It’s a day like any other as you wake up, eat some cereal,
and log in to check the news. Looks like politicians are yelling at each other,
governments are threatening war, and a celebrity is being forced to apologize for
a meme they liked. A day like any other. Except one news item catches your eye.
“Mysterious infertility syndrome discovered by doctors.”
You click, and it details a strange phenomenon that’s popped up - couples
turning up at fertility specialists, seemingly unable to conceive. There are many reasons for
this normally - low sperm count, mechanical defects in the reproductive system for either
the man or the woman - and doctors have many ways to compensate for those. In fact,
fertility help has become a massive industry - so why do they all seem to be coming up empty?
The article explains that in all these cases, the tests done on the patients
reveal that they have a normal capacity to conceive - but still somehow seem unable to.
And there’s nothing more frustrating than a question without an answer.
This isn’t a big concern for you immediately - you’re enjoying that swinging single life.
And by swinging single, you mean you have a cool hammock that you play video games in!
Living the dream! Still, you always assumed you’d have kids one day. Eh,
it’s probably fine. You don’t feel any different, and the odds are this is just
some weird blip with a simple explanation. A lot of things can affect fertility - genetic factors
and environmental toxins, for instance. So it’ll probably be solved by scientists in short order.
Except it’s kind of odd that it seems to be happening all over the world…
You put it out of your mind, assuming you won’t hear too much about it - and
you couldn’t be more wrong. More and more reports come in of ob-gyn offices
suddenly no longer being filled with pregnant women, and instead being filled with tearful
couples. With each passing day, the media drumbeat about this problem gets louder,
and more facts about the crisis come in - but with no answers. It seems like a switch was flipped.
There are still women out there who are pregnant, and their babies seem to be developing fine. But
the number gets smaller and smaller as you move forward in time, until it drops off completely.
And panic is starting to grow.
There is nothing more important to the future of humanity than the ability to reproduce - after
all, that’s how we get more humans. So after protests start around the country,
the government decides it has to act. Making it worse, it doesn’t take long
before paranoid people and bad actors start coming up with their own answers for who’s to
blame. Some blame environmental toxins. Others blame vaccines. Yet others blame
a sinister virus unleashed deliberately by whoever they hate most. Soon enough,
there are violent mobs gathered around the headquarters of whoever is being blamed.
And the public won’t be satisfied until they have answers.
The President addresses the nation, and you watch nervously - this is the first
time anyone in authority has actually admitted this is a problem. But you
can’t help but notice that the President looks like he’s aged five years in the last few days,
and he doesn’t offer any answers either. What he does say is that the entire federal medical and
disease-related bureaucracy is on the case, with orders to spend anything they need to
find an answer. It doesn’t take long for other countries to announce they’re joining the effort,
and soon the United States, Europe, Japan, and many of their allies have created a
joint commission to study what has now been dubbed “Global Auto-Infertility Disorder”.
But not everyone is cooperating.
It’s rare for there to be an issue where everyone is on the same page, and this
is no exception. As soon as word gets out, propagandists from enemy nations are looking
for who to blame. Russia blames America, America blames Russia, and everyone watches
nervously as humanity is about to come to an explosive end. Cooler heads prevail,
but it just feels like we’re just pushing the end down the road a little bit. After all,
if no more humans are coming to replace us, what are we fighting for?
And the scary thing is, not everyone thinks this is a bad thing.
You’re used to seeing people on the internet saying just about
everything to get a rise out of people - but could people actually be happy about
the potential extinction of humanity? It turns out, yes! Because whatever this disorder is,
it only seems to be affecting humanity. Animals and plants are reproducing just
fine. And that’s led some people to say…would it be a bad thing if we went extinct? Groups
like VHEM, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, argue that we’re the most dangerous
species on the planet - and they’re claiming that Mother Earth took care of the problem somehow.
Of course, given how humanity handles a crisis,
the odds are good that they might not leave much of a world for the animals anyway.
It’ll probably be fine. After all, the government is on the case - and they never disappoint!
Five Years Into the Great Baby Bust:
Spoiler Alert - it wasn’t fine. The government threw everything they could at the problem and
largely came up empty. What they did determine was that it wasn’t a localized problem,
or a problem with either the sperm or the egg. It was something wrong at the point of connection.
That moment when the sperm fertilizes an egg and creates an embryo – this process has just
stopped working. Tests came up empty time and time again, and weeks turned into months then
turned into years. Over a nine-month period, babies were born, the number getting smaller and
smaller - and then maternity wards went dark. The last baby was born a little over four years ago.
