Great piece by Kim Stanley Robinson (my favourite author).
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Opinion: A declining world population isn’t a looming catastrophe. It could actually bring some good.
June 7, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. GMT+1
Thanks to scientific advances in medicine and public health, humanity’s population shot from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.7 billion today. People on average are staying healthier and living longer. Over the past six months, the United States has seen the inauguration of the oldest president ever, a Super Bowl victory by the oldest quarterback ever and a major golf title captured by the oldest winner ever.
I myself am like a lot of older people: I would have died some years back without modern medicine, but thanks to medical interventions I’m currently in good health.
Now, though, this steep population increase is not only slowing, demographers say, it may well start reversing over the coming decades as fertility rates around the world decline. On Monday, news came that China — apparently frightened by the portents — is raising its family-size limit, allowing women to bear three children instead of two.
President Xi Jinping isn’t the only one fretting. The vision of a dwindling global population is widely depicted as a looming catastrophe.
“The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a ‘jaw-dropping’ impact on societies,” the BBC reported last summer. This media staple got a boost a couple of weeks ago from a New York Times article headlined “Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications.” While trying to find some bright spots (lower demand on resources!), the article mostly focused on the “hard to fathom” negative implications.
I’d prefer to fathom the good stuff.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... n-problem/
Opinion: A declining world population isn’t a looming catastrophe. It could actually bring some good.
Re: Opinion: A declining world population isn’t a looming catastrophe. It could actually bring some good.
good. for now. This infinite growth, spamming the world with people, need to stop until we've taken the time to address major issues. We have enough houses, and enough food now, but we do not manage those well enough. People go hungry while food is thrown away, and they go without shelter while properties sit empty.
if the population numbers are fewer people added than are removed for a few decades that's not going to suddenly result in the world falling apart from too few humans existing. Literally we could go the entire rest of this century and more before we'd reach numbers like the total numbers of humanity during the early days of the industrial revolution. the world wouldn't even suffer all that much should we fall back to world populations on par with after the plagues wiped out millions of people and estimated to have dropped the world population down to less than 500 million.
eventually when we move off world to fill the solar system with life, we should expect to be able to allow 10s of billions of humans to exist. and as we get to a point where death can become a rare surprising event, we may benefit from slowing the replacement rates to sustainable levels when coupled with loss rates. Not through some draconian lottery system for who gets the right to reproduce, but just more in line with the cultural refocus on the idea that not every person needs to have a child, and that you don't have to have one until you are ready to commit the years to one.
I think that if people lived 1000 years or more and could choose to be a parent at any one of those centuries, that most people in a reasoned and stable culture would take time to find themselves and live a life for themselves, and then maybe eventually come to a time where they might wish to have a child. and after we've culturally worked passed this notion that we can't let a child be an only child, that we might get to a point where human populations come to a sustainable course.
colony ships might have population booms for a few generations but settle out. and eventually we will hit a point where we may feel thinly spread, and we could expand the population if we like, but I'd wager by the time we reach that point we could very well have artificial citizens and have changed so much ourselves that what a human world colony might look like would be so hard to even imagine, that the idea of population management would be something that doesn't even make contextual sense.
if the population numbers are fewer people added than are removed for a few decades that's not going to suddenly result in the world falling apart from too few humans existing. Literally we could go the entire rest of this century and more before we'd reach numbers like the total numbers of humanity during the early days of the industrial revolution. the world wouldn't even suffer all that much should we fall back to world populations on par with after the plagues wiped out millions of people and estimated to have dropped the world population down to less than 500 million.
eventually when we move off world to fill the solar system with life, we should expect to be able to allow 10s of billions of humans to exist. and as we get to a point where death can become a rare surprising event, we may benefit from slowing the replacement rates to sustainable levels when coupled with loss rates. Not through some draconian lottery system for who gets the right to reproduce, but just more in line with the cultural refocus on the idea that not every person needs to have a child, and that you don't have to have one until you are ready to commit the years to one.
I think that if people lived 1000 years or more and could choose to be a parent at any one of those centuries, that most people in a reasoned and stable culture would take time to find themselves and live a life for themselves, and then maybe eventually come to a time where they might wish to have a child. and after we've culturally worked passed this notion that we can't let a child be an only child, that we might get to a point where human populations come to a sustainable course.
colony ships might have population booms for a few generations but settle out. and eventually we will hit a point where we may feel thinly spread, and we could expand the population if we like, but I'd wager by the time we reach that point we could very well have artificial citizens and have changed so much ourselves that what a human world colony might look like would be so hard to even imagine, that the idea of population management would be something that doesn't even make contextual sense.
