The rapidly aging populace is bad for everyone including the old. Isiah 57:1. We should have had the “day of the pillow” that conservatives in Texas were advocating for during Covid.
Endless growth and the inevitable planetary destruction/exhaustion from that process isn’t good for anyone, either.
It’s easier to adapt to a shrinking population than one that is too large to sustain with food and energy.
I hate to say it but tossing bible versus around isn’t going to make your case very well. If we want to talk about things that are grounded in reality maybe let’s not cite a book that says god sent bears to kill children who made fun of a guy for being bald (2 Kings 2:23-24).
Let’s be real: the Christian plan is to trash the earth (Genesis 1:26) until rapture comes around to bail out believers who have been dutifully praying and fucking.
Any day now!
We're nowhere even remotely near our production capacity for food, water, or energy - but we're already facing labor issues in achieving such. And in a low-growth future, which is our future, these labor issues will magnify exponentially. And it's not like you can just pay people more and everybody lives happily ever after - there simply won't be enough people to do everything that needs to be done, even if everybody's willing to work themselves to death. The expectations for what a society can provide will begin to unravel.
And I see no reason not to go sci-fi here because there's every reason to believe it's our future. Earth will not be humanity's only domain. It's practically inconceivable that we won't have thriving off-planet civilizations within a century and realistically - far sooner. And a century of unsustainable growth would be vastly less damaging to society than a century of unsustainable decline.
It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates.
Country boundaries are arbitrary.
And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.
I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria.
The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before.
The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.
A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still.
As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.
Global TFR: 1990–1995=3.31, 1995–2000=2.88, 2000–2005=2.73, 2005-2010=2.62, 2010–2015=2.59, 2015–2020=2.52
Our current 1.6 predicament was just at 2.35
Not if you actually read the verse, it's a relevant, experience driven philosophical statement.
My grandma lived 96 years of a happy, healthy, enriching life. She got her college degree at age 60. She had a beaming smile when she played with her great grandchildren. She enjoyed the company of her husband well into her 90s. She lived independently until the last month of her life.
And there we go with the bible, you gotta read the correct telephone game translation of it and interpret the right way for it to make any bit of sense.
Nobody can just accept that it was written in a human developmental era that most of us wouldn’t relate with in any way.
For example, it was considered a blessing to die young and “go to heaven” in an era before surgical anesthesia. Better than living a long life with ailments that a modern doctor can treat in an afternoon.
We didn’t even get basic antibiotics until less than 200 years ago.
The alternative is that some sort of societal collapse resets humanity to a much lower technological level in which case your grandmother was likely also fortunate to have missed that.
The overall concept is that the only way to get to heaven is to leave earth. Thus, anyone who does that, has, from the perspective of those that remain and inevitably break the longevity barrier, died young.
Think of how disappointed the billions of souls in heaven, experiencing only peace and bliss, would be if their time on earth had increased 10x due antibiotics. It's not the dead who mourn, but the living.
Seems like you're more conditioned by apocalyptical Christian logic than you think
The population went from 1 billion to 8 billion in the last 226 years. So my question to you is: how many more billions do you really think our planet can support? How long can we support 8 billion?
According to the MAHB, the world's oil reserves will run out by 2052, natural gas by 2060 and coal by 2090. Maybe those estimates are sooner than reality, but still, I'd love to hear about how a solution to running out of fossil fuel energy abundance in the next 25-200 years involves growing the population.
It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.
Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?
Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?
$14 per kg to get something to space.
Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US.
So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg).
Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are.
Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates.
Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.
As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1]
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
If the economy is dysfunctional on earth, why is SpaceX a special snowflake company that is not also dysfunctional? It’s a US-based company. It’s publicly traded just like UPS. UPS has more competitors than SpaceX (FedEx, USPS, DHL, Amazon fulfillment, numerous B2C couriers, international couriers)
Using the price of bottled water is not meaningful to this discussion. Bottled water is a convenience product, the water is not a significant aspect of the retail cost of the product. Bottled water costs $5 inside the airport and $.15 at the Costco 2 miles down the road. The water is not the driver of the cost.
We only have one proven habitable planet and we need to protect it. Multi planetary habitation is some combination of 4 things:
1. Billionaires’ excuse to extract the earth dry for profit.
2. Billionaires’ fantasy to escape the pitchforks at their doorsteps, to build a gated community in the cosmos
3. Billionaires’ pump and dump investment vehicle
4. Billionaires’ science fiction affirmation of their narcissistic belief in their own demigodhood.
SpaceX is not publicly traded. It's privately owned and operated, with Elon's motivation behind the company being consistently ideological in nature. The water prices were apples to apples comparisons - the cost of a 0.33 liter bottle of water in an average restaurant.
A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier.
> It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.
There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels.
> Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?
Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research.
The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa).
There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.
Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. We don’t do that and never have because it doesn’t really make logical sense, we have better options available. It lends the question of “why do that?”
Why? Why do we want to live in space colonies? To what end?
This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it, certainly moreso than the vacuum of space.
If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor.
> Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges.
Maybe we’ll do that too someday.
> This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it
With a very limited amount of space and resources. We got into this discussion because of concerns about overpopulation. The Earth has plenty of natural resources and can almost certainly handle a much higher population than it has now, but exploiting the rest of the solar system will make it last even longer and allow significantly more material wealth for every person alive even at a significantly higher total population.