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Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations.

Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. There is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations being alive.

bhouston 5y ago
> Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? At some point yes we do. > There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society. > here is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations being alive. I think generational change is a major driver of innovation. Old people get stuck in their ways, more so then we are likely to ever admit -- but maybe we can solve brain plasticity as well? I think if we solve aging completely, we become a rigid oligarchic society.
- pradn 5y ago
  If more people are able to have healthier lives and be productive in their chosen niche (if they choose to), there might be other benefits, too. For example, many fields benefit from long expertise, like mathematics.
  - prionassembly 5y ago
    On the contrary, it's widely acknowledge that mathematical ability and productivity decreases rapidly with age. (There are other fields benefiting from long expertise, like project management...)
- rcoveson 5y ago
  > For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society. How can we acknowledge that we need a lot of people to run the sort of society we ended up with today without also reasoning that the more advanced society we might achieve in 100 years might need a lot more people? There's nothing special about 10 billion people. People have been throwing out numbers as "overpopulation tipping points" for hundreds of years, and we've passed all of them. And now we acknowledge that it's important that we passed them, because we can't even keep our advanced version of "the lights on" without having done so.
  - bhouston 5y ago
    Humans are resources in a general sense. More humans means more resources which you can throw at various challenges, problems. So you are right. More humans has benefits. But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. So what we need is controlled growth or at least sustainable levels. Right now we are switching into a decrease which will be very jarring and not sustainable. We've never truly has controlled population growth, we just had unfettered growth, which now has slowed down into a decrease. What is next is for us to increase it again and then have control over this. It is basically getting us to the next level of human development. We just have to be careful about those that want to exercise differential growth/decrease rates based on people's memberships in ideological, religious or racial groups.
    - rcoveson 5y ago
      > But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. This is vague, and assumes the conclusion. All we've ever known is unfettered growth, and it's been accompanied by people "proving" that it's "not sustainable" for a long time. So far we have not only sustained it, but thrived while sustaining it. More importantly, we have come to rely on it: We're pretty sure we couldn't have a society like this one without hundreds of millions of people.
      - tzs 5y ago
        Any given growth rate is not sustainable long term. For example, consider a growth rate of 1% per year (about what the world population growth rate currently is). Right now, every human is on or near the Earth. Let's call this year 0. In year 1, every human must be within one light-year of the Earth. In year 2, every human must be within two light-years of the Earth. In year N, every human must be within N light-years of Earth. Take the volume of a sphere of radius N light-years and divide it by the population after N years of 1% growth, and you get the volume available per person if humans were spread out evenly among all possible space that humans could theoretically occupy. At year 1, that is about 4.39 x 10^38 m^3 per person, so no problem. But at around year 11600 it is 4 m^2 per person. By 12101 it is down to 0.04 m^3 per person. The internet tells me that the average volume of a human is about 0.06 m^3 so 0.04 m^3 per person would be bad news. What if we manage to invent Star Trek style warp engines right away, which let us go 1000x the speed of light. That makes everything a 10^9 times better. At 12101 we have 40000000 m^3 per person. But by 13524 we are down to 40 m^3 per person, and by 14000 below 0.39 m^3 per person. From there we have only got until 14192 before we are just below 0.06 m^3. Remember, this is being ridiculous optimistic. Even with warp drive available starting tomorrow we would not be able to spread so fast that 14000 years from now we are uniformly occupying a 28000 light year diameter spherical volume around Earth. In reality we'll hit a space limit a lot earlier. Hence, we can conclude that 1% is not sustainable for more than a few thousand years even under very optimistic assumptions. Long term the growth rate must be one that on average declines over time, simply because a growth rate that does not do so leads to exponential growth, but we live in a universe were accessible space cannot grow faster than polynomially.
- teej 5y ago
  > A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. — Max Planck
- mpol 5y ago
