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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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