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One of the only things I know about my children's future is that they will die, and that it will probably be ugly. I'm a lot more concerned with the meaningfulness of their lives.
Sure, the Reaper comes for us all, but I wouldn't have a child if I knew, eg through embryo screening, that it would almost certainly die of a horribly painful disease before turning fourteen. I don't think most people would. If you grant the assumption "civilization will almost certainly collapse with bodies piling up in the streets within fifteen years", the prospects of a child conceived today would look an awful lot like our screened embryo with the horrible genetic malformation. Needless to say I don't grant the assumption, but it seems, on its own terms, to add up.
Glad we agree that it would be an absolutely insane thing to assume, but if I actually had reason to believe that I'd plan accordingly, and still have children. It's happened many times before and probably will many times again.
I'd also have the kid who's (allegedly) going to die within fifteen years, though that gets back to moral foundations that I don't expect to share in common with most here.
To get me to shy away from having kids, I'd need to be convinced, and I mean really convinced, that there is little chance of saving them from fates worse than death. Getting hoovered up by Cthulhu for example, or forced into some kind of AI-run entertainment/nutrition pods where they have no opportunity to learn about nature or real history and instead have their minds' semiotic webs wrecked by bombardment with false impressions.
If an asteroid were definitely going to hit the earth in 18 months we'd still have another kid and cherish our time with him or her.
An asteroid hitting the Earth has the benefit of being instantaneous; I had in mind a slow, painful death from gradual organ failure or similar (which seems similar to the possibility of a slow death from malnutrition and dehydration in the event of social collapse from runaway climate change). I agree it's more defensible to have the child if your only consideration is an early cutoff, the suffering was an active ingredient in my reasoning. Though with a child whose projected death is at a somewhat older age than 18 months you'd run into the dilemma of whether to tell your six-year-old kid that they're for sure going to die before they grow up, which seems like a very cruel choice for any parent to have to make either way.
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