Kirk v Trump

I wonder how long the social mandate had been in effect. Pre-industrial times?

With advances in technology and medicine by the time of the episode (and without the mandate) their lifespan could have been in the centuries. They might not have been considered decrepit until a century after hitting 60.

In the novel, you were a fully trained and legal adult on your fourteenth birthday.

Top predator being disease?

Sumner Redstone (chairman of both Viacom and CBS) is 92.

To find a US president who was below 60 at the time they left office, we have to go back to William Taft.

Edit, it's been pointed out the last line of my post is factually wrong, poor research on my part.

 

*ahem* Also Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover, and Calvin Coolidge. Obama and Clinton were younger than Taft was when they left office (Obama by only one day, though).

 

Since he's dead, his opinion is irrelevant. If he were alive, I would have no hesitation in telling him that I didn't like his writing (Gulliver's Travels was on the reading list in one of my college English courses; I couldn't force myself to finish it).

 

As their sun slowly died their resources began to decline. Timicin was a scientist attempting to find a way to revitalize their sun, and save their civilization. He was forced into euthanasia due to limited resources as much as anything else, because an increasing population consumed more resources, and the easiest way to control the population was to require everyone to die at 60 or before.

 

No. They never said anything about it being a function of limited resources, only about how caring for the elderly was a burden on the young. The only threat in evidence from Major Winchester not accepting that suicide is painless was that it upset the emotions of his fellow beings.

If you want to imagine that there was an underlying problem of limited resources, you can, but it's fanon. All we were shown was that it was just an attitude.

 

I've still got 6 years to go until I hit 60. But my point is that I grew up around elderly people - my grandparents, my grandmother's siblings, their cousins, their friends... and once my classmates found out I was living with my grandparents, they kept asking, "Isn't it WEIRD?" They acted like I was living with aliens (and these weren't kids who were into science fiction). I told them no, it wasn't weird at all. Elderly people are just people who have lived longer - had more trips around the Sun, which is the way I look at the matter of birthdays.

I don't consider 60 to be elderly nowadays. Even 70 is young. My dad is over 80 and still has a lot of his natural hair color.

 

I only have 13 years left myself. The issue isn't age, it's contribution. In order to fund a retirement of 30+ years, healthy humans need to retire much later in life or the young end up more and more subsidising retirees until it becomes unsustainable either because you can't produce enough children or you run out of resources. Euthanasia for everyone at a certain age us fairer than killing off the infirm. It also prevents social inequality becoming a factor. If you adapt culturally it's a perfectly acceptable compromise even if there are preferable alternatives such as making sure older people can keep contributing. The rise of the nuclear family reduced their contribution by requiring paid child carers. No reason not to swap grandparents for free child care though!

 

Sometimes, you have to be like Cap and know the reference to understand it, whether it be a Heston film, modest satire piece, or whatever.

 

Not everyone who thinks he is funny is actually funny.

 

It's the division of family because of the need to travel for work that leads to the decline. China is suffering a bit from its one child policy and is having to import workers in some areas while having poverty in other regions.

I'm in a similar precarious position, still renting after 20+ years, in a job with stagnant pay that is as of this year now paying less in real terms than when I started. The gap between rich and poor gets wider even if our standards of living get better. That said, the UN found poverty levels in Alabama to be shocking in a first world country, complete with hookworm infections that are normally only found in the third world.

The Eminians, in the city at least, seem to live very middle class lives. This could be the future if cheap renewable energy is available to all but we don't know about their rural areas. Once you strip profit out of energy provision, the only major costs are food and housing. Population control then depends largely on space. One assumes that, since their infrastructure remains sound they can absorb the additional population for a while. Some births might previously have been as replacements for those killed but other people of child bearing age would now be alive to have children that would never have been. If the number of survivors is roughly the same as all the people who die in the USA every year, that's a lot of extra people!

The issue of euthanasia is toxic to us because it's alien to our culture. In a hundred years our elders might be happy to be cooked and eaten by their families in the aftermath of the water wars of the Trumpocalyse.

 

Kirk vs. Trump is just begging for a photoshop job.

Sorry, I'll get my coat.

 

I repeat: Do we even KNOW what caused the war? Did either Mea-3 or Anan-7 ever state that they had an overpopulation problem? For that matter, how is childbearing/rearing organized? Are marriages arranged, do people get to choose, or is it mandatory? Do they even have marriages there? How many children are people allowed to have? Are children exempt from being disintegrated?

As for euthanasia, physician-assisted death is legal now in Canada.

 

He'd certainly be more fun than Colonel Green or Zhora. Even better, SNL should spoof the scene with Lincoln on the Enterprise!

 

Uhura: "In our century, we've learned not to fear words."
Trump: "That's great. I think I'm going to like it here."

 

It writes itself!

 

Can we please NOT bring Trump into my happy place.