  > [...] enough humans to run an advanced society. [...] I think generational change is a major driver of innovation [...] That is a good point, and I would like to add that currently most young people on this planet are not part of innovation. They have to make sure they get food and shelter. If in the future we solved poverty and everyone has access to good education and a relative safe life, many more young people can be innovative. One can dream ;)
- michael1999 5y ago
  We entered the 20c with ~1.5Bp, and didn't hit 3 until we were ready to land on the moon. We have a loooong way to go before we run out of people to run an advanced economy. As for the grey-aristocracy: it's already here, just unevenly distributed. Bruce Sterling described it vividly in Holy Fire (1996). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359390.Holy_Fire https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359390.Holy_Fire
  - throwawaygal7 5y ago
    If the entire world had south Korean levels of fertility it would take... 70 or 80 years to end up with a couple billion people again. In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.
    - michael1999 5y ago
      What’s wrong with what we’ve been doing? Emancipate and educate women, vaccinate and educate children, and suppress the worst of male-supremacy ideologues, and fertility comes down.
      - tsol 5y ago
        Rising economic outcomes have led to that, not some sort of push for women's rights or the death of male supremacist ideologies. Just look at India or China. Only in the most metropolitan areas are they even close to thinking like that on a large scale.
      - throwawaygal7 5y ago
        100mish people are born on two dollars or less a day and it's not slowing down , that's what.
droopyEyelids 5y ago
It depends what you mean by 'need'. From the perspective of eudaemonia, yes, the surviving population needs goods and services to continue. With a sub-replacement birthrate, there are fewer 'new' people to provide the goods and services for the remaining. This creates inflationary pressure and deprivation. From the perspective of 'will the world end?' no- the Earth will continue to exist even without any people at all.
- virgilp 5y ago
  > the Earth will continue to exist even without any people at all. Nobody cares about that perspective; it's an obvious and not particularly interesting observation... yeah universe existed without humans and can obviously continue to exist without humans too. When people talk about "world end" they talk about the humanity, not the physical world around us.
  - droopyEyelids 5y ago
    I agree and that's why it was a footnote- that's the point I was making. But on much of the Internet you'll find people eager to misunderstand this very point, so some defensive writing is justified.
rayiner 5y ago
Only if humans in different places are fungible, which they are not, and only if young people are willing to shoulder increasingly high burdens to take care of old people, which is debatable. And the “solution to aging” stuff is pretty optimistic. Modern medical technology has barely pushed the boundaries of healthy life at the top end. The first five American presidents died at 67, 83, 90, 85, and 73. The two that didn’t make it to their 80s died of a viral disease that still affects us today (influenza) and a bacterial disease that we do have a treatment for today (TB).
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  Sure, but how hard has modern medicine tried to cure aging?
paxys 5y ago
Just by simple numbers – no, you don't need a sustainable population rate. We were perfectly fine as a species when the population was half or a tenth or hundredth of what it is now, and will still thrive if it gets to that again. The problem is the demographic breakdown. If the rate of growth is decreasing it means that when your current population ages and exits the labor pool there won't be enough young people to replace them. And with better medical care and increased life expectancy these old people will still hang around and need care. This is a problem that every large, developed country faces today, and they generally solve it through immigration. But what happens when every country is in the same situation?
- cute_boi 5y ago
  do we need that labor pool considering we are progressing in technology? 100 years ago there were no factories we see today etc. But day by day with technological advancement we are automating lot of things. So I really don't think we need that much labor we required yesterday. Is population problem really a big deal considering we already have a big elephant in room already like climate change, scarcity of resources, poverty, water crisis?
  - paxys 5y ago
    While technology has definitely made things better over the last few decades, we are still very, very far from the post-scarcity society that we like to envision. The majority of people on the planet today are still doing back breaking labor in order to survive.
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      I always thought that when our western governments talk about this problem, they are not concerned with the back breaking work that needs doing, but the amount of tax being paid by younger generations not enough to cover pensions and all the expensive medical conditions old people have. I think its mostly a financial problem, not a physical labor problem.

