Slashdot Mirror
'The World Might Actually Run Out of People' (wired.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations. But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end." But Empty Planet is not a book about statistics so much as it is about what's driving the choices people are making during the fastest period of change in human history.
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end." But Empty Planet is not a book about statistics so much as it is about what's driving the choices people are making during the fastest period of change in human history.
Most trusted world authorities - the UN?! The same UN that puts Sudan on the "Human Rights Committee"?
"...it will never end."
And at the current rates, everyone will own an iPhone and a Tesla. Only good times ahead people, we just need to wait.
...because you need 1) stable, accountable government 2) increasing wealth out of poverty conditions
At least there will always be an infinite supply of hype and silly speculative "news" stories. They'll be just as insightful when the writers are all robots.
It sounds familiar.
Clearly, demonstrably, populations reproduce and continue to exist barring extinction events like asteroid strikes, famine, and plagues.
Social changes, where it is too expensive to raise children so couples frequently have only a single child. If your birthrate falls below 1.0 and nothing convinces people to reverse the trend then the scenario is quite realistic.
It's all bullshit futurist conjecture and there is zero evidence to support it. So while it is a plausible possibility, it is not a cause for concern.
Iâ(TM)m done worrying about shit. Deforestation? Cool. Plastic filling the oceans? Bitchen. Millennials getting fat-cancer? Rad. Mass-shootings? Sucks to be you not having a gun with which to return fire if you wanted to live, Nuclear annihilation? Wake me when its over.
What is this bullshit about? Human extinction even without nukes? Excellent. All of you can fuck off, as a species. I simply am out of give-a-shit at this point. This life has been exhausting, to tell you the truth.
Today, I learned the guy who was fixing to replace the guy who either was, or was not, the guy in the photo in blackface or in the KKK getup may be replaced by someone who was accused of sexually assaulting some bitch a decade ago.
We are left abandoned to King Donald I by the so-called Democratic Party because they cannot stop eating their own and anyone who may have ever fucked up in any way, no matter what he has done since or whom he has become, must be destroyed, ESPECIALLY if he has a penis.
Fuck it. I am officially done giving a shit.
I haven't read the initial research or the article but I'm 100% certain that both are wrong.
A journalist and a political scientist... sure seems like the right team to look into this.
It took us what, 200 years to go from around 1B to 7B. Unless we have a nuclear war, or a plague - and even the latter ain't gonna kill 90%, it's not going to happen.
As it is, we know - 1:1 correlation - that the higher the educational level of the woman, the lower the birthrate. HOWEVER, the idea that 80+% of humans will just not want to reproduce is ludicrous. Even if the world is in such bad shape that folks don't want to inflict it on their children, people will still want kids. There is this thing called hardwiring in biology.....
People LIKE the process of making children and most of us like raising children, but it is very expensive: 233k in 2015, excluding college education.
Follow the money. Governments don't provide proper incentives to compensate us for it.
You change the laws so that childcare, health care for kids, lunchs, and college are all free, all without any paperwork and we will have a baby boom the likes you never saw.
Population starts going down, that is the kind of thing we will do.
Right now, immigration from poor countries to developed countries tends to stop us from having those kinds of laws. Partly because of racism, partly because the immigration means the problem is not as severe.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Going extinct because of the 100% compliance in condom use?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Works for Doritos.
...who've written a book together. No ulterior motives there.
This nicely balances out the other over the top articles about mass starvation from uncontrolled population explosion. They're both kind of silly.
People everywhere say they want two kids, and Indian girls have smartphones, so researcher concludes that population will decrease. How lame.
First, you can't trust self-reporting. Second, most people don't have two kids and then go get sterilized. They can therefore have more kids.
Second, you can't make the horse drink. People with all of human knowledge at their fingertips often ignore it, and go with their feelings instead.
Third, people's current desired number of children is based on current conditions. If there were less people, there would be more room and more opportunity, and people would want more children.
Now, I will acknowledge that there is one way that this prediction could come true. We might have already pushed the climate past recovery. In that case, yes, human population will continue to fall, and will not recover - maybe ever. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with this guy's faulty logic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People don't change. The same phenomenon that are occurring now have occurred over the last 5000 years of recorded history. Increased wealth and lower infant mortality reduce birthrate and delay childbirth. The negative population trend in Japan and parts of western Europe aren't new or surprising; significant decreases in population growth occurred at the heights of the Qing, Han, Roman, Greek and Babylonian empires.
