4 ms·

The thought of a trillion people living on this planet sounds downright dystopic.

• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• Qwertious 10y ago
  Realistically, if we get immortality then we'd want to cap our population. The mechanics are actually really simple: Get the average number of children per couple significantly lower than 2. Like, if it's a 1 child per couple rate, then it caps out at double the population. If it's 1.4 per couple, then it caps out at somewhere less than 4x our population, I think. Which, realistically, means we'll probably never have more than 40 billion people, since without immortality our population will cap at around 10 billion. The "worst case" scenario is if immortality is widely administered before birth rates drop to 2/couple or below. I'm not sure that will happen, because I'd expect immortality to start off fairly expensive and a populace getting wealthier usually results in birth rates dropping massively, AND there will be a huge focus on minimising birth rates once immortality (and the asociated population problems it causes) becomes widely recognised as imminent by the general population.
  • davidgerard 10y ago
    The proven way to cap population growth is to empower women and give them social clout. This works over and over. It's a problem that we have the solution to.
• discombobulate 10y ago
  Solving a given problem creates new problems. People dying of cancer/dementia/heart disease sounds horrific. That doesn't mean antibiotics should be abolished--so more people don't reach an age where diseases of ageing are commonplace. Edit: Added info after the em dash.
• Arizhel 10y ago
  If we had well-designed, well-maintained cities, it could be done I think. People would have to live a lot more densely, and we wouldn't be able to have personally-owned cars that drive on asphalt roads.