QUESTIONER: I had a similar point. What can we do to correct this problem? It's, it all has to come from policy level because of the way human society is structured when the governments represent people.
PIANKA: Politicians can’t win elections with views like this. I could never run for office. [Laughter] [Unintelligible] [Laughter] They have to present good news to win, and they deceive themselves and deceive the public in every way they can to stay in power. Even Al Gore, who wrote the environment book, never faced overpopulation. No politician ever has.
The reason China was able to turn the corner and is gonna become the new super power in the world is because they got a police state and they can force people to stop reproducing. That’s the only reason they were able to turn the corner.
QUESTIONER: [Unintelligible.]
PIANKA: . . . Well, there’s cheating going on. You can pay in China and have more. I know all that. But there’s a solution that’s theoretically possible. I call it the Johnny Anti-Appleseed Solution. Instead of being cursed with our fertility, I would bless us with infertility. Now this could happen because male sperm counts are falling because of plastics and the estrogen [unintelligible] naturally.
But I asked a reproductive physiologist years ago about this. I said, “Could you design a molecule that you could administer once that would bind to the DNA to turn off reproduction and make people sterile?” And he said, yeah, theoretically. And I said, well, if you did that could you design an antidote that would unmask it just briefly for as few seconds? And he said, yeah, probably. So this is what we need. We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth [laughter] and make the antidote freely available to anybody who’s willing to work for it.
Immediately you'd get responsible parenthood. No more juvenile delinquents, unwanted kids. You have a kid, you had to work, and you had only a few seconds to do it in. [Extended laughter]