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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

Ageing and declining population everywhere - already most developing countries from 90s have net negative population change, and it spreads to more and more countries.

Huge cities disappearing as remote working, automation, rising sea levels and mass migrations make most of them pointless.

Lots of civil unrest, mass migrations, new plagues and wars as the globalized economy collapses and disappointed voters choose new kinds of populism to save them.

Rich people moving to the few lucky countries that won on the global warming and now try to isolate. Everybody else fight for scraps.

Eventually population adjusts and stabilizes on much lower level and reproduction rates grow again as repopulation starts.

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I can relate to that comment, as I feel the same way. So much that it causes me pain.

I have to constantly remind myself:

In chaos, all predictions are possible, solarpunk is just as likely as cyberpunk.

Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. If you are looking for death all you see is death, if you are looking for god, all you see is god.

> Rich people moving to the few lucky countries that won on the global warming and now try to isolate. Everybody else fight for scraps.

Which, if you follow the projections, will include entire Europe and North America. Seriously, read the IPCC report: impact of global warming in western world will be rather superficial, if not positive. It’s not them who is most negatively affected.

> Which, if you follow the projections, will include entire Europe and North America

So, about 1 billion people out of about 8 billion worldwide. Half of that if you were speaking of "western world" only.

Now imagine what the rest will do. And how that will impact globalized economy on which welfare of western world is built.

Oh, I know that. My point is that, contrary to what the comment I was responding to said, rich people in western world will not be moving anywhere. Rich Africans will indeed try to move to Europe/North America, but they already do, and would do so even without global warming happening.

At first this vision seems like a bleak contrast to the world of the film, until one remembers that the 25 years immediately following the making of this film were arguably the bloodiest in world history, containing the great depression, WWII, the holocaust, and huge famines in communist Russia and China.

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