And things have changed a lot, mostly for the worse.
Research is ongoing into the problem, but it’s mostly a case of throwing more money at it and
hoping things would change. Countless scientists have worked on the project,
with the most popular conclusion being that something went wrong
in the evolutionary process. A part of our DNA bent sideways and screwed up the
most important part of human existence, and they haven’t been able to correct it yet.
But in a lot of ways, things are still normal.
People are still getting up every day, going to work, and going out to drink. They’re still
meeting on dating apps and trying to forge that love connection. After all,
it’s only been five years - and surely scientists are going to crack this code eventually. And
while the number of children being born is near-zero, there are still a lot of children
out there - some as young as four years old. They need to be educated, and schools are still up
and running. But no one’s sure what’s going to happen in a year or two. Kindergarten teachers
will need to find a new job, with elementary school teachers joining them soon after.
And you’re noticing a lot of things starting to go dark.
OB-GYN doctors were the first to lose their jobs, although many dovetailed into becoming
general gynocologists. Fertility specialists kept their doors open for a while, promising desperate
parents that they’ll fix a problem no one could solve, but they’ve all been shut down now. And
as you walk down the street, you recognize the old baby supply store in the shopping district.
It’s a liquor store now, which surely says something about where people’s minds are at.
And people have gotten desperate.
No one is able to conceive, but some people are still trying to become parents - by
any means necessary. That’s made the adoption industry go into overdrive,
particularly when it comes to adoptions from abroad. Many countries have closed their borders
to international adoptions, believing they have to keep their remaining children as an
investment in the future. But in countries with a huge population and problems with poverty,
adoption smuggling has become increasingly common.
And scientists are still hard at work.
Once it became clear that human reproduction didn’t work the way it used to, specialists
immediately tried to solve the problem with in-vitro fertilization and other
techniques - only to come up empty. That led them to a more desperate solution,
that of human cloning. This has been banned as it’s considered unethical in most countries,
and many cloned animals had significant defects that led to an early death. But
by bypassing the traditional method of conception and instead duplicating cells,
scientists hope to kick-start a new baby boom. It’s considered the most promising
method of potentially solving the problem - but no viable embryos have been created yet.
And then there’s the case of the most valuable resources in the world.
One of the x-factors in global infertility is that fertility specialists have been preserving
embryos for couples since the 1970s. Not all are still viable, and not everyone is still around
to use theirs. But in the years after the great baby bust began, some people chose to experiment
and see if this would solve their problem. It did - because the fertilization of the embryo
had already happened, and the implantation was still possible. Couples who chose to go this
route tended to be very private with it and avoid attention, not wanting to be harassed by couples
who didn’t have this option. As for embryos that weren’t claimed by a couple, they were a
hot commodity too. Some couples were willing to pay big money for someone else’s embryo and the
chance to have a baby, while others were purchased for research - and potentially human cloning.
But one factor is unavoidable.
The human population is declining for the first time in a very long time. Before the baby bust,
an average of 140 million people were born every year, while 60 million people
die each year. The death rate has ticked up slightly in the last five years - due
to a combo of less research into other diseases, global chaos, and despair and
depression leading to people not taking good care of themselves. That means humanity is
almost half a billion people lighter than it would have been before this crisis.
And things are only going to go downhill from here.
Ten Years into the Great Baby Bust
“We’re the government, and we’re here to help.” You can always trust that - but
at what point do you stop believing them? It’s ten years in, and the government has
gotten no closer to a solution. The human cloning experiments dried up,
and the few remaining embryos were either used or confiscated. Humanity is now officially a
world devoid of young children - and the effects can be seen everywhere. Most elementary schools
have closed down and have been converted into other government facilities. Playgrounds have
either been left to rust or have been torn down - painful reminders of what humanity has lost.
And the loss has gotten clearer and clearer.
The old are continuing to die, and they’re not being replaced. The human race is now down over
a billion people, and it does seem like there’s a little more space everywhere. It’s almost
eerie. But where you’re at, things are still normal in some ways. People still need to eat,
so they go to work. They need to forget, so they drink. Families with children of school
age tend to keep to themselves, but teenagers are a different story. These kids grew up in
the age of the Baby Bust, knowing they might be the last generation - and they’re angry. Sure,
teenagers are always kind of angry, but this is different.
And they’re not the only ones.
Unrest has gotten significantly worse in the last five years,
and many people seem to have taken the attitude of…does anything matter anymore? After all,
there is no next generation to build a world for anymore. Stealing, looting,
and rioting have gotten more common, and you notice quite a few boarded-up store windows as you
pass by. There are still billions of people left in the world, and they have needs to be filled,
so most buildings and government services still exist. Many people still hold out
hope that the world as we know it will resume, but they’re getting fewer and fewer by the day.
