In his book ”Brave New World”, by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932 – exactly the year I was born –, among many other things, the possibility of creating authentic child factories was predicted. That is, the idea of creating human beings, massively, uniting in each case a male gamete with another female gamete, to form an embryo, and in a duly scheduled time have a citizen.
With the proper organization, a century later, Huxley’s idea could be put into action from a revolutionary demography, overcoming with appropriate technology the complex gestation and the very long periods of breeding and training of true human minds, with automatic methods and great economies of scale. .
There is a country where serious consideration may be given to practicing this new form of birth, the People’s Republic of China. Well, with its current 1,425 million inhabitants, the country already has losses of several million annually; with the forecast to fall to less than 1,000 million total population in 2100. Which would be a major demographic crisis.
Deng Xiaoping’s one-child policy of 1978 was abandoned (400 million Chinese people were saved in 35 years of application), the two-child policy of ten years ago was also subsequently surpassed. And now it is the turn of the three children in 2024, perhaps with the Huxley method we would like to reach a volume of population, avoiding unwanted immigration.
There are many physical, economic and moral objections to consider in such a complex issue and they must be assessed. But that does not mean that, somewhere in Beijing, on the outskirts of the Forbidden City, the issue is already being studied, with a public debate that will come before what would be the big decision.