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Comment by silexia | Hacker News Reader

I agree, I actually posted a comment debating the merits of a possible rollback on birth control and I ended up getting flamed for it. I understand the concerns about telling people what to do with their bodies, but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race

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I once put a birth rate of 1.5 or so in one of these population simulators and IIRC even with that well below replacement fertility we still had more humans in 2200 than in 1900 or something like that, so I'm gonna be honest I don't think the survival of the species is on the table any time soon.

As long as there's tens of millions of humans we're probably good in that department

I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million

People have been predicting a population disaster calamity since the 1960s. Having more people on our planet has actually made the human species much more efficient because of the combined brain power of all of us working together to solve problems. The people trying to shut down population growth have led to horrifying policies like China's one child policy that deeply hurt many parents.

So now you’re suggesting horrifying policies in the other direction? I live in a country where most birth control was banned til the 80s. It wasn’t pretty, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wants to go back to that.

Forced population control - either preventing or requiring people to reproduce - is a terrible idea. The low birth rate has a huge number of external factors, not least of which is given the current housing and job market many people simply cannot afford to have a child, and much less give their child the attention required to raise a healthy, functioning human.

So instead of an authoritarian policy that you can't have more than one child, forcing a lot of people to not have kids they do want, you want an authoritarian policy that you can't go on birth control, forcing a lot of people to have kids they don't want.

Come on.

> I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million

I think that argument is weak. Geopolitical instability is probably the main threat to us[1], and I think that would be much worse affected by a shrinking population in a world where every policy decision since WWII has been predicated on continued growth.

[1] Unless you think the main threat is unfriendly AI with short timelines, in which case population in 50 years matters much less than whether we can get our shit together in the next decade or so.

I think the biggest cause for geopolitical instability is some sort of ecological disaster or global nuclear war and I think that's if anything more likely on a planet with large, young populations rather than smaller, older ones due to intensified resource or territorial competition.

People have coined the term 'geriatric peace theory' for the effect that aging populations tend to be remarkably stable politically. Today if you think of who can wipe a few billion of the planet India and Pakistan come to mind, less so Germany or Japan.

Italy has more than 50% (could be wrong, but high number) of population considered old, but politically it hasn't been stable.

While writing I'm guessing you mean "externally", but the two things might be related

There's a lot of problems societally that happen when you go below replacement rate that are probably not being accounted for in that simulation. For example, the age proportionality can become massively fucked with populations that have a massive majority in retirement-aged people and people under working ages leading to extremely low working-age people. That type of collapse can also accelerate unpredictably since we don't have exact ideas on whether or not there is a "catastrophic threshold" that replacement rates can go under.

> but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race

We’ve… some ways to go before we have to worry about extinction from not reproducing enough. This should probably not be in humanity’s top thousand or so worries.

I'm probably misreading the posts but... The worry is that too many humans may mean consuming too many resources which depletes/damages the earth too quickly.

A case could be made that if we were to somehow go back down to about, say, about 1 billion humans (it's a nice round number) we could both keep our knowledge, transmit it, make new discoveries, yet not pollute too much.

I'm not a big fan of the idea that "civilization" should be about packing as many humans as possible in as little space as possible ("because energy efficiency") with as little liberties as possible.

The person I was responding to appeared to be worried we might run out of people. I was pointing out that this isn’t an immediate concern :)

Tell that to a hiring manager ;)

Have you looked at the environmental impact of low birth societies?

China, Japan, and the former USSR should be environmental paradises. Their combination of technical sophistication and low birth rate should result in something from Avatar.

Instead they are irradiated hellscapes (very broad and unfair generalization, but still).

The human race isn't in danger, though. The population's actually going up year after year. There are some countries that aren't having enough kids to stay at their peak population without allowing immigration, which may be the actual cause of your concern, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing; encourage immigration, and the problem's solved.

Have you seen that movie Idiocracy? Our modern society is hollowing out the gene pool in the vast median of our cultural middle classes

I hate to break it to you, but Idiocracy wasn't a documentary.

Yeah, it was satire, and all good satire has a kernel of truth.

Correct, it is a warning

I wonder if a bimodal genealogy could be a long term outcome?

Essentially splitting the human races into two separate species.

- Homo Sapiens Alpha

- Homo Sapiens Beta

Seems farfetched but many species have diverged due to sexual selection so not totally ruled out.

I feel like if we try to increase the number, it will actually backfire.

There's no shortage of humans on this planet, currently, or by any forecast.

Let's revisit this non-problem once we figure out how the humans in those forecasts are going to sustainably live, first.

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