And around the world, you see more evidence that people are
acting like there’s no time like the present.
Over the last few years, more and more conflicts have gone from cold to hot. The Middle East burst
into flames again with Syria and Lebanon launching another attack on Israel - this one officially
backed up by Iran. Israel won decisively, but has been facing a continuing stream of attacks on its
borders since. After a brief pause, Russia is once again on the march, attacking every country in
its path that isn’t a member of NATO - and some believe that it’s only a matter of time before
they cross that line. In Asia, China finally made good on its threats to invade Taiwan. In both
Europe and Asia, many people chose to flee rather than wage a doomed war against a superpower - and
no other superpowers seemed inclined to risk the little time humanity has left by intervening.
The one exception was in the Korean peninsula, where a North Korean attack on the South was
met with fierce resistance - and only ended when the North went dark communications-wise
and stopped its attack, leading many to assume that the leadership was ready to go nuclear.
And this is happening all around the world.
Many powerful countries seem to be taking the opportunity to make their moves against their
long-time enemies, but all seem hesitant to cross that final barrier and kick off
World War III. After all, we’re all in the same horrible boat now - the infertility
plague seems to have affected across country lines, and no one has an answer. You remember
those opening days after the crisis began - FOX News was blaming China,
China was blaming the US, and that guy with the tinfoil hat was blaming the Latvians.
That all seems to have faded away, as the blame doesn’t really help anyone.
Plus, maybe cooler heads were truly prevailing.
The population of the world is aging fast, and unlike in the past, there is nothing to set that
off. That means that the older generation is taking a more active role in the world,
and maybe that means wisdom and caution. Or maybe if Thanksgiving with Grandpa Jed
and Uncle Larry was any indication, it means more fighting than ever.
And in one area, things have completely changed.
Maybe the most basic desire of most humans is companionship, sex, and ultimately reproduction.
If you take that last one out of the equation, what does the dating world look like? There are
still young people out there, and they still want to get busy - but there’s no sense of urgency,
no desire to ensure you’re finding the right person. Dating apps have shifted to helping people
find casual relationships, wedding providers have seen a massive drop in business, and a sense of
permanence seems to have disappeared from how we interact with people. You open up the app,
look through potential matches, and freshen your breath before a night out in town.
Of course, one relationship sector is booming - divorce lawyers. People are
taking a long hard look at who they want to be spending time with in humanity’s
last days - especially since there’s no more staying together for the kids.
Twenty Years After The Great Baby Bust:
There’s no question about it - you’re getting old. Spending your adulthood
in a slow-moving post-apocalyptic world will do that. The good news is that you’re
not alone. As the last graduating class finished school a little over a year ago,
and all schools have now been converted to other buildings or left abandoned. The few
babies from frozen embryos conceived after the bust are largely keeping out of sight, and even
the colleges are looking pretty thin of students by now. No one thinks that getting
a four-year degree is the best use of your time when the end of the world is looming.
And the harsh facts are impossible to avoid now.
The population drop has become incredibly obvious. The population has shrunk by well over a billion,
maybe more by now - although statisticians aren’t too concerned with tracking it. With
the world looking older and older, it’s clear some things are falling by the wayside. Essential
services like police and medical professionals seem to be funded by fumes. Facilities that
care for the elderly are over-taxed and understaffed, leading many old people to
choose to die at home instead. Medical examiners and hearses are a common sight on your street.
And for many people, the world has shrunk.
Travel around the state and country continues, as energy production has been one of the few sectors
to maintain full production. After all, there’s no need to worry about running out of natural
gas or harming the environment with it anymore, is there? Something else got us first. So buses,
trains, and even planes still operate, although much less frequently than they
used to. But one thing that has stopped for the most part is international travel. Most
countries have gone into bunker mode, seeking to care for their own shrinking population
and not wanting to take in refugees from other countries that are collapsing faster. This has
had a positive effect - countries are largely keeping to themselves, with military conflicts
having ceased after a chaotic previous decade. It seems like most people are waiting for the end.
Well, not everyone.
There is still a significant population of young people in the world - in their
twenties and early thirties - and they’re living it up at the end of the world. They
used to be fierce activists, demanding the government save the world for them,
but you can’t find a solution where there isn’t one. So now they party,
largely running their own businesses and services as they take over for the people who are retiring.
