What population?

***please keep this a-political

Humanity has done a great job of pushing back at the natural world with science but I have a feeling that a "population correction" is coming.  Whether it comes from a famine or plague is up for speculation but something will happen this century to bring our numbers down to a more manageable level.

My primary concern is this, a 50% reduction would be manageable, a 95% loss would not.  We lose half of the population (evenly across all skill sets) and life goes on with less traffic and more available housing, but if 95% disappears we don't have the necessary skills (or even manpower) to maintain something like our current technology level (electricity, health care, internet, gasoline, etc). 

But all this is just my suspicion/opinion.  What does the hive think?  Will the population just continue growing in defiance of nature?  Will we have a scare that forces us to bring ourselves in line without the sweeping die-off?

"Scientists" have been predicting that the earth can't support the current level of population for at least the last 200 years.  Rich people like Bill Gates want to see a population around a billion, I think, or less.  They don't mention how they want to go from 10  billion to 1 billion, but we can assume that they are not planning on being one of the 9.

Dr. Hess said:

"Scientists" have been predicting that the earth can't support the current level of population for at least the last 200 years.  Rich people like Bill Gates want to see a population around a billion, I think, or less.  They don't mention how they want to go from 10  billion to 1 billion, but we can assume that they are not planning on being one of the 9.

Nothing wrong with dying of old age...

There won't necessarily be a "correction." If we're smart, population can level off at 8~10 billion and then slowly decline from there. The current population level is somewhere between difficult and impossible to sustain long-term.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

That's just the problem, "we're" not smart.  Sure we have a bunch of smart individuals but as a whole humanity is pretty blisteringly stupid.

Just imagine the tantrums people would throw if a PSA was released meerly suggesting that having only one kid per household was sufficient.  Contrarians would crank out 20 kids just out of spite. 

And reducing birthrate adds all sorts of population weirdness with too many olds for the youngs to take care of.

There will inevitably be a population "correction" due to climate, disease, war, or a combination of all three. The climate is changing, man-made or natural. Disease is ever-evolving. War is inevitable.

I'm of the thought that the only reason the population continues to climb is simply because of how much our technology has advanced. Add to that everyone is trading with someone, so countries tend to not want to mess that up.

KyAllroad (Jeremy) said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

That's just the problem, "we're" not smart.  Sure we have a bunch of smart individuals but as a whole humanity is pretty blisteringly stupid.

Just imagine the tantrums people would throw if a PSA was released meerly suggesting that having only one kid per household was sufficient.  Contrarians would crank out 20 kids just out of spite. 

And reducing birthrate adds all sorts of population weirdness with too many olds for the youngs to take care of.

Oh we can't do it by making everyone smart enough to carefully consider the problem and/or telling people not to reproduce too much. The key is going to be 1: raising the floor of women's education in undeveloped countries, 2: reducing child mortality in undeveloped countries, 3: reducing the need for and use of child labor in undeveloped countries, and 4: inventing new contraceptive technologies, especially those women can use that men don't know about.

The too many olds problem (which Japan is just about to have) can be mitigated through advancements in automation and medicine. And one other factor but that could get political.

FuzzWuzzy said:

There will inevitably be a population "correction" due to climate, disease, war, or a combination of all three. The climate is changing, man-made or natural. Disease is ever-evolving. War is inevitable.

I'm of the thought that the only reason the population continues to climb is simply because of how much our technology has advanced. Add to that everyone is trading with someone, so countries tend to not want to mess that up.

Actually the more developed countries and advanced economies are the ones that have little to negative population growth. There is certainly the possibility of a population "correction" due to the factors you stated but I don't think it's inevitable.

You've also correctly identified an economic aspect to the problem, our economic system requires infinite growth in a finite world. Actually addressing that will get very political one way or another. Some people want to try working around it with space exploration or virtual worlds, but the former won't come soon enough and the latter will run into the limitations of human attention that we're already starting to butt into - companies like Netflix and Epic Games, in different entertainment industries, have begun to realize they're competing with each other because of it.

HIV/AIDS took a pretty good shot, but Science has it mostly under control.

Cancer is another option, but its pretty slow (so far) and again, Science is working on it pretty hard.

I suspect that it will be a virus like the flu or worse that will eventually get us, much like the Spanish flu during WW1 (which was a component for the eventual armistice).  We've had some pretty close near misses (Swine Flu, etc.), but the more susceptible portions of our population (the poor, children, the elderly and the sick) will get hit hard by something like that.

The climate change will impact food production and while Science is working on solutions to this (GMO crops, meat alternatives to save crop land, etc.), we'll lose the battle and this can/will prompt mass migrations of those that are desperate/capable enough to move.  This migration can more easily lead to transmission of pathogens on top of starvation and the like.

There's also the realization that mass migrations between sovereign nations can and will lead to conflicts that if not properly managed could bloom into much larger conflict quite easily.

Say what you will about preppers and the like, but there's a good chance that some hard times are coming and SOME prep isn't a bad idea, but perhaps don't go full Una-Bomber.  Never go full Una-Bomber.

