"Ringo, John - Council Wars 1 - There Will Be Dragons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

"So why aren't there enough children?" Aikawa asked.
"Because, as Ungphakorn pointed out, children are a pain in the ass," Sheida
replied. "There isn't a nanny yet designed that can give children the right kind
of love and attention for maximum positive development; that takes a human and
preferably a female. One female can do a decent job, especially with the quality
of life in this era. One female and one male work okay, better than just a
female. Multiple females and a male work pretty well, possibly better than
straight monogamy. Multiple males and one female is suboptimum. One male depends
on an unusual male. That's all 'in general' and there is some flex on
individuals. But those are the best patterns overall as proven by repeated and
reproducible studies. End of child-rearing lecture.
"But if you have kids, and are raising them well, they take up time, lots of it.
So you end up spending time on your children that you could be usingЕ other
ways. And the world is filled with other things to do. Most people would rather
surf or mass-game than answer 'why, why, why' questions all day long.
"Most women realize this and realize that they are going to be doing most of the
rearing. Those that don't, learn after the first child. And if they give the kid
away, the Net won't let them replicate another; they lose the right."
"Another thing we could change," Celine said. "Producing large numbers of fully
viable human children is a trivial exercise. Indeed, there are still
improvements that could be made to the human genome, despite the work that has
been done over the centuries."
"Who is going to raise them?" Ishtar snapped. "What she just said is that most
people don't want to go to the trouble. We already have a slight surplus of
unwanted children. Are you saying that we should have more?"
"There's also a cultural conditioning aspect," Sheida said. "Human populations
tipped over in the mid-twenty-first century and have been tending downward ever
since. But our society still has a cultural mythos that 'Gaea is wounded.' Which
is why nearly fifteen percent of total energy usage goes to repairing
'environmental damage' on a world where the last strip mine shut down a thousand
years ago! People still think we have a population problem, so having passels of
kids is societally frowned upon."
"And your point is?" Paul asked.
"Women aren't all the same, either," Sheida continued. "There are women who
through a combination of genetics and culture adore children. You can find them
out there, the women who have had three, four, five children, despite the
cultural prohibitions. Their bodies say 'make babies.' They don't use their
bodies anymore, thank God, what a God awful mess that would be, but they still
raise the kids.
"One of the reasons that the rate of population decrease has been decreasing is
an increasing trend towards those genes. Basically, women who didn't want babies
haven't reproduced for the last two to three thousand years. I think we're
leveling off, or will in the next two, three hundred years. Also, we're always
pushing the boundaries of life extension. We're up to five hundred years now. We
could be over a thousand in the next century or so. That, right there, will
change the premises."
"If we gain at all," Paul said. "You have your trends to show, I have mine. The
rate of scientific progress has dropped to nothing. Quantum jumping and
replication were developed nearly five centuries ago and they were the last
significant scientific breakthrough. Despite your pronouncements, the population