The internet is still up and running - for now - so you can often log on and see all sorts of
funny end-of-the-world memes from those darn kids. You don’t get most of them anymore.
But you’ve noticed some other strange things.
The end of humanity has led to a lot of abandoned buildings. Schools are the most obvious, but as
the population dwindles, you see a lot of other buildings just close down and never reopen. At
first, they just looked like vacant real estate, and in the past they would have been snapped up
by a development team pretty quickly. But there’s really no money in building new facilities when
no new people are coming to fill them, so the buildings have been left to decay - and as the
years pass you can see vines starting to crawl up them. You look at what used to be a middle school,
and see a family of raccoons clambering off a tree branch and into an open window, no doubt in
search of food or nest supplies. Well, at least some children are making use of the building
still. You look up at the big buildings downtown. Eventually, nature will come for them as well.
Fifty Years After the Great Baby Bust:
It feels strange to live through the last years of the world, that’s for sure. You suppose
you’ve been lucky. You’re an old man now, your joints ache, and unlike the past,
there’s no getting repairs. After all, almost everyone is in the same boat and the number of
people still working are few and far between. That’s partially because there just aren’t that
many people left. The internet went down a long time ago, only local newspapers still
print stories, and the best estimate is that there are probably no more than two billion,
maybe fewer people left on the planet. The natural cycle of life and death took out many
of them, and no one knows how many people died from the lack of proper medical care and services.
But you’re still one of the lucky ones.
The US government technically still exists, and they’ve been managing end-of-the-world plans. One
of the biggest fears of a situation like this is nuclear meltdowns because of a lack of personnel
monitoring the facilities, and you remember when they made the decision to decommission all nuclear
plants decades ago. It greatly impacted the power grid in some areas - but it prevented a much worse
disaster. And the power grid is largely a thing of the past now anyway, with energy only being
intermittent in most areas. Information about the rest of the world is spotty at best, but rumors
still make their rounds, and you’ve heard of nuclear meltdowns in Russia and surrounding areas.
You still see people around - but it’s not their world anymore.
The youngest people alive are around fifty. You’re significantly older than that,
but still spry enough to get out and trap a rabbit or two to cook for supper. The
concept of going to the grocery store to pick out your food is largely a thing of
the past - the factories and farms that supplied groceries have mostly shut down,
and most people are only farming for subsistence now. You’ve even gotten into
that - keeping a small garden in the backyard to have some fresh produce along with your rabbit.
And nature is everywhere.
Humanity didn’t just use nature for its benefit - it kept it in check. Controlling plant growth
isn’t really a thing anymore, which means that overgrowth is everywhere. Grass has
grown several feet tall in some areas, and vines go up and down tall buildings. And it’s not just
the plants that have the run of the place now - animals do as well. The population of wild
animals like deer have exploded, and you can frequently see them running up and down the
streets. An eagle-eyed and armed survivor might be able to shoot one down and have
a big dinner - but they should keep an eye out for larger predators. It’s rarer to see
bears and cougars wander into city areas, but there are far fewer humans for them to avoid.
And there will be fewer and fewer every day.
Most people are dying at home now, their deaths going unrecorded. The
infrastructure to take care of the elderly isn’t there anymore, and most people
keep to themselves. You know you won’t be around to see the very last of humanity - that gift,
or curse, is reserved for the generation after you - and you figure you have a good fifteen,
maybe twenty years left before the lights go out. And you know by now there won’t be an
answer to the big question - why did this happen? Humanity was the dominant species on planet Earth
for millions of years, and with one unfortunate quirk of evolution, the lights have gone out.
Extinctions happen for all sorts of reasons, from massive natural disasters to environmental
changes. But maybe this one happened because Earth defended itself - evolving a way to stop
human reproduction and to ensure other species would have a chance to flourish. As the last
days of humanity proceed and humanity sees its infrastructure collapse, most people are living
simple existences in the way their ancestors did before we became an industrialized, urban species.
But soon, none of that will matter. It’s a nice day to go for a walk, and as you travel
the mostly empty streets, you come upon the old Natural History Museum. It’s long been abandoned,
but the doors are open. You wander inside, and are greeted by the familiar sight of the
T-rex skeleton standing proud - 65 million years after its extinction.
You wonder if one day another intelligent species will evolve and build their own
museum to what came before. Maybe they’ll put you on display. You wonder what they’ll
make of what humanity left behind. Maybe they’ll learn a few lessons.
Want to learn about some other shocking hypotheticals? Watch “What If The US
Economy Crashes (Day By Day)” or check out “I Survived 100 Days of Nuclear War” instead!