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Comment by jdmoreira | Hacker News Reader

I really hope our civilization can go from 7 billion people to 1 billion without a total collapse. Unfortunately we might not be ready. Will we be able to keep our technological level? Our current understanding of math, physics and nature? That requires quite a lot of people to transmit and learn. It certainly is theoretically possible but in practice? It's exponential. This has the potential to creep on us really soon.

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The issue lies in who those 1 billion people will be. The most anti-LGBT, anti-women, anti-education, low income cultures which have the most kids? Or a "controlled landing" in which most of the Western world doesn't become a ghost town or has its culture more or less replaced because it couldn't reproduce itself?

Is this what you are saying?:

“Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this type is pari passu multiplying and perpetuating those direst evils in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots.” -- Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

In hindsight I should've probably not make 1b (1800) but rather the 1.65b of 1900 the goal, just because from a time frame and as a vision it is so much easier to communicate: around the turn of the century we already had electric streetcars, electric underground, electric lighting, motorcars, elevators, entire countries with rail networks and so on. I do not see why a slow-ish-ly shrinking population should entail tossing all of our advances since then—in medicine, computers, telecommunication, chemistry, virtually all fields, not least agriculture (although the way we do it now is utterly unsustainable). Rather, I believe that in a situation where you have an extremely high birthrate and a doubling of the population in a matter of just 15 or 30 years you end up with half of population being rather young and lacking experience; you will also, as an economy, have a hard time to build enough schools and housing. People will and already do live, in many places, in cities that are almost entirely without any built history to speak of. This is what erodes local traditions, customs, awareness; I see this and not the OP's notion of 'shrinking societies cause cultural attrition and global homogenization' (paraphrased from memory) as a major cultural problem. Population growth, not shrinkage, is a great contributor to cultural loss.

This is one of the reasons why we put together this document. We (as authors) see there being many benefits to smaller human populations on earth, but we think that any transition made needs to be made very thoughtfully.

So far we we can see, there is very little (effective) proactive action being taken to ensure that as population levels decline, things we value (like technological progress, women's rights, diversity of cultures, etc.) are protected.

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