What's more significant than Women's education about this story? Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What gets you a lot of people reposting on social media? (1) Find a commonly accepted concept "A". (2) Write a story that's it's actually the opposite "not A". (3) Bonus SEO if you can make a large problem that people can't individually fix go away.
I guess the conclusions could be true, but I really think this story is really about driving people to read this story and thus view the ads. That is, this might not be "fake news", but SEO and ads are the thing driving fake news. Leaving me to questions stories like this because they fit the formula so well. Especial because the story doesn't actually support its headline of "empty planet", the facts in the story just raise doubt if the models could be wrong. "All models are wrong, some are useful."
Wow. Biased post much?
The sooner the better - us niggas are taking over!
Shoot, here is an article from 2017
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...
In the early 20th century, global population grew more rapidly than ever before. Then came a dramatic reversal as population growth began to slow. It appears very likely that the human population will soon stabilize and may even start to decline. Fertility rates are dropping as women become more educated and gain better access to birth control. As fewer babies are born, the average age of the population increases; thus, our planetâ(TM)s human population is getting older. Today some populations are already declining while others are rising. But soon, populations in most countries will begin to decline.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Evidently the UN team never watched Idiocracy. Carl's Jr Or perhaps they are part of it. Mountain Dew.
Perhaps their study found that AI will perfect a fidget spinner more enjoyable than eating or Sex. Taco Bell.
Or we'll get so politically correct that we all get assigned to one night of Rehab. Carl's Jr.
See you in 500 years.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This notion was popular in the 60's and foretold of world wide mass starvation that was to occur in the 70's and 80's unless drastic steps to control population growth were enacted. Of course that never happened. The UN backed this idea back then too, until about around 2000 when it switched gears and started warning about Western countries problems with underpopulation. It's solution: mass immigration from the overpopulated regions (read Africa) into western countries.
In other words, this trend of population increasing won't last forever.
But, this new trend that I'm looking at will last forever. I don't know about the book being promoted, but the article doesn't mention running out of people.
Make childrearing expensive and you achieve net zero population growth.
The slow down in population especially in "1st world nations" is due to many factors which are not environmental, or resource base.
* The availability of cheap, safe and effective birth control.
* The microeconomics costs in having a child.
Currently our economic model, while on the large scale more population is better for the economy on the whole. It is a hindrance to the family, as a child is expensive and can set a middle class family back years in terms of money. This combined with birth control has turned raising a child as something almost considered a Hobby for a lot of people. In rural countries, a child become a member of your workforce, thus becomes an economic strength to your family.
I can see the population dropping for a while, but as we are starting to see in ageing countries like Japan and France, additional intensives to try to increase child birth.
In terms of resources, our technology to increase output still seems to be able to keep up with growth. Sure we get some Hippy dippy stuff with people complaining about GMO, preservatives, and radiation treatment. But we have the ability to feed the world for a while.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The poor will always be with us and they will never run out, since they always manage to breed like rabbits.
It is only the smart people who will run out, but we already have that problem.
"In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."
I stopped reading right there, no it won't "never end". Sorry, these people must be new to this planet and are not actually human or they have not observed anything around them ever. Population growth may decline and overall population may drop over a period of time, due to having more old people than young people, but you won't drop to zero, ever. Not unless we go extinct.
male birth control is coming soon (stop snickering there in the back rows). Assuming religious objections don't derail it expect to see a huge population crash. 60% of pregnancies are unplanned. I grew up with lower working class guys and trust me, they'll take their pill.
Hell,I had a close friend try and get a vasectomy in the 90s and no doc would do it. He ended up with a kid he didn't want. Vasectomies are reversible now (mostly) so if he did the same thing today he'd have no problems.
Basically, people, especially men, won't breed uncontrollably if they have options, and baring a regression they're going to have those options.
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12 billion will be the top.
Until then, every watches TV, posts on Facebook and tweets instead of having sex.
PS. If you haven't watched his TED talks, you should do so now, they are amazing.
To be fair, without actually reading the book, it's hard to completely rule out that there isn't some sort of meaningful argument in there, but on the face of it, it does seem pretty retarded. If there's an unfavourable trend occurring, then as a society, we tend to note that trend and do something about it. If population is growing too fast, we undertake education programmes to teach people about contraception and so forth. Conversely if the birth rate is too low, we provide incentives, for example through tax and benefits systems, to encourage people to have more kids. Why we would in the future suddenly stop responding to ongoing trends, or somehow fail to come up with effective responses, seems a bit of a mystery at this point.
