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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

...Aaaaand if you prolong youth, people will eventually have more kids. One at 30, one at 45 and one at 60. And then maybe one at 75.

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Apparently, every opportunity that women are given to delay pregnancy and childbirth is taken. Education advances, health advances, birth control, and wealth have each caused a delay and decrease in reproduction. It's a bit of a cliche fear that is popular because of its simplicity, not its correctness, IMO.

I’m not convinced. It does that for a high percentage of the population. However, after a period, the smaller percentage of the population that don’t reduce their birth rate will become increasingly dominant.

Current examples are the rapid growth of Orthodox Jews as a percentage of Israel’s population, and evangelical birth rates in the US.

My bet is that given technology to allow massive extension of fertility into older age, the fertility differences between religious groups that believe in a religious duty to procreate, and everyone else, will increase even more.

Yeah, it's weird to me that people in general don't see this.

I like to joke that the Amish are obviously the one true religion because eventually they'll cover the earth: They live long and peaceful lives, have scores of children, and are among the best farmers on Earth.

As long as the rest of us don't do something horrible the end state is inevitable.

That has a lot to do with consequences of having child. If you are young for long, giving some years to one more child might be less of sacrifice. If you know that having one more child is game over for everything else, you wont get a chance to restart the rest of your life.

soace colonies

(as long as we're just making up future scientific advances)

That was the idea. But why would want to move there?

In 60-s, people imagined how population would line up for space colonies to build a farm there. And a big house.

Now, people want not just live on Earth. They would prefer to live in, let's say, the EU. And not even all of the EU; how about a Paris arrondisement? That's the place we find desirable.

A few people would like to be the first to space colonies. I fail to see how a few billion people would like to move there, to become some sort of worker drones. Plus, this tend to not end well. Compare how well do people in Spain live, and compare it to how people who went abroad to South America live.

> Compare how well do people in Spain live, and compare it to how people who went abroad to South America live.

The fate of South America is not due to the failures of the local population... more "thanks" to decades of racist and/or anti-"communist" US foreign policy.

South American (Venezuelan) here. This is not true. Blaming US foreign policy for all or even most of South America's failures is silly and a common tactic of demagogues, with no basis in reality, to deflect from bad domestic policy.

Admittedly, I did not fully understand the point the GP was trying to make with the Spain comparison.

We may argue why South America has lower life quality than Spain, but the fact that it has.

This will be the case with space colonies too, I'm afraid. While it will be debatable why colonies perform worse than Earth, it will be apparent that the best course was to stay.

So you're going to ignore the United States, Hong Kong, Australia, etc?

They're very special cases, and still, I'm not sure that Australia (and even US) fares much better than e.g. source England and Norway.

> I'm not sure that Australia (and even US) fares much better than e.g. source England and Norway.

I don't know many fellow Americans that are of Norwegian descent but the US fairs better than the UK on lists of human development, happiness, and productivity. That has to mean something.

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