Which Kids Should Go Where?

An analogy for the controversial thing

It’s 2250, the earth is running dry, but we discovered light speed travel and a new solar system next door, with a single viable planet named Normoria. We’ve been sending our kids there to start new lives without us - younger, unformed bodies can survive the light speed, but adults can’t. As each child hits somewhere between 10-14 - parents take them to our launching ceremony, say their tearful goodbyes, and send them into space.

Most kids on Normoria thrive - but a small subset struggle. This subset is allergic to the air. They develop occasional hives and difficulty breathing, with reduced lung capacity. Their quality of life is substantially diminished. They can’t really exercise, go on hikes with friends, climbing stairs, etc., and as thus have overall shorter lifespans. There’s some ways to deal with this - they can carry custom-made air canisters around with them, get some medical therapies - but outside of a few lucky ones, it remains burdensome for the rest of their lives.

For a few decades, some parents have instead been sending their kids to a moon in a different solar system, light years in the opposite direction - Regenera. The moon has a different atmosphere that is inoffensive to kids who would normally be allergic in Normoria. Here, they thrive.

Of course, Regenera isn’t perfect. It’s a bit of a harsher environment overall, with less infrastructure and a smaller population - but compared to Normoria, for those who are allergic, it’s a clearly better choice.

Nobody can switch between Regenera and Normoria - they’re in opposite directions and way too far apart. So this leads us to a tricky problem - it’s hard to know for sure whether your kid is going to be allergic to Normoria or not before you send them off. Most aren’t allergic, sure, but some develop symptoms before leaving Earth - they sneeze a little more, get fatigued a little quicker. And for a while, people have been noticing that these kids are much more likely to end up allergic on Normoria.

So for some time, a small handful of parents who suspected their kids might be allergic to Normoria’s air, would instead ship their kids off to Regenera. Most of the time this worked pretty well. Occasionally it didn’t, because the reverse was also true - kids compatible with Normoria’s air were horribly allergic to Regenera’s, and had terrible reactions if they ended up on the planet not suited for them. There was some tech to help, of course, but much as the allergic kids on Normoria, the allergic kids on Regenera had to use special breathing apparatuses that were really annoying and costly.

1. Sending your kid to Regenera was stigmatized due to lots of complicated things (including Regenera being an outright harder planet), but mostly due to a new religion that had sprung up that viewed Normoria as heaven. Regenera simply did not fit into this plan.

2. Over time, an angry movement defending sending your kids to Regenera sprouted up. As we developed faster communication technology, we got to see videos of just how bad the allergic kids lives were on Normoria, and this sparked an activist movement. Regenera is good, they changed in the streets. It rescues kids from a horrible adult life.

3. People wanted to be good and accepting, and more sent their kids to Regenera. But nobody was ever able to be totally accurate about predicting which atmosphere kids would be allergic to in the first place, and so we started to see more kids on Regenera getting allergic.

4. This started a huge backlash originating from (but not limited to) the religious movement. People were ruining their kids lives, they’d point out, broadcasting videocalls of kids on Regenera hooked up to breathing tubes and crying that they wished their parents hadn’t listened to them and instead sent them to Normoria. People shouldn’t be sending anybody to Regenera, they argued. The vast majority of kids were naturally compatible with Normoria’s air. If you send an allergic kid to Normoria, then they can choose to use breathing tubes once they get old enough, once they’re an adult and can decide for themselves if they’re allergic. Kids are too young to be making permanent decisions about their future!

5. This made it a war, and war makes victims. Kids on earth raised in pro-Regenera cultures quickly learned that going to Regenera was the winning move - you could become the martyr in battle, you were the hero and the victim all at once. You could have the sacred going-off ceremony where everyone would gaze in awe at you as your parents loaded you into the rocket heading to Regenera. This made you cool, pure, valued, it made you belong.

6. These kids began developing prodromal symptoms at alarming rates. Kids were sneezing on each other, complaining of tiredness. It was hard to know how much was real. And the opposite was true, too - in pro-Normoria cultures, kids would insist they weren’t tired, even if they seemed to constantly be lagging behind in gym class. But the difference was, in pro-Normoria cultures it had been normal, for as long as anyone could remember, that kids tried to suppress any symptoms that might suggest they should not end up on the popular, ‘heaven’ planet. That the reverse was now happening in pro-Regenera cultures was brand new.

7. The pro-Normoria side latched onto all this hard. “You’re brainwashing your kids to think they’re gonna be allergic”, they’d say. “It’s social contagion.” They pointed out how people on Regenera also had harder lives - “so what if your kid isn’t allergic to the air there”, they’d say. “Regenera still has a harsher environment. It has less infrastructure. You want to subject your kids to that for the rest of their lives just because they got caught up in a fad?”