So, maybe there's some kind of point there, but personally I remain far more worried about too may people on the planet than too few.
Oh no... it's the future.
You're an idiot
It's the negros from Africa who are pulling these statistics up. And they are doing it thanks to our help. First world countries are, in fact, having less than replacement babies. Overpopulation? Stop giving fucking aid to the black people in Africa and let them adjust to their natural population number naturally.
So what if human population peaks at 10B, 11B or 20B. By definition it has to peak sometime, at least on Earth. The planet cannot sustain 500 billion people concurrently, at least with current technology and practices. And even if it could, it couldn't sustain 500 trillion people. There has to be a limit. Maybe we're close. Maybe we're not. We still potentially have a ways to go. We could build floating cities, and use all land for crops. We could turn the Sahara and other deserts into farmland. We could build floating farms to grow even more food. All that could allow for more people, but there will be a limit. I suspect there will be a pandemic sooner or later that will wipe out 90% or more of the human race. Then those left will start over again. By the time they build civilization back up, it will happen again. Rinse and repeat.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
OK. I suppose he's opposed to birth control. But I wasn't willing to give him a click to find out.
OTOH, there are legitimate reasons why the world might run out of people. It might be due to a universal plague that caused either sterility or was fatal. It might be due to a complex interaction of environmental insults (mainly chemical) that would cause a tremendous increase in miscarriages. WWIII might do it.
OTOH, even if the human population were reduced to zero, the world wouldn't run out of people, because the world doesn't need people. It's totally the other way around.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In 18 generations the mass of the earth will have been converted entirely into Duggars. 20^18 = 2.6 x 10^23 and the earth is only 6 * 10^24 kg.
Seriously, you have to consider the growth rate of the fastest growing subpopulation because that will dominate.
_Women_ like having and raising children. Most men are pretty indifferent to the whole thing. Many are hostile to it.
Proclaiming you don't want kids is pretty taboo in virtually all cultures. You're labeled as selfish and there's the risk that when you screw up (pun not intended) and have one anyway the kid will find out they're not wanted.
For the childless it's kind of annoying to be constantly subsidizing kids an getting nothing for it. Now, if you're planning to retire you need those kids to work and grow the economy for your 401k and pension. The problem with that is practically nobody has pensions, raiding pension accounts is a popular pass time for venture capitalists (I'm looking at you Sears) and even 401ks are basically worthless for 80% of the population ( in low tier jobs they get eaten up by fees).
What I'm saying is that if you want to get support for investing in children you need to make sure the benefits are spread all over. As it stands they're just cheap labor I'm gonna compete against in my 50s.
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I wonder if they know there will be an ELE within the next 50 years, and this is their way to leak the info out? Maybe an asteroid they know nobody can stop?
Now that I have seen how such dumb ideas can generate traffic, I'd like you to help me with my next book. What is your idea? Here are the prerequisits:
(1) It should be outrageously absurd - e.g. we'll live on an empty planet
(2) At the same time, there should be some pseudo-scientific justification for it (e.g. I've painstakingly modeled inaccurate projections based on highly questionable theories that go against the entirety of human history - but I can somehow justify them).
(3) It should not be verifiable. The topic should relate to a time that I am long dead or at least nobody will come back to care for it. It is even better if the short term predictions are accurate so that in the first couple of years after the publication I can claim to be right.
If I accept your idea for the book, you will a free signed copy when I publish it ;)
Animals generally maintain their population to a level that consumes the available food supply.
Current food-production levels can support roughly 12 billion humans (We waste about half of the food that is currently produced. We're definitely different from other animals in this respect)
While it's true that most late-stage industrial societies are currently running birth rates that are below replacement level, and that the most likely "peak-population" scenario is probably 9-14 billion people, sometime around 2050. Speculation as to what happens after that is exactly that: speculation.
That said, any population level that is below max possible food production level should be sustainable nearly indefinitely, be it 14 billion or 14 million, we'll do just fine, provided we make it through the peak transition without any sharp dropoff: war, famine, disease or severe global environmental catastrophe. If the transition is reasonably smooth (which I agree is a big IF with things as they are).
