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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

What about the birth rate collapse[0] and how this affects things? It’s easy to project out with holding population levels but as the oldest among us die in the next 20-30 years there will be significant drops in population worldwide, before factoring other forms of population decline it’s already naturally going to happen.

I wonder how this factors into all this.

[0]: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/global-fertilit...

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population is still rising into 2050 by conservative estimates, and it's not counting the energy requirements per person that's exploding.

on a century scale, we will fix this by either getting to space or having a lower population. but the pressure is going to crack our systems long before that. I'm still hoping we get better as pressure increases, but there's nothing in nature that says that has to be true. the system will correct itself but how we will look as a species on the other side can be vastly different.

Getting to space is not going to happen. We don't have the ability to live sustainably on Antarctica, which is several orders of magnitude easier logistically and technologically.

there is no economy in Antartica besides resource extraction, which is banned. Instead a space economy (logistics, tourism, manufacturing, research) its on the rise. No selfsufficient space colonies in the next 50 years for sure

We still don't have the ability.

> What about the birth rate collapse

There are about 8 billion people (about 4 billion more than when I was born) in the world. The "birth rate collapse" isn't making much of a dent in that as far as I know.

Is there any reason to think that the birth rate collapse is a long-term phenomenon (e.g. one thousand years)? There will presumably still be some subcultures that will have high birth rates, and I imagine they will make up an increasingly large proportion of the population as time goes on.

There's a lot of noise about the population decline for 2100, but I wonder about 2200 and beyond.

Education of women is the strongest predictor of falling birth rates - this in turn is unlikely to reverse without a huge change in our economical system.

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