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We need more people, not fewer.
Quadrupled in 100 years. Gosh. Who could want to retreat from such an achievement?
Right, except, the population explosion didn't cause the technology. Other way around -- a productivity explosion. Like most things, it is subject to diminishing returns. Less labor is needed. What are the high numbers of people for? The economy is shedding them as fast as they can. I guess they could pick tomatoes and strawberries. For recreation, thanks our gigantic population producing our miraculous technology, we'll have synthetic nature, available to the poorest:
Say it slowly, and see how ridiculous this sounds: "In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives." A path through the plastic trees.
I would sooner be troubled about the dead than about the never-born.
Depopulation alone wouldn't. Who's saying it would? Is it the contention that a larger population replaces "the need for urgent action"?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...al-growth.html
Because most demographers look ahead only to 2100, there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion. As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.
Because most demographers look ahead only to 2100, there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion. As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.
Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.
It is likely that we shall want to apply our technology to the creation of artificial environments. It may be possible to create environments that are evocative of other environments in other times and places. It is possible that, by manipulating memory through the rewriting of history, environments will come to have new meaning. Finally, we may want to create proxy environments by means of substitution and simulation. In order to create substitutes, we must endow new objects with significance by means of advertising and by social practice. Sophistication about differentiation will become very important for appreciating the substitute environments. We may simulate the environment by means of photographs, recordings, models, and perhaps even manipulations in the brain. What we experience in natural environments may actually be more controllable than we imagine. Artificial prairies and wildernesses have been created, and there is no reason to believe that these artificial environments need be unsatisfactory for those who experience them.
What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?
Science
2 Feb 1973
Vol 179, Issue 4072
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...e.179.4072.446 [h=1]What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?
What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?
Science
2 Feb 1973
Vol 179, Issue 4072
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...e.179.4072.446 [h=1]What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?
Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.
Perhaps that loss doesn’t trouble you.
Perhaps that loss doesn’t trouble you.
It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges.
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