Humans are incredibly adaptable, and provided we use our technology well (which again is a pretty big IF given our track record). I don't see any problem maintaining an advanced technological society with population levels at pre-industrial levels. The headline and article would seem to be pure sensationalism.
Also without reading the book, if one tones down the drama of the conclusion, it actually lines up with a lot of predictions. The 'overpopulation' meme that people take as a given today was an outgrowth of racism/xenophobia from half a century back and as that fades researchers are finding that developed nations generally fall into patterns of reduced birthrates. For the last century or so this has been countered by developing nations being on a different part of the population curve and thus able to provide immigrants, but as they develop too it has been long predicted that we would eventually hit a point of global population decline. The interesting question will be how the impacts the economy since we are kinda stuck between 'robots will reduce the need for workers' and 'we constantly need more workers'.
The world's population growth must inherently be a logistic curve, not an exponential one, since the world has finite resources to supply a population.
I expect that the world population will stabilise at about 10 billion people or so perhaps going slightly above that figure but tending to oscillate near it indefinitely.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The United Nations.
An outfit you can get just about any message you like out of. Special Committes. What would we do without them?
The hell is this doing submitted. Birth rates get pressured down in FWCs, mostly because having a kid is an intensive sink of time and money in a world that has every capi- er, financially-optimizing motive to drain those from plebs.
Population-based pressures will relieve as numbers shrink. These clowns should *comprehensively* understand feedback mechanisms, or at the very least have a layman's "know of it"-awareness of population ones, which biologists have been documenting for ages.
Frankly, developed countries aka pop.reduction can't happen soon enough. Anyone who thinks it will be a "perilous" dip will be someone who has a personal interest in more pop. There aren't many true advantages in overflow pop; maybe an increase of outliers with yield (ie geniuses) or realized GDP (ie space projects).
Some are less inclined to breed. They would rather spend time on Facebook, gaming, their law career, or whatever than having kids. But as they get selected out the average propensity to breed goes up. Species have gone extinct because of disease, predation, competition, climate change or what have you. Probably in the whole history of life on Earth there has never been a single instance of a species under benign conditions going out of business because they couldn't be bothered to procreate.
Also, in our modern world of abundance a religious movement that made having 4 kids a sacrament, would do fine. In the past there would have been Malthusian checks on such a project, but not anymore. In fact, any nation or culture which breeds aggressively will have the world at its feet.
There are more than 10 milliard people on the planed right now. By 2050 there will be more than 14 milliard people in the planet and at 2100 there will be probably around 18 milliard and a planed that is broken and dying.
The problem is, this planet, with its resources, with the rate at which those renew and at our current consumption levels can only sustain a stable human population of about 3 milliards, and that is not really food dependent. There are many many other resources that we consume and we think they are somebody else's problem.
"But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?" is not actually a conclusion.
Stuff like that bothers me. Saying "they're wrong" is a conclusion. Asking "what if they're wrong?" is not. It's just a question.
What you see will generally be reproductive cycles that go up and down based on many factors, from food to the overall environment, and available resources. We already see a decline in birth rates for those who are middle class and above, while those who are poor have the genetic pre-disposition where the less likely offspring are to survive, the more children they will have. Pollution, global warming causing a reduction in available food, and things like that are the larger causes for concern, because reproductive choice may not be enough to solve the problem of a lack of food, and pollution causing humans to die off.
Society as a whole has been breaking down as well, and when dictators and those who aspire to be dictators(such as Donald Trump) become the norm, rather than the exception, deaths will increase until society pulls together again to remove these people from power. The problem is, with environmental problems such as climate change and pollution combined with the problems in society, will the planet remain able to sustain us?
Many of us think this would be a good thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
Sure, the natural regulating mechanisms may finally start to work and reduce the human race to a sane size for this planet, which is probably somewhere around a few 100M. But there is no reason to not expect that at that level things will stabilize.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Within the next hundred years the population of the earth has a pretty good chance of going to nearly zero. It's just going to be due to things like the Americans ramping up production of low yield nuclear weapons or purposeful gene editing on viruses like smallpox and not human breeding habits.
I call bullshit(PDF alert). Page 9 says that there is a 27% that the population could stabilise or begin to fall by 2100. In three decades it looks more like a 5% chance.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
If it's true, we're heading towards a complete world economic collapse. The world's economy is built on debt we assume to paid by future generations. When the population no longer grows, the resulting social upheaval will be immense. The concerns from global warming are trivial in comparison.
