It doesn’t take a whole lot for people to do what people do. We survive, and we make more of us. We work to improve our lives and the lives of people we care about. Even people in the most desperate conditions strive for today and dream about the future. Frankly, humans are often at their best in adversity.
The pessimists in this thread, and those who talk about voluntarily excluding yourselves from the gene pool, are talking from a position of detachment. That intellectual detachment would probably not survive the enormous change in personal circumstances. If it did, you’d soon be marginalized in a society that was dedicated to survival and improvement of their lives, or dead and not available to help or hinder things. Regardless, the world would be repopulated without any need for “planning” to make kids. That kind of thing happens quite naturally.
I like living, and aside from that I’ve got knowledge and skills that would be of a lot more help in post-apocalyptic circumstances than they are in my present life. My interests are weird, including ancient and medieval warfare, primitive living, and the associated technology. While dealing with the aftermath wouldn’t be all that fun, in some ways it would be a really cool chance to use the knowledge and skills I’ve acquired through my hobbies.
And, I would not only be a frequent, enthusiastic, and copious contributor of sperm, but I’d like to think I’d be a pretty decent provider and protector too. I’m already married, so assuming she survives I’ve only got a second-wife position open. Sorry about that.
As my role in any kind of catastrophe would probably be limited to choosing the drapes in the fallout shelter, I doubt I’d even be there in the first place. And there’s also the obvious problem. However, if it were truly necessary, I’d do my duty. All of my grandparents lived or have lived to their 80s so I have pretty good stock, apart from the hair department.
If you’re including me in that, I think you’re wrong (at least in the sense that I’m any more or less detached than anyone else discussing this purely hypothetical scenario).
As I said, I’d be quite prepared to take an active role in supporting a friendly community of survivors - I even think I have quite a useful range of skills appropriate to that particular situation, I’d be more than mildly interested in the survival and comfort of the individuals in the group, including myself. Someone else can worry about the perpetuation of the human race; I’ll just keep things working until that either happens, or does not.
I’m not having any kids now, why would I have kids if my circumstances were worse?
I like the people who exist right now, but if all of those people were killed, I don’t have the sort of loyalty to my species that would make me think that repopulating the world was a noble and right thing to do. If it happens, fine. But if it doesn’t happen, that’s also fine. My love of humanity is a love of the individuals, not the species.
That was kind of my point. You don’t need to plan those things, they happen pretty much on their own. There’s no need for species loyalty.
As to why you might change your mind after an armageddon, from what I understand it’s common for people to drastically change their behavior and outlook on life when they’ve been involved in a crisis. You might find that you have a quite strong emotional drive to have children in those circumstances, even though you rationally don’t want to right now. We’re not really in control of our emotions, only of our behavior and, to a limited extent, of our patterns of thinking.
You have no way of knowing how you’d deal with it; the only way to know how you’d react is to actually be in that situation. I’ve been in life-threatening circumstances a couple of times. They didn’t turn out like I thought they would. Sometimes, your actions surprise even you.
