https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero/amp?__twitter_impression=true
Well, apparently too much plastic pollution is devastating male sperm counts. Rip humanity, it was a good run.
On a serious note, there are a few ways to attack the problem that are mentioned but none of them are cheap: fertility techniques are highly-reliable but still set you back tens of thousands, and surrogates are hard to use. All in all, this might encourage people to adopt. And that's likely a good thing in general, given overpopulation and all. It'll be hard on a lot of people though, given that they want babies that are 'their own' because of dumb evolutionary reasons.
Well, apparently too much plastic pollution is devastating male sperm counts. Rip humanity, it was a good run.
Now it seems that early death isn't enough for us—we're on track instead to void the species entirely. Last summer a group of researchers from Hebrew University and Mount Sinai medical school published a study showing that sperm counts in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have fallen by more than 50 percent over the past four decades. (They judged data from the rest of the world to be insufficient to draw conclusions from, but there are studies suggesting that the trend could be worldwide.) That is to say: We are producing half the sperm our grandfathers did. We are half as fertile.
The Hebrew University/Mount Sinai paper was a meta-analysis by a team of epidemiologists, clinicians, and researchers that culled data from 185 studies, which examined semen from almost 43,000 men. It showed that the human race is apparently on a trend line toward becoming unable to reproduce itself. Sperm counts went from 99 million sperm per milliliter of semen in 1973 to 47 million per milliliter in 2011, and the decline has been accelerating. Would 40 more years—or fewer—bring us all the way to zero?
I called Shanna H. Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist at Mount Sinai and one of the lead authors of the study, to ask if there was any good news hiding behind those brutal numbers. Were we really at risk of extinction? She failed to comfort me. “The What Does It Mean question means extrapolating beyond your data,” Swan said, “which is always a tricky thing. But you can ask, ‘What does it take? When is a species in danger? When is a species threatened?’ And we are definitely on that path.” That path, in its darkest reaches, leads to no more naturally conceived babies and potentially to no babies at all—and the final generation of Homo sapiens will roam the earth knowing they will be the last of their kind.
On a serious note, there are a few ways to attack the problem that are mentioned but none of them are cheap: fertility techniques are highly-reliable but still set you back tens of thousands, and surrogates are hard to use. All in all, this might encourage people to adopt. And that's likely a good thing in general, given overpopulation and all. It'll be hard on a lot of people though, given that they want babies that are 'their own' because of dumb evolutionary reasons.