The thing about peak population is that the peak is reached not because of resource constraints, but because of the natural human inclination to have fewer children when people are healthy and have good access to education. Since all of that has been ramping up continuously we are in no danger of hitting resource limits.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And the meek shall inherit the Earth. I can't help but feel that there are countries where modern medicine is the exception, not the rule. Where we have antibiotics that combat diseases, they have survivors who are naturally immune. They care not about socialism, progressivism or capitalism just survival. When we get sick and die, or failed to reproduce due to delaying childbirth or STDs, they will be happy to take or place when we aren't around anymore.
The UN is huge and has a changing staff. To characterize the whole body and all it's members on it's past actions -- which were supported by a subset and implemented by a small minority is as foolish as racism itself.
THINK about it.
We easily will hit 10 billion without drastic changes; climate change won't be quick enough to impact it in the slightest. The UN last projection was not horribly complex, they took all the projected factors and applied them to the current population years ago and if every child born followed all the KNOWN trends they would produce offspring very close to projected rates yielding 10 billion. This was known years ago and it's set in the stone of the path in which we are headed. We can diverge from this path with great effort; the later we do the more effort will be required. It's so simple if you just THINK.
TFA is imagining shifts in the path, it is far removed from logical projection from known facts. They might guess correctly, but then I might guess the lotto numbers this week too; both deserve an equal level of consideration (very little.) Guessing when we maximize to the point where humans/locusts/etc peak shouldn't be a big deal; we are supposed to THINK and should be able to avoid peak population... unless we are no better than all the other animals (except in the damage to the planet; at that we truly are exceptional.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Hold my Tsing Tao, China guy here!
Like all overpopulated species, Nature will take care of it.
It won't be pleasant or pretty, but it will happen.
Folks will either start starving to death / dehydration or a disease will wipe out a significant number due to high population density.
You see it in any species who overpopulate an area. Too many mouths to feed and not enough food / water.
The resources just aren't there.
end the One/Two-child policys then
The article isn't great, but it looks like they're arguing for a population max of 9 or 10 billion instead of 11. The UN makes all kinds of population projections under various scenarios. This is just one: https://population.un.org/wpp/... [un.org]
and includes what the article says the book claims.
This just sounds like more modern marketing. Hype, with a good dose of strawman maverick underdog fiction.
From the linked article at Wired: "In the Philippines, for example, fertility rates dropped from 3.7 percent to 2.7 percent from 2003 to 2018."
Fertility rates are children per woman, not percent. Journalists.
On the whole, wouldn't we be better off with just a billion humans around? Why must we always increase our overall numbers?
At least I know how periods function, you sniveling fucking moron.
If the effects of climate change are going to be anywhere remotely as bad as scientists predict and yet we maintain our current course of fossil fuel usage, then yeah, humans are going to start dying off in large numbers.
Disease, famine, drought, inhospitably extreme temperatures, severe and catastrophic weather events, systemic collapses in the food chain, mass extinction of insect populations, forced migrations, wars over remaining resources. A cockroaches' paradise.
Has Rosling said the same thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The Earth is capable of sustaining 160 million people, AT MOST, without entering resource depletion. It takes, on average, 100 acres of habitable land to create the resources required by one person. That is, organically-grown food without petrochemical fertilizer, potable water, waste cycling, energy, and shelter.
The Earth will welcome the decimation of the human species.
Says the retard that thinks the forrins are out to get him.
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Everybody says this when wages might rise. Good conditions for life brings population growth. Should it surprise you that women don't want to be in poverty just to help your economy.
The summary mentions the "Soylent Green" scenario yet fails to mention that in the late 1960s "the best minds" were predicting by the year 2000 the world population would have become so high that we would all starve due to the lack of farm-able land to feed everyone. Now they are drawing the same line in the sand and saying the same "In 30 years we won't have enough farm land to sustain the exploding world population!" warning.
Most likely the non-vaccination children of today will reduce the future population explosion. Darwin nods in approval.
Every country that undergoes industrialization shifts into a negative growth pattern eventually, with only some extremely limited exceptions (e.g. the high birth rate among the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel keeps that country in growth mode).
Early in the process government policy can distort this (the high birthrates encouraged in China and Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s) but as industrial society touches more of the population this rate inevitably falls. China pushed this along in the 1970s with its "One Child" policy, now abandoned, but China will not shift back into positive growth, the normal process of falling birth rates has taken hold.
