You wouldn’t believe some of the stupidity that I don’t let thru into comments. (Well, perhaps you would.) A recent bit suggested that I shouldn’t object to Gaza genocide because after all, I think human population should be lower, and this is lowering it!
After a bout of derisive laughter, I thought about it a bit and figured we need a bit of exploration of the overall issue. The original moron won’t understand, but others will.
Let’s lay it out simply. In population overshoot, a species winds up at numbers higher than what the environment can support long term. It’s not hard to understand this. If you need a breeding population of 1,000 deer to sustainably feed one wolf pack, and there are two packs, the wolves can eat into the 1,000 deer. They breed less, and enter a population death spiral and when there aren’t enough left to feed two packs, the wolves die in droves, or leave.
We, Musk’s fantasies aside, cannot leave, not in any time span that will be useful in the current crisis. Space might have helped a lot, not for colonization, but for resources, but after the moon landing America decided to starve the space program and the Soviets were entering their decline. Serious space exploration and any chance of space exploitation entered an over forty year hiatus and has only recovered in the last decade. Jingoism aside if space is truly exploited, it will be done by the Chinese, not by America or Europe.
If we were not in overshoot, the environment would not be degrading so severely: massive loss of insects, mammals, acidifying oceans, climate change, rain water that isn’t safe to drink, etc, etc… We’re eating into the carrying capacity of the Earth, producing more than the Earth can sustainably produce, and damaging the Earth in ways which will take ages to fix. Some of them, like loss of biodiversity, are not fixable on any human lifespan.
So, since we can’t leave, and since we can’t get enough resources from space to matter, and since we’re destroying environment that makes our survival possible along with drawing down resources at a ferocious rate, we’re in overshoot.
So, our population is going to go down one way or the other. Now if you read the media or spend time reading political or economic social media you’ve heard a ton about the replacement rate crisis. Virtually every country’s birth rate is lower than is required to keep up the population.
This graphic from Pew makes the point:
This is good. China having a population over 1.4 billion people is TOO MANY PEOPLE.
The transition will be difficult, because a smaller number of young people will have to support a larger number of old people. This is the actual use case for robots and “AI”, to care for people as they get older and make up the age gap. In a sane society, there would be no worry about “losing jobs” to AI because we wouldn’t distribute resources to people based on jobs. We would be happy to work less, to let people who want to not work at all to do other things, and to reduce hours and share jobs that still need to be done by humans. And if a human wanted to do a job that is mostly roboticized, unless they completely sucked, that’d be fine because the economy exists to serve humans, if you’re sane, not the other way around.
Both China and Japan have been moving hard to “gerontorobotics” (not sure if that’s a word yet.) They know there won’t be enough care workers, so they’re moving to robots which can help people live who are still mostly OK but just old, and they’re also working on robots that can help invalids and semi-invalids, including getting them into and out of bed, helping them bathe and use the washroom and so on.
Now, to go back to the original moron, all efforts to reverse the birth rate decrease are stupid at this point. The BEST way to lose population is to simply have people age out. Among major countries the only one which might reasonably make a case that it isn’t overpopulated is Russia. Among middle countries, perhaps Canada, though as a Canadian I don’t want more people. I like wilderness, this is fine.
Population needs to be decreased, yes, that does not mean we need to start mass murdering. Further, if we did want to eliminate any group of people it would be the top .1%, because they produce vastly more pollution and use up vastly more resources than others. (Not saying we should, but if eliminationism is your goal, radically reducing elites is where you would start if your motivation was actually to help the world.)
Get out of the way, and let reproduction rates keep falling. If we fall to two billion or so and they’re still too low, then feel free to panic. Right now, it’s a good thing.
If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.