/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10848064]

So you have a device that will kill a random different human every second, somewhere on the planet, perpetually. However you are able to fine tune said randomness with some specifics.

We know that currently the number of births outstrip number of deaths by at least double, but is there some way to maximise the effect such a device might have, even eventually, if you play the long game and wish to achieve a more culled number, like say 1 billion?

This is a thought experiment obviously.
Currently my idea is to have the device targeting random pregnant women that are pregnant with female twins/triplets/quaduplets (etc.), and slowly working our way up in descending order until you have women currently normally pregnant with a single female babe.

At this point I still am not sure if this will put an eventual dent in the number of people on earth being born vs. dying. The long game was to skew the ratio of young, available girls for men to pair with towards an imbalanced large number of men, who are likely to spark conflict/commit suicide, die earlier due to higher sexual frustration.

There might, however be more efficient ways to go about equalizing or reversing the births/deaths ratio with perhaps targeted kills of prominent disease researchers about to make breakthroughs or the people active in curing disease. This would promote diseases to come through and wipe many of us out.

Hell, there's probably something better I'm not considering. Remember our goal is to seek population balance, and then possibly regressions to a more maintainable number.

This is a weird thread, but its what we're here for.

[Anonymous No.10848348]

OP, I want to emphasize that I'm a literal brainlet that didn't think this through too much, so check my math. This is also pared down from a much longer, ramblier post I was writing.

The machine kills 30 million people a year. Africa is the most fertile continent on Earth so let's try to depopulate it first. WHO estimates around 165 million pregnancies per year that don't end in abortion.

Africa has a population of around 1.2 billion. That's a sixth of the world's population. Quickly glancing at fertility rates shows us that African countries average a fertility rate between 5 and 6, roughly double the worldwide average of 2.5. So let's say Africa accounts for a third of the worldwide births (I honestly don't know the definition of fertility rate so I might be fucking up hugely here, but 1/6th of the population multiplied by 2x the fertility rate = 1/3rd of births or some shit, right?), or 55 million. Assuming 50% of pregnancies are female-bearing, 27.5 million female-bearing pregnancies occur in Africa yearly, which we can prevent and then some.

We can effectively prevent any births by killing women who are furthest along in their pregnancy first. It's been 1 year, and all women who were pregnant when we first started the machine are dead. Population growth in Africa has slowed to zero. If it wasn't midnight and I didn't have work tomorrow I'd take a crack at working out a timeline of how this would play out, but suffice to say that you could effectively genocide a continent in under 10 years with this thing. Give it a century, probably less, and mankind would be doomed to extinction.

[Anonymous No.10848365]

You think I have the patience to read all that bullshit? I have places to be and taxes to do, you know, ADULT THINGS. Because I'm an ADULT with a JOB where I make loads of MONEY and I pay TAXES and have SEX, not to mention my FRIENDS which I talk FOOTBALL with on FRIDAY NIGHTS. I wouldn't expect you to know about these things. I'll quickly glance over your word salad just to be nice. Lets see.... device.. deaths.. experiment... disease... Yep schizo post. Book an appointment with your local psychiatrist.

[Anonymous No.10848665]

The device kills ~31.5 million per year.
UN stats for mid-2017 say there were ~143.5 million births that year. That's probably higher now.
Women are obviously the better choice for killing (if half the men die, the survivors just form harems), so this kills ~45% (40-45%, if we assume the current birth rate is higher) as many woman per year as are born. Pretty nice, but we can do better.
Pregnant woman, as mentioned, are good picks -- women pregnant with daughters are even better. Since the machine can be used to kill newborn girls, simply being a few months faster trivially allows you to double your woman-killing rate, to 80-90% the rate of new female births.
Your device should try to give each target (i.e. pregnant woman) a point score of how many daughters they're expected to have in their life. Granddaughters make a more accurate measure, but that's much harder to calculate. Multiple pregnancies need to get factored in. As the other anon said, Africa is the only continent with a birth rate higher than the global average, so that's likely a good place to start (~42.7 million annual births there).
It should be pretty clear that with these additions, the 80-90% easily grows past 100%. Theoretically this means all women eventually die, and humanity goes extinct... but technology marches on; we already have artificial wombs, and who's to say artificial human eggs are beyond us? Forming a futuristic all-male society isn't impossible.

But obviously, making the device's rule "prioritise high positions of command" is single-handedly enough to destroy civilisation overnight. This will lead to global extinction eventually, when the population gets low enough the birth rate sinks beneath ~31.5 million annually. If you can't turn the device off, this method would be exceeding difficult to balance, but also potentially the fastest if you thought you could manage it.

[Anonymous No.10848846]

>>10848348
>>10848665
OP here, these are both extremely well versed schools of thought, which I've since boiled down to Potential Value and Dependent Value.


Potential value is obvious. "How many more born generations is this person personally responsible for". These are subsets within subsets that require some kind of omnipotent power to observe since those generations do not exist, and technically speaking, cannot be targeted by the machine. It begs the question, is a mother birthing female triplets to the world that decide to abstain from having children themselves worth less or more to the device than a mother who chain-births single female children every year, however those children themselves eventually start chain-birthing once mature enough (and so on). It's difficult to tell.

The other anon makes Dependent Value a more interestinf concept: "How many lives is this person currently responsible for keeping alive?"
This is the more devious of the two, since positions of power, accumulation of wealth or information or knowledge or even one's situation mean someone elses survival is dependent on your own. If the device were tuned to people currently driving gas-trucks on highways, considerable loss and destruction and loss of life could be incurred faster than just targeting pregnant women. Furthermore, I doubt 31.5 million qualified medical doctors around the world graduate every year, so if they die first, pretty soon access to proper medical treatment will suffer, and other diseases will take over, kind of like how HIV itself doesn't kill you, it just disables the immune system meaning even the common cold presents a significant threat to your health. The same can be applied to government positions by using a top-down approach, including military and civil peacekeepers like police which can be wiped out within several months. Once governments break down and the paychecks stop flowing, societal breakdown and anarchy is a near certainty.

[Anonymous No.10848869]

OP here, part 2.

To further expand a little on Dependent Value, there are many things we take for granted in our daily lives to either happen or not happen that ensures we aren't killed. No-one would particularly have a big problem if a president of a major world power died this instant, but the traffic control officer or the plane pilots or nuclear-plant engineer are people with considerable responsibility to "not fuck up". So many social support structures are the foundations of other social suppport structures, and sooner or later vulnerabilities make themselves known when important people responsible for something important make a mistake and the loss of life is the result.

This device can take advantage of this.

[Anonymous No.10850200]

>>10848846
>people driving gas trucks
Fuck it, what if we just have it kill everyone driving an 18 wheeler? Supply chains would collapse in under a week. Stores wouldn't get their food shipments, and people would be starving while food would be rotting in warehouses. There'd be rioting and widespread panic in under a month.