But industrialization is not the only process that brings down birth rates, and may only be an enabling factor, rather than the true driving force. Bangladesh is the poster example for this. A conservative Muslim nation, that is one of the poorest in the world, it is now below the replacement rate. It did not take industrialization or becoming wealthy to do it, it was entirely the choice of the female population there. This phenomenon was entirely unexpected, until it happened, That is what this book is alluding to - educating women brings down birthrates by itself, and may be why it correlates with industrialization and wealth in the first place.
If you look at UN population projections by region you see every region in the world is projected to peak in population during this century and begin declining. Except for one, Africa. Continuous growth is projected there. What this book is arguing is that female education will bring down the birthrate there also, like it did in Bangladesh. The difference between UN and author projections for population in 2100 is due almost entirely due to differences in population projections for Africa.
I think the authors are likely correct in this regard.
But is the world population fated to shrink away to nothing now?
We don't know of a trend that will reverse it at present. Some countries are already heavily affected by declining (and aging) populations - Japan, Italy, Russia, Serbia (perhaps the lowest birthrate in the world), for example - and none of these has found a way to halt it yet.
But the Industrial Revolution was not predicted, the Green Revolution was not predicted, the fall of birth rates with industrialization was not predicted, and the fall in the birth rate of Bangladesh without industrialization was not predicted. That some future change in world human societies might stabilize populations globally certainly cannot be ruled out. It may be simply that no society currently affected by declining population has yet undergone a sufficient and necessary transformation - providing enough support and incentive to make higher rates of child-bearing attractive.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
It's best modelling efforts. Modelling distant future is where your error margins are much greater than your conclusion. It's how we got "massive global starvation by 2020 because of global warming" in 1990s best models. Assumptions used were that warming would rapidly desertify main food production sites as well as several other similar assumptions considered to be "scientific consensus" at the time.
Reality check - we're on the way to eliminate non-political (i.e. warfare caused) hunger entirely by around the same time frame. We're already almost done, and we beat even the most positive outlier models by a wide margin. Because all models modelling tens of years in the future are wildly inaccurate as they rely on assumption of linearity, cannot predict future technological changes, and cannot predict effects not yet understood/known/realised by people both behind the scientific facts and the assumptions going into the model.
In reality, desertification effect was vastly overestimated. In addition to it, logistics improved to the point where we effectively can ship food almost anywhere on the planet where there isn't political obstruction to it very cheaply. And finally, increase of CO2 in the atmosphere made plant life significantly more efficient, farming practices improved dramatically, and amount of viable arable land in the more northern areas is climbing rapidly as warming progresses while arable land in more northern temperate climate areas is starting to reach points where it can produce two sets of crops instead of one per year.
So we have a global food production system that is more plentiful than ever that can be shipped to areas that are suffering from lack of local production for almost no cost. Global starvation: solved. In spite of desertification of some areas and massive population increase in those areas.
Next time someone talks to you about modern climate catastrophism being reality rather than a result of almost certainly inaccurate modelling process, remind them of the opposite outcome of best scientific consensus on global warming's impact on world hunger and how it wasn't just wrong. It was the worst kind of wrong - it was the diametric opposite of what actually happened.
This will come in handle as new technology enable people to live for millions of years,
1) Lack of security. If parents can't protect their daughters they will marry them off at a young age to someone who might be able to. This is the main reason for high birthrates in places like Afghanistan. Afghanistan did not have high birth rates 40 years ago under communism.
2) Stable careers for young men. If men in their late teens can get stable careers they will marry their girlfriends and start having families. This was the main driver of population growth in the industrial revolution. Young men getting factory jobs. They might not have been great jobs by our standards but they were enough to feed a family.
If you look at most Western countries today few men under 30 have a stable career, most are in debt. How many women want to start pumping out babies with these men? I have 5 kids, you don't get five kids if you don't start having them in your 30s.
There are two simple principles there. One, courtesy of Nassim Taleb: Things that can't go on forever, don't.. It is obvious that the population cannot go to infinity. So it will stop growing sooner or later. The only question is: When? And also: How painful is that going to be for everyone?
The other is that trends typically go on for much longer than predicted. Peak Oil was first predicted for the 1920s. Then the 1960s. Then around 2000. At the moment some estimates say it'll be in the 2030s.
