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>> The purest example of scarcity creating existential terror is declining birth rates. 50% of the world population is now below the replacement birth rate and

>> The purest example of scarcity creating existential terror is declining birth rates. 50% of the world population is now below the replacement birth rate and younger generations are delaying reproduction or choosing to go childless altogether. While this is generally correlated with one-time increases in standards of living, inverted population age pyramids have historically spelled doom for societies. I think this is mainly correlated with the invention of antibiotics and the near-elimination of child mortality. Historically, when HALF the children are dead before reaching the age of 5, a species has got to have a high birth rate to compensate. Which has been the case in humans since their beginnings: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al... Only extremely recently on a historical scale have we surpassed this conundrum and seems like mentally we haven't fully adapted to it. It's no longer necessary to spew out 10 kids in the hope maybe 2 or 3 make it to adulthood. With high likelihood, every born kid can now make it to old age. And we're still too many, human population is still too big due to this unusual condition of mixing a historical high birth rate with high survivability. Personally I think there's absolutely no danger. Humans have bounced back since .. I dunno, some 10,000 individuals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck). I'm sure we don't need 10 billion to continue to survive and natural decline is an elegant solution to overpopulation without the need for Soylent Green scenarios. About half of how many we are currently would be good, a quarter would be even better in the long term. Bonus it would create incentives for actual efficient work. With less manpower to compensate by just throwing work at the problems, they'd have to be solved in a more automated / sustainable manner.

oezi 3y ago
We have already adapted. Birthrates have fallen globally. There are some holdouts, but a new equilibrium is not far away. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
- MichaelRo 3y ago
  Interesting. Another thing that popped through my mind along with a bit of wild extrapolation. I have one (and only one) kid and my wife chose to give birth by C-section. Apparently it's fairly low risk to have two kids delivered this way, though we probably won't have another one. But ... another issue with human species was the problem of "big brains", with an upper limit of cranial size at birth and the (unique to humans, I think) problem of labor pain. C-sections solve this problem and allow for selection of even larger brains inside bigger heads. So now the SciFi what if ... what if selection goes so far that at some point we lose the capacity to give birth naturally? Sure, average IQ could be 200 but we're entirely dependent on technology to reproduce. And if some global catastrophe prevents that technology to work, we're out of the scene as a species in the blink of an eye.
  - cmrx64 3y ago
    The alien creatures in “Destroy All Humans” lost their ability to reproduce and their solution was to invade Earth and steal as much genetic material as possible. To.. uh.. restore the gonads? Surely a better work has explored this :)

oezi 3y ago

We have already adapted. Birthrates have fallen globally. There are some holdouts, but a new equilibrium is not far away. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

MichaelRo 3y ago
Interesting. Another thing that popped through my mind along with a bit of wild extrapolation. I have one (and only one) kid and my wife chose to give birth by C-section. Apparently it's fairly low risk to have two kids delivered this way, though we probably won't have another one. But ... another issue with human species was the problem of "big brains", with an upper limit of cranial size at birth and the (unique to humans, I think) problem of labor pain. C-sections solve this problem and allow for selection of even larger brains inside bigger heads. So now the SciFi what if ... what if selection goes so far that at some point we lose the capacity to give birth naturally? Sure, average IQ could be 200 but we're entirely dependent on technology to reproduce. And if some global catastrophe prevents that technology to work, we're out of the scene as a species in the blink of an eye.
- cmrx64 3y ago
  The alien creatures in “Destroy All Humans” lost their ability to reproduce and their solution was to invade Earth and steal as much genetic material as possible. To.. uh.. restore the gonads? Surely a better work has explored this :)