The Global Birth Crash

Good. Without a physical escape hatch off-planet, we are viruses that are overwhelming the little planetary Petri dish we are inhabiting, to massively deleterious effects on both ourselves as well as the global ecosystem.

While I would rather see a space elevator bringing most of humanity to offworld arcologies where we can flourish without poisoning ecosystems, we desperately need to get our on-planet population beneath 1B, and preferably beneath 500M.

And projections via the World3/2024 model show us dropping beneath 4B quite rapidly after civilization collapses in the 2040s, and suggesting a significantly non-zero probability of humanity being extinct by 2200. So we’ll get there without tech, just not in the most ideal manner.