bhouston 5y ago

> Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? At some point yes we do. > There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society. > here is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations being alive. I think generational change is a major driver of innovation. Old people get stuck in their ways, more so then we are likely to ever admit -- but maybe we can solve brain plasticity as well? I think if we solve aging completely, we become a rigid oligarchic society.

pradn 5y ago
If more people are able to have healthier lives and be productive in their chosen niche (if they choose to), there might be other benefits, too. For example, many fields benefit from long expertise, like mathematics.
- prionassembly 5y ago
  On the contrary, it's widely acknowledge that mathematical ability and productivity decreases rapidly with age. (There are other fields benefiting from long expertise, like project management...)
rcoveson 5y ago
> For sure. But at some point there won't be enough humans to run an advanced society. How can we acknowledge that we need a lot of people to run the sort of society we ended up with today without also reasoning that the more advanced society we might achieve in 100 years might need a lot more people? There's nothing special about 10 billion people. People have been throwing out numbers as "overpopulation tipping points" for hundreds of years, and we've passed all of them. And now we acknowledge that it's important that we passed them, because we can't even keep our advanced version of "the lights on" without having done so.
- bhouston 5y ago
  Humans are resources in a general sense. More humans means more resources which you can throw at various challenges, problems. So you are right. More humans has benefits. But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. So what we need is controlled growth or at least sustainable levels. Right now we are switching into a decrease which will be very jarring and not sustainable. We've never truly has controlled population growth, we just had unfettered growth, which now has slowed down into a decrease. What is next is for us to increase it again and then have control over this. It is basically getting us to the next level of human development. We just have to be careful about those that want to exercise differential growth/decrease rates based on people's memberships in ideological, religious or racial groups.
  - rcoveson 5y ago
    > But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. This is vague, and assumes the conclusion. All we've ever known is unfettered growth, and it's been accompanied by people "proving" that it's "not sustainable" for a long time. So far we have not only sustained it, but thrived while sustaining it. More importantly, we have come to rely on it: We're pretty sure we couldn't have a society like this one without hundreds of millions of people.
    - tzs 5y ago
      Any given growth rate is not sustainable long term. For example, consider a growth rate of 1% per year (about what the world population growth rate currently is). Right now, every human is on or near the Earth. Let's call this year 0. In year 1, every human must be within one light-year of the Earth. In year 2, every human must be within two light-years of the Earth. In year N, every human must be within N light-years of Earth. Take the volume of a sphere of radius N light-years and divide it by the population after N years of 1% growth, and you get the volume available per person if humans were spread out evenly among all possible space that humans could theoretically occupy. At year 1, that is about 4.39 x 10^38 m^3 per person, so no problem. But at around year 11600 it is 4 m^2 per person. By 12101 it is down to 0.04 m^3 per person. The internet tells me that the average volume of a human is about 0.06 m^3 so 0.04 m^3 per person would be bad news. What if we manage to invent Star Trek style warp engines right away, which let us go 1000x the speed of light. That makes everything a 10^9 times better. At 12101 we have 40000000 m^3 per person. But by 13524 we are down to 40 m^3 per person, and by 14000 below 0.39 m^3 per person. From there we have only got until 14192 before we are just below 0.06 m^3. Remember, this is being ridiculous optimistic. Even with warp drive available starting tomorrow we would not be able to spread so fast that 14000 years from now we are uniformly occupying a 28000 light year diameter spherical volume around Earth. In reality we'll hit a space limit a lot earlier. Hence, we can conclude that 1% is not sustainable for more than a few thousand years even under very optimistic assumptions. Long term the growth rate must be one that on average declines over time, simply because a growth rate that does not do so leads to exponential growth, but we live in a universe were accessible space cannot grow faster than polynomially.
teej 5y ago
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. — Max Planck
mpol 5y ago
> [...] enough humans to run an advanced society. [...] I think generational change is a major driver of innovation [...] That is a good point, and I would like to add that currently most young people on this planet are not part of innovation. They have to make sure they get food and shelter. If in the future we solved poverty and everyone has access to good education and a relative safe life, many more young people can be innovative. One can dream ;)
michael1999 5y ago
We entered the 20c with ~1.5Bp, and didn't hit 3 until we were ready to land on the moon. We have a loooong way to go before we run out of people to run an advanced economy. As for the grey-aristocracy: it's already here, just unevenly distributed. Bruce Sterling described it vividly in Holy Fire (1996). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359390.Holy_Fire https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359390.Holy_Fire
- throwawaygal7 5y ago
  If the entire world had south Korean levels of fertility it would take... 70 or 80 years to end up with a couple billion people again. In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.
  - michael1999 5y ago
    What’s wrong with what we’ve been doing? Emancipate and educate women, vaccinate and educate children, and suppress the worst of male-supremacy ideologues, and fertility comes down.
    - tsol 5y ago
      Rising economic outcomes have led to that, not some sort of push for women's rights or the death of male supremacist ideologies. Just look at India or China. Only in the most metropolitan areas are they even close to thinking like that on a large scale.
    - throwawaygal7 5y ago
      100mish people are born on two dollars or less a day and it's not slowing down , that's what.

