6 ms·

What is the track record of demographers predicting 75 years into the future? I guess these models assume that neither human cloning nor interstellar space tra

• natch 3y ago
  Once the birth rate for a particular year is set, you can’t exactly go back in time and change it. So you don’t need to be a trained demographer to see that we are on a crashing trajectory. Beyond that, perhaps the models do assume that future birth rates don’t wildly depart from historical ranges. Seems a reasonable assumption to me. But sure we could somehow get artificial wombs and an interest in using them, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Seems unlikely though.
  • tuatoru 3y ago
    Despite a several decades long decline in total fertility rate, most demographic models I have seen assume that lifetime fertility will magically bounce back to replacement level. Underpants gnomes models. Bounce-back could happen, but there is no understanding in governments of why the decline is occurring, nor what it takes to reverse it,* so it is unlikely. * Exhorting people to return to traditional family values, as the new PM of Italy does, is likely to crash fertility faster.
• xmprt 3y ago
  Full human cloning won't take off because it's too unethical - not because of lack of technological capabilities.
  • ivalm 3y ago
    Why is it unethical (if we are good enough to avoid genetic abnormalities/mistakes)?
    • fieldcny 3y ago
      Really?!?! I think anyone who wants to clone themselves is too full of shit to allowed to be cloned.
      • ivalm 3y ago
        Why? We allow people to have children, why can't they have clones? We can still grant these clones all the normal human rights.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      It gets into "playing god" territory without many justifiable reasons to do it. Who is responsible for a child born as a clone? What is the purpose of cloning them instead of encouraging people to have children the normal way? Things like artificial wombs would be getting into similar territory, but unlike cloning they have justified ethical medical uses such as enabling women who can't carry a child in their own womb for any reason to still have a child.
      • ivalm 3y ago
        We play god all the time, and I'm glad for it. Little about human habitat is natural, it's all reshaped to our need by us. In terms of responsibility, it can be the same as normal children -- either they are assigned parents or they are wards of the state. They should have same rights as other people.
        • dotnet00 3y ago
          The point about playing god isn't about it being unnatural, but that you're touching against some fundamental things about being human and our limited understanding of the limits of things something of a similar intelligence level should be subjected to. Responsibility was just one example of the ethical quandries that arise with cloning thrown into the mix, why should we create cloned children when the state already can't do good by orphaned children? How do inheritance rights play out? What do we make of things like DNA tests as meaningful evidence in criminal cases? Who gets to have themselves cloned, and how do you prevent misuse of the technology? Is it misuse to say, store the DNA of the best soldiers, best athletes etc so as to create clones to meet demand in those areas? And if that isn't the intention for cloning, why do cloning at all instead of something like artificial wombs? Is it worth the suffering of all the imperfect clones (and the surrogate mothers within whom they'd be grown) that will inevitably be produced during the development of the technology? How do we deal with reproductive rights of clones and their impact on genetic diversity? Children who are raised in the foster system will typically have a harder time than those who have families which can provide financial backing, so unless the clone is raised by a family as their own child, we'd effectively be creating a subservient class by cloning, since while with normal children, losing their family is not necessarily known ahead of time, with a clone that isn't the case. As it stands, we aren't even mature enough to have a proper conversation about the much less dangerous ethics of creating rudimentary "intelligences" in the form of current generation AI. How are we, as a society, supposed to then have a proper conversation about the ethics of creating full human intelligences? With normal children we can at least point to a biological imperative.
  • mensetmanusman 3y ago
    It’s also unnecessary, there are tons of kids to adopt that people don’t. Secular society just doesn’t want enough kids to sustain itself.
    • serf 3y ago
      adopting children doesn't allow oneself the vanity of reproducing the greatest genes ever known to history -- their own. and I say this not as a jest, but as a mere point that the two markets (adoption/cloning) may not overlap.
  • c22 3y ago
    That makes no sense. Human history is littered with unethical acts.
  • smokel 3y ago
    You could use the same argument for the two World Wars in the 20th century.
    • xmprt 3y ago
      Wars don't just appear out of thin air. There were a lot of incentives for countries to engage in war. Cloning doesn't really benefit anyone and doing cloning requires a ton of funding and grants and ethics boards reviews. If you're interested in the history of human cloning (and where that field of research is trending towards), I'd recommend watching this video [1]. Full human cloning is somewhat pointless however the research has lead to innovations in stem cell research which does have real benefits for things like organ transplants. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U
• tsimionescu 3y ago
  How exactly would human cloning affect world population to any significant level? You still need someone to be pregnant for about nine months to give birth to a clone, why does it matter if they give birth to a clone or a normal child? Or do you mean human "printing", some machine that can carry a pregnancy instead of a human doing it? I don't think there is even a glimmer of such technology on the horizon. Then again, you seem to also think that there is some imaginable chance that we'll discover interstellar travel in the next 75 years, so maybe that doesn't stop you?
  • pomtato 3y ago
    well you're in for suprise! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02901-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02901-1 now while this isn't nearly at the level of human cloning, it never ceases to amaze me how far we've come.
    • tuatoru 3y ago
      Artificial wombs don't reduce the period of bring a child to be be a functioning social being (currently 18 - 28 years). Nor the costs or other incentives or disincentives. To me, the most likely consequence is to reduce the total fertility rate to one child per woman.
    • tsimionescu 3y ago
      This is far from even hinting at an artificial womb. It is at best a replacement for an infant ventilator and incubator. In the best case, it will improve survival rates for fetuses that even today sometimes survive. But the first 20 or so weeks, from conception up to viability, are an entirely different prospect and we have no idea how we could replicate them yet.
      • pomtato 3y ago
        i understand where you're coming from but like any other ecosystem, we'll need a bunch of puzzle pieces and this just happens to be one of them :)
• jerry1979 3y ago
  Wikipedia has some insight into this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#History_of_population_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... My impression is that demographers have thought we would plateau around 9 or so billion.