“Jerk Off” becomes a term of endearment and honor. 
The prequel to “Planet Of The Apes” that no one wants to see.
Nuh-uh. A daily blowjob or you’re doing without my share. It’s a seller’s market from my point of view, and every day you want to argue the point the price is going up (to a hotter chick).
But meanwhile you need to be training up your female master navigators and marine pilots, without whom all the world’s merchant fleets (including the precious oil supertankers) are so much scrap metal. Not to mention the marine engineers to fix the darn ships, the steelworkers, the heavy-metal miners… even the fork-lift drivers. Unfortunately some of these key professions take more than two years to learn and probably aren’t going to survive the loss of 99% of the personnel, but you know, in between yakking as though reproduction was going to be the only problem to face, you might at least acknowledge the difficulty.
And you’re collecting money for what reason? Remember-the premise is that all men die off within a period of two years, so you could kick the bucket a week and a half from now.
I didn’t say money. Read the quoted sentence again. But if I am - for the usual reasons: I might as well die with the most toys as not (given that half my putative offspring are going to die anyway).
Sorry-misread it. On the other hand, it’s only a seller’s market when there are more buyers than sellers…and I’m betting there will be far more men wanting blowjobs than there will be women wanting(or even needing) to go that route to collect sperm.
Then, as I said, they’re welcome to do without my contribution. I’m not that eager to donate gametes to a world that’s going to be a Stone Age wasteland for a pathetic few years. They had two years, tops, to collect my share, and when it’s gone it’s gone. From that point of view it most certainly is a seller’s market: the entire source of supply is about to disappear for ever.
I think I would spend what little time I have left saying goodbye to all my friends and family, do what travelling I can work into the schedule…and immediately stopping payment on my life insurance, because I don’t seeing insurance companies doing anything but defaulting on all policies for males.
Without men to carry the load, women will finally have to learn to belch and fart for themselves.
I’m worried that the market will be flooded with cheap sperm from China.
Ah, I know one or two who are ahead of the game there.
I think that half the world’s population (including the vast majority of people in a number of very important fields) dying over the course of 2 years is going to destroy civilization whether or not cloning can be perfected in time.
Rephrase it as all men becoming sterile, or all men spontaneously changing gender (and wouldn’t THAT have some interesting side effects) and then who knows?
Good points-I wish I had thought of that. :smack:
Oddly enough I just recently was involved in this discussion (and the “all men spontaneously changing gender” one too) on another board. The point was made that besides the problem that the economy would collapse due to so many jobs being overwhelmingly done by males, but that much of the world simply wouldn’t have the wealth or faculties to sustain themselves by cloning or the like even the technology already existed and if their economy took no hit at all.
The overwhelmingly likely scenario I feel is a rapid collapse of society and human life dying out in a generation or two; society will be too busy falling apart to invent human cloning, much less institute it on a massive scale. The “best” scenario would be human cloning made at least crudely workable in time, most of humanity dying out and a relative handful managing to keep just enough technology to keep on doing it. They’ll probably “envy the dead” as the quote goes, though.
Spiders everywhere!
True. But reproduction is the bottleneck. If we don’t get past that, it won’t matter how well we deal with our standard of living as we die off.
I’ve got the fork-lift driving down. That one won’t take two years. Unless I got conscripted for something else, I’d probably head to the local wastewater treatment plant. That’s something really necessary that isn’t at the top of most people’s minds.
I won’t, personally, be doing anything about the reproductive problem because that’s nowhere near my area of expertise. What everyone will be hit with hardest is the overload to medical resources, after life care resources, and our emotions as so many people are ripped out of our lives. I will probably be snippy, at best. When I go to the treatment plant, I’ll bring a pillow and sleeping bag. I probably won’t be the only person sleeping at the job.
That’s the lovely thing about liquid nitrogen. And the purpose of the slogans. If you get enough frozen, the little wigglers can last a looooong time.
I expect they won’t be used much right away. Everyone is going to be too overworked to handle babies, too, even if we’re just keeping up with everyone who’s sick and not trying to learn hands-on infrastructure management.
This. Get enough guys to donate enough sperm before they die off, and there can be several more generations of womankind, at least. And that might give y’all enough time to figure out how to create sperm cell equivalents out of eggs, and keep things going indefinitely without any men.
On the guy side of things, whoever’s alive when the last women die will be the last humans, period.
You’re still shafted for lack of anything to keep any technology going more advanced than the late Stone Age.
The trouble with liquid nitrogen is it needs fairly high-tech gear to keep up and running, and by the time you figure out what supply bottleneck is going to do you in first, you’re probably run out of copper, electricity, rubber, oil… and the little you have left can’t be shifted around to where it’s needed because nowhere near enough women know how to drive, pilot or navigate the big stuff, and still fewer how to fix them, and it really isn’t the case that any job a man can do a smart woman can figure out in five minutes. Modern society is built on a giant network of people running frantically to stay in the same place, and if enough links break (and it won’t take many) the whole thing collapses beyond recall - or at any rate, any recall that can be managed within a few millennia.
I don’t see that it’s an insurmountable problem. Unlike in Czarcasm’s Rapture scenario, you’ve got much of two years to prepare, and you’ve got half, rather than one-quarter, of the population remaining.
It seems improbable to me that with even a year to prepare, you couldn’t train enough women to keep at least a geographically reduced version of the electric grid running. You need to train power plant operators, and you need to keep up the supply chain that provides natural gas, coal, plutonium, etc; maybe you focus on just one of those power sources, plus hydro. And with an eye to the future, train enough women to keep at least one solar cell manufacturing plant running.
You might have to do some fairly radical stuff like limit the grid to the more temperate parts of the country - you can stay in Montana if you want, but you’re on your own - and ban air conditioning for awhile even there. But if you can keep the electric grid running, then the Internet and phone networks can be kept going; information continues to be available, and people can communicate to coordinate their actions.
After that, you can worry about food. I’m not particularly worried about there being enough food: even in today’s more high-tech agricultural world, women can and routinely do keep farms and ranches running, and there are only half as many people to feed. It’s more a question of processing and distribution. Distribution is a matter of logistics and trucking; neither is insurmountable for women. And women already do much of the scutwork in processing chickens to turn them into what we get in the supermarket.
IMHO, women keep civilization going. Not without problems, and quite possibly with some die-back: there may not be enough electricity to heat Northern cities in the winter, and those that don’t move south may freeze. But you prioritize the refrigeration of all that donated sperm so that there can be a future if you make it through the present.
Scutwork’s not the issue - your raw material supply and bulk transport’s the issue. Too few women know how to do the key jobs that keep your metal and oil refineries running or ship stuff halfway round the world, and all your trainers have a half-life of a year roughly speaking. You can’t keep a power grid running without a vast assemblage of tools and spare parts, nearly all your toolmakers have died, you have no maintenance engineers left (a couple of years is a rush job to qualify as a domestic electrician, much less keep a power grid up and running). When the systems start going out there isn’t a faint hope of restarting them because too much of everything depends on everything else.
Roughly what I’m saying is that if you seriously think men’s principal value to the species in this century is as sperm donors, you need your head examined.