We need to consider ways to reverse or at least slow rapid depopulation

A fascinating article that teeter-totters between wild speculation about the condition of human society many decades in the future (which we are demonstrably bad at predicting) and tenuous cause-and-effect relationships. But there are also a lot of very interesting current statistics that I was not previously aware of.

When I was young, absolutely everyone studying the numbers was certain that overpopulation would result in the collapse of civilization at some point. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but always eventually. Now that population growth is slowing (and it's not at all certain yet that it WILL stop or reverse, just that the recent trend is toward that direction), the sentiment is that de-population is inevitable and will ALSO lead to a collapse in society.

Maybe this is a crazy idea, but what if human populations could reach a steady state? The Earth is a finite resource[1] and can only sustain so many of us. I don't have the foggiest idea how to structure or enforce such a thing but it seems like the most realistic goal.

(1. It should go without saying that off-planet human colonies are at best science fiction, and will be within our lifetimes.)

If you aren't willing to pay people lots of cash to have kids, and then pay for every aspect of raising those kids, then you obviously do not think it is that big of a problem.

Educated people don't have kids because they understand the costs and the costs don't make any damn sense unless you put a huge value on a traditional family lifestyle, which a lot of people don't, because once again they can't afford it.

But big businesses would rather the world burst into flames than have to spend a single cent on taxes to support the entitlements to give them a genuine working class of people, so instead the tactics we have been seeing are increased immigration and reducing the rights women have to do anything other than pump out babies.

From the article: "Perhaps the most extreme case is Japan, where population growth has been slowing since the 1960s. Rather than seek to reverse this pattern, Japanese authorities are now working to adjust to a much smaller population. If the current trend continues, the island nation’s population will drop from 125 million to under 90 million by 2065 and barely 50 million by 2115"

"barely" 50 million. That's 50 cities à 1 million each. Not enough?

From Wikipedia article about Japan: "Japan is the eleventh most populous country in the world, as well as one of the most densely populated and urbanized. About three-fourths of the country's terrain is mountainous, concentrating its population of 125.5 million on narrow coastal plains. [...] The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world, with more than 37.4 million residents."

When you look at Japan from the air what you see is mostly lush green hills with interspersed grey floodplains—grey from the dense urbanization going on there.

A Japan of 50 million people is what we had around 1920 or somesuch. Japan was not considered an empty quarter back then, quite the opposite.

We don't need to "reverse or slow rapid depopulation". We must become less people. What we need is to learn how to do that with a minimum of suffering. If we don't, our suffering will be ensured, for a long, long time.

Maybe this is why the Georgia Guidestones were demolished. They warned about overpopulation at a time capitalists are far more worried about underpopulation.

No, we shouldn’t. Our planet’s healthy carrying capacity of humans is about 2 Billion at a somewhat less-than-first-world level of totally vegan quality of life, or somewhere around 500 million at a first-world omnivore quality of life.

We are so far beyond the planet’s healthy carrying capacity that the planet is dying before our very eyes, for those with the will to actually see what’s happening. Fisheries are collapsing everywhere. Topsoil will be gone within the next 60 years. Wild populations of all animals has gone down by 60% in the last century. We are in a human-caused extinction event that rivals the worst that has happened in geological history not only in magnitude, but also in sheer velocity. Even ELE-class asteroids took centuries for the majority of their extinctions to conclude, and we’re doing it in mere decades.

Sure, the planet could “support” 10 or 20 billion or more, but only by placing 100% of all arable land under intensive use, and by fishing every inch of the ocean; whereupon all non-farmed life will be pushed to extinction and the planet’s biosphere will collapse, bring its carrying capacity rapidly down to 0 humans.

We desperately need far fewer humans on this planet, and as soon as humanly possible.