The data seems to show that we'll be figuring out the answers to this question a lot sooner than you think, but it's going to be education and birth control that drive it.  Even in the developing countries, birth rates are plummeting.  In many countries, it's already negative (well below "replacement rate" of 2.1 births per woman) which is going to challenge a lot of society's main structures, as we've build our economies and governments on policies of "constant growth." 

See articles like this for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html

My understanding is that studies predicted peak global population by 2099 like this one:

https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2019.html

But that there's a decent number of scientists who believe that the birth rate decline is happening exponentially faster than expected, so articles like the one above that rely too much on historical trends are likely to be undercut even further with a peak population somewhere between 2060-2070.

#thanosdidnothingwronh

Lebensunwertes Leben.  We all saw the logical conclusion of that.  These 'idea' conversations always have an everybody but me flavor to them.

Ironically this is probably not one of those threads that's going to get locked as I think humanity has always thought poorly enough of each other to do away with more than half of their fellow man without a tear shed.

So far the conversation seems to be trending economic.  The Dismal Science indeed.

I have just one question then I'll stick my RC head below the parapet.

How is childbirth and thus population in defiance of nature?  

Aside from flowers, chocolate and overpriced dinner I would think it's the one of the most natural outcomes of male/female attraction for the portion of the month it could happen. 

p.s. One of six.  Neighbor of 12 and 22.  Childless because if the dating game involves bottomless mimosas shrieking and banal conversation then I'm out.

I think all the ideas above about, food shortages, new diseases resistant to medicine, ect. could cause a mass die-off. 

currently the population is increasing by a billion every ten years.

A show I watched recently about AI predicted that we will achieve the Singularity in 25 years or less. Some are predicting we might reach it in 10. To me at least it raised a lot of chilling conclusions that are possible. Sound far fetched? Think about where we are headed with self driving cars, robotics, ect. We already have military drones that will communicate with each other during missions, independent of their operators. What happens when the AI becomes self aware. In 1984 the terminator movie just seemed like harmless Sci-Fi. Maybe not so much anymore. 

We may create our own doom, and it may not be from war, or climate change.

Broadly speaking the idea you're talking about is called Malthusianism.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

I don't buy it as a absolute, personally.  If you look at the population growth figures of most western nations and exclude the effects of immigration from non-western nations (both in terms of direct immigration and children of recent immigrants), then that figure is negative.

At lower technological development levels, having more kids is associated with a better life -- you need them to help out on the farm, and you need lots of them to make up for those that will be lost to the distressingly high child mortality rate at that tech level.  As tech advances and agriculture becomes mechanized, farms cease to be a family business and become big business.  They become more mechanized, needing fewer people, and those people they do hire are working at a higher level -- managing machines and solving technical problems, rather than just being grunt labor.  Now the benefit to having a large family goes away, but the costs associated with those kids (feeding them, clothing them, housing) are still there or even go up (college education).  This tends to push people towards having smaller families (or in some some cases going without kids at all).

So, absent disasters/calamities/etc, what I suspect we'll see is that as the "third world" becomes more developed, the birth rates in those nations will drop similar to what's happened in the west, and eventually the world population will stabilize.

Obviously, there are lots of potential disasters waiting in the wings (epidemics, wars, asteroid impacts, collapse of the false vacuum, etc), but I don't think the likelihood of those is really that closesly correlated with the absolute population numbers, so I'm not really sure it's right to call them "corrections".

In reply to WonkoTheSane :

I read this a couple days ago....

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/world-population-stop-growing/595165/

GameboyRMH said:

KyAllroad (Jeremy) said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

That's just the problem, "we're" not smart.  Sure we have a bunch of smart individuals but as a whole humanity is pretty blisteringly stupid.

Just imagine the tantrums people would throw if a PSA was released meerly suggesting that having only one kid per household was sufficient.  Contrarians would crank out 20 kids just out of spite. 

And reducing birthrate adds all sorts of population weirdness with too many olds for the youngs to take care of.

Oh we can't do it by making everyone smart enough to carefully consider the problem and/or telling people not to reproduce too much. The key is going to be 1: raising the floor of women's education in undeveloped countries, 2: reducing child mortality in undeveloped countries, 3: reducing the need for and use of child labor in undeveloped countries, and 4: inventing new contraceptive technologies, especially those women can use that men don't know about.

The too many olds problem (which Japan is just about to have) can be mitigated through advancements in automation and medicine. And one other factor but that could get political.

I'm not trying to get political here but you forgot "raising the floor of men's poor attitude about contraception and children being 'womens' problems". It takes two to make a kid.

Oddly enough, I have the exact same solution for making voting fair as I do controlling the population numbers, a lottery! Instead of picking social security numbers lottery style to determine leaders, birthdays are picked from the lottery machine, and they go to the soylent green factory. Overpopulation and world hunger solved at the same time. 

Next major problem please.