Obviously, one day oil will run out. But from this and many similar estimates we learn that we tend to see gloom and doom arrive too early, typically.
There's no sign that population growth will suddenly decline sharply. So it's going to be at least a few more generations before peak humans.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In other news, the NASDAQ was down 4% in 2018. This clearly means that all US stocks will be worthless in 25 years.
Actually browsed the link. The whole "once that decline begins, it will never end" thing is just bait to get people to read. They're projecting out for just a few generations at most.
The western political correctness state religion makes it a crime to be in a relationship, and confiscates as much tax revenue as necessary for lawyers, social workers, swat teams, etc. to enforce their religion. The only option if you're poor is to not be in a relationship. So this makes it look like the population is declining, but evolution is still pushing the rest of the world to overpopulate.
Won't happen. People like to fuck too much.
TFA tries to briefly make the argument for why population growth might slow, or even go negative for a bit. But it doesn't explain this:
Does anyone know what they're basing that on? What's the argument for it becoming permanently negative? Even educated women still sometimes decide to get pregnant. It's not like education totally overcomes biology; we haven't even seen that in the first world.
Hmm... I guess I agree with the moderation after all, though I'm taking "interesting" in the "provocative" sense, and I don't know how the tie was broken against "insightful". (MEPR could resolve it better...)
I think you started on some of the right tracks, but didn't go deep enough.
People are here BECAUSE they are genetically programmed to like reproducing. The potential ancestors who didn't put enough priority on reproducing have left the gene pool (and the building, atAJG).
When you follow the money, you realize that the RoI for human beings is not so good. Much better to invest in machines, but I've read that perhaps the highest RoI is for investing in the cheapest politicians. If I were a gambling man, then I'd be gambling on GAI, because an actually useful artificial intelligence has the potential for the highest RoI of all. Too bad that's the solution to a fake problem and I can safely predict that the corporate cancers will remain dissatisfied.
Is there any potential solution involving better people? I predict you don't want me to get into eugenics, even passive eugenics.
Time's up, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The best thing for planet Earth would be if humans were to become extinct before global warming continues. Humans have caused far more damage to the planet than any other species in the history of Earth. Without humans, Earth would return to the natural processes which previously led to great biological diversity. Human beings are threatening most species' life on Earth, not just our own.
The whole theory relies on the population of the earth getting smarter? REALLY? Put down the crack pipe. The world most definitely is NOT getting smarter. The most educated and affluent among us are the antivaxxers bringing measles misery back to the USA. Please stop conflating wealth and education with intelligence. There is no connection. Donald Trump went to Wharton. Can we please dispense with the idea that school and money makes you smart? Nothing is going to help if you're born with low intelligence, and those people breed like animals in season.
Global warming is enormously more dangerous than a decline in population. Debt can be forgiven. It's all just numbers in a computer. Heat is physics. It will not be ignored.
No. Don't be stupid.
Works for me assuming we have three decades left. Either way I'll probably be dead or hitting 90.
A journalist and a political "scientist"? Are you serious? We're going to pay attention to the population predictions of a journalist and a political "scientist"?
What, they couldn't find a barista and a street mime? Or a tool & die maker and a mall security guard? Have any of you ever met a political scientist? You might as well get population predictions based on your last playthrough of Civ 4.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If this ludicrous prediction comes to pass, it will be able 100 years too late to save the species from resource-consuming itself to death.
Because a decimation would leave us with 90% of the population.
You want, probably "annihilation". Or just "drastic reduction".
BTW: I too would be very happy if we could get this crazy species down to 160 million.
We'll have begun to start living off world well before 2100
You completely, utterly lost me at "one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations". Lmfao
Some women will want large families despite education. That will be for some combination of genetic tendencies and social circumstances. But either way the children of those women will tend to have larger families on average than the general population. They will also tend to breed with like minded people (like strict Catholics).
We have introduced a bug in the system. Birth control. It enabled our desire for sex to be met as well as our desire for a good living standard. But over time Natural Selection will sort that out, and the fittest (for breeding) will dominate. There is no point in having a good living standard if you do not breed many grandchildren.
Now that process will take some time. Perhaps centuries. It is likely that over that timescale we will have built software that can program itself as well as we can program it. At that point humanity will become obsolete technology, and it is the robots that will do the breeding.
It's all part of the plan for global depopulation...
Remember what item #1 on the Georgia Guidestones says....
"Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature."
