“Another thing we could change,” Celine said. “Producing large numbers of fully viable human children is a trivial exercise. Indeed, there are still improvements that could be made to the human genome, despite the work that has been done over the centuries.”

“Who is going to raise them?” Ishtar snapped. “What she just said is that most people don’t want to go to the trouble. We already have a slight surplus of unwanted children. Are you saying that we should have more?”

“There’s also a cultural conditioning aspect,” Sheida said. “Human populations tipped over in the mid-twenty-first century and have been tending downward ever since. But our society still has a cultural mythos that ‘Gaea is wounded.’ Which is why nearly fifteen percent of total energy usage goes to repairing ‘environmental damage’ on a world where the last strip mine shut down a thousand years ago! People still think we have a population problem, so having passels of kids is societally frowned upon.”

“And your point is?” Paul asked.

“Women aren’t all the same, either,” Sheida continued. “There are women who through a combination of genetics and culture adore children. You can find them out there, the women who have had three, four, five children, despite the cultural prohibitions. Their bodies say ‘make babies.’ They don’t use their bodies anymore, thank God, what a God awful mess that would be, but they still raise the kids.”

“One of the reasons that the rate of population decrease has been decreasing is an increasing trend towards those genes. Basically, women who didn’t want babies haven’t reproduced for the last two to three thousand years. I think we’re leveling off, or will in the next two, three hundred years. Also, we’re always pushing the boundaries of life extension. We’re up to five hundred years now. We could be over a thousand in the next century or so. That, right there, will change the premises.”