Yes, I'd probably have a different opinion if I thought uploading consciousness into hardware would happen in my lifetime, but since I don't expect that to happen in the next 30 years I expect to live, well, who doesn't like free lottery tickets?

Of course if we do actually figure out how to use quartz as a mass storage mechanism for consciousness, rockets around the galaxy. It's time to get off this rock and see what the rest of the universe looks like. We could do it now if we took the next decade of world defense spending and put it towards this project instead, but that'll never happen.

If you guys wanna get really weird I think the next impact "evolution" on the planet will be the merging of computers and humans, to form essentially a new life form that is neither human or computer. 

As with all evolutions, there might be competition between the new species and the existing species, or there might not, depends on if they need the same resources to survive. So, let's make sure that the AI bots don't need air, water, shelter, and energy.

0.7 children per adult will get us to 1.5B in 150 years assuming a generation length of 30 years and a lifespan of 80. 

Widespread distribution of current birth control brings the rate down to 1.4 children/adult woman; a male pill is likely to give another reduction

In reply to GameboyRMH :

That's just the problem, "we're" not smart.  Sure we have a bunch of smart individuals but as a whole humanity is pretty blisteringly stupid.

Like people that have 5 kids and complain about traffic.

This is nothing new. Even as a pre teen 50 years ago I could see from what I read and saw on the limited TV of the time there would be a population problem. Science would advance health care keeping folks alive longer, "helpful" organizations would feed children in countries where the litter family plan was in effect, then those children would become parents of their own litters. At the time families in my upper/middle neighborhood had 3-5 children. I told my parents I would not be fathering any children by choice because there would be too many people on the earth. They said "You'll change your mind and want your own children".  My reply, "No, I won't".  I've raised kids but never fathered any (to my knowledge).

If not for modern era health care I'd have died at least 3 times already.  1. Badly ruptured spleen caused severe bleeding internally.  2. Lyme disease leading to encephalitis. 3. Heart attack requiring surgery to install two stents. So even though I tried not to add to the overpopulation problem by creating children I've been an "extra" person on the planet so to speak, for at least 25 years.

Nature has a way of correcting things when populations of any living organism becomes out of proportion. Something will happen eventually if the balance is off.

I've seen projections that have world population growth leveling off and declining within decades with the widespread knowledge and use of contraception in developing regions of the world.

Dr. Hess said:

"Scientists" have been predicting that the earth can't support the current level of population for at least the last 200 years.  Rich people like Bill Gates want to see a population around a billion, I think, or less.  They don't mention how they want to go from 10  billion to 1 billion, but we can assume that they are not planning on being one of the 9.

We have only been able to support population increases through great strides in farming techniques and technology.

You're not going to be able to feed 2019 population with 1919 agricultural tech. Or 1969 tech, for that matter.  (We're not really supporting 2019 population all that well, either, although there is visible room for improvement that we are not taking yet because it is not hurting us relatively well-off people yet)

We wouldn't be able to support 8 billion without our GMOs and factory farming techniques and pesticides from Hell.

1988RedT2 said:

I've seen projections that have world population growth leveling off and declining within decades with the widespread knowledge and use of contraception in developing regions of the world.

The neighborhood I live in now is primarily populated by immigrants from 3rd world/developing countries. Typically 5-10 children by each couple that entered the country years ago and most of those children are now having more than two children per couple and still have time left in child bearing years.  Their upbringing is "Big family good". They can't really afford all the kids but have learned how to navigate the social services systems to get whats necessary to raise them while living above what you'd think their finances would allow based on employment. I'm tip toeing here and don't want to become part of a patio.

So, have you read about the Georgia Guidestones?

Exponential growth cannot continue forever, so at some point something will change it. War, famine, disease, asteroid impact, who knows. 

NOT A TA said:

1988RedT2 said:

I've seen projections that have world population growth leveling off and declining within decades with the widespread knowledge and use of contraception in developing regions of the world.

The neighborhood I live in now is primarily populated by immigrants from 3rd world/developing countries. Typically 5-10 children by each couple that entered the country years ago and most of those children are now having more than two children per couple and still have time left in child bearing years.  Their upbringing is "Big family good". They can't really afford all the kids but have learned how to navigate the social services systems to get whats necessary to raise them while living above what you'd think their finances would allow based on employment. I'm tip toeing here and don't want to become part of a patio.

Knowing some of the refugee families in my neighborhood and those that my friend works with as a school teacher, they live that way through essentially living as a commune.  Everyone contributes.  They also don't typically use credit, they use cash and buy from the local thrift stores, discount stores, CL/FB and fellow refugees, etc.  They also work damned hard, most of the folks in my neighborhood work several jobs and with at least one business being run by a spouse.

Many Americans could learn a lot from them and greatly improve their own lives, instead of casting side eyes towards them and making assumptions.

This is how you survive, especially after the sort of things they've been through to get where they are.  The refugee process is a miserably long and drawn out process, full of misdirection and the potential to break up families or worse.

If things continue the way they are headed, Americans could end up as refugees as well.  It isn't pretty and it will get uglier before it gets better.