from Hacker News

Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race

by joubert on 2/26/21, 3:13 PM with 28 comments

  • by merricksb on 2/26/21, 3:34 PM

    NYTimes article discussing this book was heavily discussed here a few days ago:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26221925

  • by lm28469 on 2/26/21, 3:32 PM

    > Total sperm count in the Western world had fallen 59% between 1973 and 2011.

    It doesn't take a genius to see that the West is degenerating. We've never been so fat, unhealthy, lazy, complacent, &c. when our whole lifestyle revolves around producing chemical waste and consuming exhaust fume, micro plastics and leftover pesticides it really isn't a surprise our bodies are starting to fail, garbage in garbage out. But hey, we have netflix and the stock market is up so I guess all is good

  • by 11thEarlOfMar on 2/26/21, 3:32 PM

    In terms of literally ending the human race, this seems a bit of hyperbole. The statistic that matters is the percentage of women who want to have children but cannot. I didn't see that pointed to as a trend, and if it actually did become worrisome, those who have virile sperm can donate so those women can still become pregnant.

  • by belltaco on 2/26/21, 3:32 PM

    The problem with everywhere chemicals and the longer time period they potentially act on is that there is probably no way of designing a study to compare two cohorts that are exposed/not exposed to those chemicals. Best we can do is study isolated or tribal populations but that introduces a whole lot of other variables that modern life has that confound the data.

  • by jonnycomputer on 2/26/21, 3:40 PM

    Nuclear annihilation is a much more likely threat to the human race. We just constantly shove it out of our minds because its too damn scary. I know I do. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night, or focus on my job if I thought about it too much.

    Climate change is also scary. And could lead to conflicts that cause nuclear exchanges. That's also a more credible threat than falling sperm count.

    Falling sperm count may be a big concern, but how scary it is really depends on the cause. If falling sperm count just means that our population slowly drops to sustainable levels, levels where just washing clothes made of nylon no longer causes damaging plastic pollution in the arctic, for example, then that might not be the worst outcome (relative to the counterfactual such as population-dependent climate-change-induced nuclear-exchanges over scarce resources).

    And if plastic pollution is the cause of falling sperm count, it might just be self correcting...

  • by cdiamand on 2/26/21, 3:31 PM

  • by sroussey on 2/26/21, 3:33 PM

    Not to mention Covid-19, and of course the mumps virus.

    https://physician-news.umiamihealth.org/covid-19-can-infect-...

  • by emrah on 2/27/21, 10:48 AM

    Earth is overpopulated anyway, so this is sort of a good thing