8. The pro-Regenera faction went about trying to downplay all the information about how Regenera was a worse environment than Normoria. They didn’t want to give the Normoria supporters any narrative ammunition. "Your studies are bullshit,” they said. “You didn’t even get your test takers to sign the consent form, we’re retracting this paper.” Some websites banned access to the “Regenera Regret” forum, a support group for people sent to Regenera who soon afterwards figured out they were allergic and would have been happier on Normoria.

9. And pro-Normorians, of course, somehow completely ignored all the videos from people thriving on Regenera, who were living happy lives, saying their parents sending them to this planet was the best decision they’d ever made.
   ”If you’re allergic to Normorian air, this is clearly a physiological problem.” they’d say. “You’re ill. The treatment for this illness isn’t sending the sick people off to the wrong planet. It’s like you’re celebrating the illness!”

10. Whether or not you’re allergic became a big, confusing argument. Were the symptoms of people incompatible with either Regenera or Normoria psychosomatic? With such intensive social war, some people thought so. “I’m living on Normoria, and for a long time I thought I was allergic, and that I should have been sent to Regenera”, someone writes in a facebook post signal boosted by the pro-Normoria party. “But then I did a lot of therapy and meditation, and eventually realized that those symptoms were really just allergies to my cat. Now I’m happy on my own planet!”
    Yet the Regenera groups have their own stories - “I was in denial about my allergies for so long,” writes one person whose parents had sent them to Normoria early on. “My parents are super pro-Normoria for all, you know. I refused to admit I had a problem. I wanted to be strong, and normal, and not a freak. But after doing psychedelics and accepting myself, I finally decided to try out a breathing tube for the first time, and it felt like I was in an egg that cracked; I didn’t know I could even feel this alive.”

11. One of the Regenera launch stations gets bombed by an activist group. All employees at Regenera launch stations start concealing their home addresses. Normoria activist groups ask why they’re being so secretive if there’s nothing to hide, and then strongly imply there’s way more Regenera launches than there are.

12. Regenera activists encourage people to boycott anybody who even glances wrong at a Regenera launch station. Careers are ruined, people are fired. If anyone so much as suggests that maybe a single kid is faking a cough to try to get sent to Regenera, internet mobs hunt you down and post your address to shady places online.

13. (one day some Earth adults dress up in the clothing styles fashionable on Regenera when performing for children and the pro-Normorians lose their everloving shit)

okay, so, can we all agree this whole mess is fucking dumb?

This isn’t a war, this is a tragedy, and apparently humankind can’t handle a social issue where the answer isn’t shoving your fingers into someone else’s eyeballs.

Our problem sucks. With limited information, we have to send a kid to a planet. And it’s permanent. Even doing our absolute best, with the greatest compassion and care, there’s no way to have a 0% error rate - some kids are gonna end up wheezing in bed on Regenera, and some are gonna end up hooked up to breathing tubes on Normoria. You can do everything right and still fail, and this has turned out to be psychologically unacceptable. There must be someone to blame. We don’t know how to make this okay, but maybe stabbing someone else will alleviate the grief?

And sure, you can argue that maybe we’ve got more people unhappy on Regenera than Normoria, or vice versa. You can argue that we’re overcorrected, or undercorrected, but at best the other side of your pendulum has lower rates of unhappiness, not none. You still are going to be condemning some people to end up on the wrong planet, forced to cope in their adulthood with the air that their body wasn’t meant to breathe. And they are going to hate you.

It seems the obvious answer is that we should be figuring out how to predict in advance where a kid will end up happiest. This clearly seems like the place we should be pouring all of our research into, all our effort, all our energy we’re using to fight online about it. If you’re pro-Normoria, worried social contagion is launching our kids to Regenera, then you should be absolutely invested in figuring out how to know which kids not to launch. And if you’re a Regeneran activist trying to normalize Regenera lives, it’s absolutely within your interests to make sure nobody ends up on your planet when they don’t belong there - and that nobody ends up on Normoria when they don’t belong there either.

The response to internet mobs should be “We need to figure out which kids should go where.” The response a politician gives to a gotcha question should be “We need to figure out which kids should go where.” Every part of this war’s energy would be better served by figuring out which kids should go where. Our public debates shouldn’t be about the pros and cons of each planet, but about how we can do better science so we can know which kids should go where.

Our kids keep getting shipped, and it’s about damn time someone does a massive survey to find out what childhood traits correlate with planet satisfaction in adulthood, or something.

….hmmm