droopyEyelids 5y ago

It depends what you mean by 'need'. From the perspective of eudaemonia, yes, the surviving population needs goods and services to continue. With a sub-replacement birthrate, there are fewer 'new' people to provide the goods and services for the remaining. This creates inflationary pressure and deprivation. From the perspective of 'will the world end?' no- the Earth will continue to exist even without any people at all.

virgilp 5y ago
> the Earth will continue to exist even without any people at all. Nobody cares about that perspective; it's an obvious and not particularly interesting observation... yeah universe existed without humans and can obviously continue to exist without humans too. When people talk about "world end" they talk about the humanity, not the physical world around us.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  I agree and that's why it was a footnote- that's the point I was making. But on much of the Internet you'll find people eager to misunderstand this very point, so some defensive writing is justified.

rayiner 5y ago

Only if humans in different places are fungible, which they are not, and only if young people are willing to shoulder increasingly high burdens to take care of old people, which is debatable. And the “solution to aging” stuff is pretty optimistic. Modern medical technology has barely pushed the boundaries of healthy life at the top end. The first five American presidents died at 67, 83, 90, 85, and 73. The two that didn’t make it to their 80s died of a viral disease that still affects us today (influenza) and a bacterial disease that we do have a treatment for today (TB).

JamesBarney 5y ago
Sure, but how hard has modern medicine tried to cure aging?

paxys 5y ago

Just by simple numbers – no, you don't need a sustainable population rate. We were perfectly fine as a species when the population was half or a tenth or hundredth of what it is now, and will still thrive if it gets to that again. The problem is the demographic breakdown. If the rate of growth is decreasing it means that when your current population ages and exits the labor pool there won't be enough young people to replace them. And with better medical care and increased life expectancy these old people will still hang around and need care. This is a problem that every large, developed country faces today, and they generally solve it through immigration. But what happens when every country is in the same situation?

cute_boi 5y ago
do we need that labor pool considering we are progressing in technology? 100 years ago there were no factories we see today etc. But day by day with technological advancement we are automating lot of things. So I really don't think we need that much labor we required yesterday. Is population problem really a big deal considering we already have a big elephant in room already like climate change, scarcity of resources, poverty, water crisis?
- paxys 5y ago
  While technology has definitely made things better over the last few decades, we are still very, very far from the post-scarcity society that we like to envision. The majority of people on the planet today are still doing back breaking labor in order to survive.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    I always thought that when our western governments talk about this problem, they are not concerned with the back breaking work that needs doing, but the amount of tax being paid by younger generations not enough to cover pensions and all the expensive medical conditions old people have. I think its mostly a financial problem, not a physical labor problem.