- People adapt to new situations far quicker than the movie assumed. If, indeed, all human reproduction would suddenly cease, people would be deeply disturbed for a few days and return to life as usual within a few months.
I must disagree at last with this point. Would not be so easy to "get over" this event, not with this particular level of catastrophe.
People have gotten over much worse. I'm not saying that people would be unaffected. They would be. But the effects will be dulled over the years, as people get used to the idea that they will not have children themselves.
The thing about humans is that it is very difficult for us to grasp big events emotionally. Throughout history, the events we attach the most emotional significance to are sudden, violent, and confined to a specific geographic localle (e.g., the attacks on Pearl Harbour or 9/11, the storming of the Bastille, etc.). It is very difficult to grasp the horror of something that is slow, subtle, and takes place over the entire world.
There will be all sort of reactions, sure, but most people will keep it on the personal level - they will be upset that they cannot have children. But society will survive, and mostly unchanged.
Plus - and this is where the movie truly fails - humanity isn't nearly as homogenous as depicted within it. The movie detailed only one emotional reaction - despair - that manifested differently in different people mostly according to their politics. But in the real world there would be plenty of other reactions. There would be conspiracy theorists arguing that this was all done by the Russians or Chinese or Australians and that they really are giving birth in secret on their side of the world. There would be plenty of people - especially the last generaton of kids, growing up - who will take an atittude of "this is great! we're the last people to be using this world! We can do whatever we want with no consequences!" and there will be the people deeply depressed. But things will go on, mostly as they do now.
I agree with Talia. Also, the youngest person on Earth is at the point of the movie, like 18, right? So, even if it wasn't a big deal back when it originally started, I don't think anyone is going to just behave like nothing is happening. It doesn't take much reasoning to wonder what will happen when the youngest people are 30, or 40, or 60.
Sure, some people will wonder. Most people won't care, until it hits them home.
As the grandson of holocaust survivers, knowing what my grandparents went through, I have a lot of faith in humanity's resilience. Knowing how little humanity has learnt from that and from other horrors of history, I have very little faith in humanity's capacity for growth. This movie, as I said above, is both too pessimistic in its depiction of society's collapse, and too optimistic, because it assumes that the collapse is because humanity has the capacity to understand the horror of its own situation.
