I'm assuming a declining population as well. Of course, in society with tight population control, it's clear that soylent green is mostly made of aborted babies. (Bet you wish I hadn't mentioned that...)
I don't believe the population is declining, as discussed below.
I don't agree with your conclusion because aborted foetuses are tiny things, but let's think about the worst-case scenario:
It's clearly unproductive to actively farm babies, given the mothers' extra nutritional needs, but let us assume that we are dealing only with women who are getting pregnant anyway.
In the best case all fertile women of childbearing age (say, 1/3 of the population) are constantly pregnant. Given the exponential growth in foetal weight, it will be most productive to process them at birth, when they might weigh an average of 3kg, and perhaps each woman will produce once such baby per year (especially since she has to produce some living offspring who don't enter into this analysis). That represents, then, about 800g of meat per person per year. In my analysis above you can also expect to eat 800g of corpse per year.
Manifestly, of course, not all women we see in Soylent Green are pregnant, nor anything like it, and if babies are routinely taken away at birth there is no mention of it.
Hence I'm glad to observe that no, Soylent Green is not mostly made of aborted babies. Phew.
If I put this in a fanzine will anyone ever speak to me again? :-)
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I don't agree with your conclusion because aborted foetuses are tiny things, but let's think about the worst-case scenario:
It's clearly unproductive to actively farm babies, given the mothers' extra nutritional needs, but let us assume that we are dealing only with women who are getting pregnant anyway.
In the best case all fertile women of childbearing age (say, 1/3 of the population) are constantly pregnant. Given the exponential growth in foetal weight, it will be most productive to process them at birth, when they might weigh an average of 3kg, and perhaps each woman will produce once such baby per year (especially since she has to produce some living offspring who don't enter into this analysis). That represents, then, about 800g of meat per person per year. In my analysis above you can also expect to eat 800g of corpse per year.
Manifestly, of course, not all women we see in Soylent Green are pregnant, nor anything like it, and if babies are routinely taken away at birth there is no mention of it.
Hence I'm glad to observe that no, Soylent Green is not mostly made of aborted babies. Phew.
If I put this in a fanzine will anyone ever speak to me again? :-)