Ref:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
Yeah, tell that the the hacidic jews and mormons that are trying to outbreed the rest of us by having 8 kids per family or more.
We've already got too many people to live comfortably. Perhaps what we need (and will have the Earth itself hand us, one way or another) is a die-back of our species. More doesn't seem to necessarily be better in this case. Or perhaps we need to develop the ability to get the hell off this planet so people can be somewhere else, where they have room to breathe again and be who they want to be without butting heads with everyone else. Any way you look at it I think a die-back of some sort is inevitable, either due to climate change, or war over resources, or pandemic. All species on this planet have their numbers ultimately regulated by environmental factors of one sort or another, be it food supply, or predation; humans have no natural predators other than ourselves and we adapt our environment to suit us instead of the other way around; one way or another we'll be the architects of our own demise, and self-regulation will assert itself, I think. No worries, it'll probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-90%, so there'll still be humans -- just much less of them, with more room to breathe again.
They've always said (along with the Earth first lDIOTS) "man" has been the problem all along. So, problem solved!
It does not tell us WHY the UN analysis is wrong. It's just a stupid book I will not be buying anyway.
In The Big Shift (2013), Ibbitson and Bricker claimed that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada would win the 2015 election and open up a new political era as a dominant party,
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
No one gives a fuck about Africa.
It reminds me of that story about 2 economists who wanted to predict the price of silver in the future. Right now, if the industrial countries need cheap low-skilled labor, they open their borders either formally or with a backdoor illegal immigration program; e.g. the United States.
If we ever get to the point we don't have enough people, governments will pay people to have children.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
There's too many human beans on this planet today, and has been for some time now. We're a disease on this rock. This has been obvious for years, but it's almost never mentioned in all the passionate discourse about what we're doing/not doing to/for our only home stone. This is, at minimum, unfortunate. I'm very grateful that the ol' lady and I never spawned, because children today have a very ugly future ahead. We made it that way.
I'm old enough to remember when we weren't quite so many, and a lot was different. Very different. Yes, I mostly agree with the post. We're not doing nearly enough to ensure a decent future for those we'll leave this world to inhabit. I'm glad to be old, I wouldn't want to be alive twenty or so years from now. I pity the millennials. No, not much, because I think they're generally narcissistic and incredibly ignorant. Not only in basics, like English, the usage of which today proves how sad and minimal k-12 education has become, and that the majority of homes, of parents, don't give a shit. Ignorant kids become ignorant adults, far more likely to do harm on some level than to do good for themselves, for family, or for our Earth. We're already living in an idiocracy encouraged by the kleptocracy. This simply cannot end well for our species.
Your mileage may vary. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Close cover before striking. Good luck, kids!
There are 400 tons of radio isotope laden water being released into the Pacific everyday from the Fukushima NPP disaster. That's over one million tons and counting.
As radio isotopes propagates into the Pacific and through the foodchain anticipate a steady decline in the birthrate from failed pregnancies and an increased prevalence of transgenic disease from the pregnancies that are successful over the coming decades.
We need an international effort to bring the Fukushima nuclear disaster under control to stop it from releasing anything as part of our responsibility to future generations.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Has anyone had the chance to fully read the book? I feel like the "choices" part might deal with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... That famous mouse experiment. I mean, isn't an overwhelming of the population acting like those mice?
-This signature is strictly to prevent comments ending with questions or propositions.-
Fuck this world. I rage-quit.
Then all of this doesn't matter.
freezing all parameters, and running only the single parameter that creates the headline.
Because until 2100, nothing will change. We will not create clean energy, new materials, etc, etc... nothing. Just procreate. All development will magically stop now.
the rules were put in place because wealthy land owners were afraid the working class would vote themselves land. There were a mountain of voter suppression tools in place back then. Unless you were wealthy, landowning and white you probably couldn't vote.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The United Nations is a political organization, not a scientific one.
@smoot123 and @Immerman, I want to congratulate you on conducting a reasoned, coherent and friendly discussion here on /.. I really wish there were more such discussions!
The whole of "history" is a bourgeois fabrication, so it can simply be ignored.
. Why doesn't anyone actually think about the plausibility of their numbers before they go crazy with them ?
https://ourworldindata.org/wor...
Great, this sounds like "global cooling" all over again. I myself can't wait to hear about this in 15 years "Well, in 2019 studies said the population was catastrophically decreasing! Population scientists don't know what they're talking about!"