's entirely possible that I didn't even come up with the better ending to remember on my own.

Comment by hebleb 10 hours ago

The movie always ended with a ship appearing and the sound of children's laughter over the credits, it's less ambiguous than people make it out to be

Comment by 4dregress 9 hours ago

IMO it would be perfect to turn into a series, they could update it with references to the billionaire class, drones, AI, asymmetric warfare, immigration, pandemics, celebrity and the attention addiction economy!

Apple if you don’t mess up Neuromancer, please make this next!

Comment by stevenwoo 9 hours ago

Off top of my head, Silo has many of those things, eventually, the attention economy gets skewered a bit in Upload which is not from TVplus. Combat is so expensive for good live action maybe the best one can hope for is the depiction in something like Pantheon.

Comment by rglullis 9 hours ago

Please, no. Stories like these work because they are timeless. One of the reasons that TV nowadays is so boring is because every show runner wants to use it as a platform for their own social commentary.

Comment by preg_match 4 hours ago

Every show or movie is a platform for the social commentary of the time. That's what a narrative is. This reminds me of the people who will say that Star Wars is not political.

No... it is. It all is. You can ask the creators, they'll tell you. Sometimes in the context of the modern day it might not seem like social commentary or political commentary because we take a lot for granted but, I assure you, at the time it certainly was, and it certainly still is.

Comment by rglullis 2 hours ago

This is not what I'm arguing.

Of course authors will inject their worldview into what they create. Of course stories will reflect fundamental aspects of humanity, and with that how people (and groups of people) relate to one another. This is all valid.

> Sometimes in the context of the modern day

The problem is that writers nowadays write *only* for the "modern day". Everything becomes "social commentary" for $CURRENT_THING, which means that the story becomes stale the moment that the powers-that-be move on and $CURRENT_THING stops being a thing.

Good stories are perenial and worthy of be retold, no matter who is in power at any given moment. "Malcolm in the Middle" is a TV show that has things that working class families can relate, no matter if they are living in 2006, 2026 or 2056. "The Wire" is a show with very clear social commentary, but the same story would be told whether you had a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. "The Boys" was a show that started with a perenial premise (what if gods were just as broken as humans) and by the third season it turned itself into a caricature of Trump's America. Guess which ones from these will be talked about 25 years from now, and which one is pretty much forgotten already?

Comment by 4dregress 7 hours ago

Isn’t that what all stories are about though?

Comment by 48585858 10 hours ago

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