This is why we need less humans on this planet. No one says that, because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway.
Why do people who say we need fewer humans on the planet always say, "no one says this?"
Literally every discussion about population, pollution, global warming, fusion, farming, or social sciences has some thread where someone says, "there are too many people and no one is talking about it." It's getting tiring reading this martyrdom, and I generally tend to agree with the viewpoint.
But this is not some edgy take. The most populous country on earth enacted policies that seem to support this idea in the 70s.
Folks love to think they’re more controversial and brave than they actually are. Feels good to think you’re a firebrand who’s not afraid to “tell it like it is”, even though no one agrees with you.
Up until less than a hundred years ago the only way to make sure any of your kids survived was to have seven or eight of them. This has change dramatically in the developed countries and is on the way every else as well as standards of living increase.
Child births need to be at around 2.1 per woman if the population is to remain constant. Right now most developed countries are way below that.
2 countries have less than 1 kid per woman
114 countries have less than 2
62 countries have less than 3 (20 of which are at less than 2.2)
21 countries have less than 4
18 countries have less than 5
11 countries have less than 6
Of the largest 6 (half the world's population):
China has 1.6, India 2.3, US 1.8, Indonesia 2.0, Pakistan 3.6, Brazil 1.7.
It's still growing, but not exactly skyrocketing anymore: "The highest global population growth rates, with increases of over 1.8% per year, occurred between 1955 and 1975—peaking to 2.1% between 1965 and 1970. The growth rate declined to 1.2% between 2010 and 2015 and is projected to decline further in the course of the 21st century."
You need to look at people dieing as well. Most of the population in those countries with high growth is really young and won't die for many decades. If they have an amount of kids below the stasis limit these kids will be alive at the same time and if the kids are more than the grandparents during the total population will go up to a while.
Fewer humans is a cop out. We need humans who won't pollute the earth to death. We need borderline Authoritarianism that protects the environment. 90 or so percent of humans just want to survive. If society tells them they need a carbon emitting vehicle to survive, they do that. Humans aren't the problem, our society is.
All vehicles are carbon emitting, some just less than others. The question is whether efficiency is enough to maintain a reasonable quality of life for 10 billion people with zero net carbon (and other pollution). If the price is authoritarianism, I'd rather avoid having children, thanks.
Having 2 children to replace the parents is already enough to drive population down longterm (because statistically, there could be a lot of reasons that those kids might not reach a time to have their own offsprings).
To be fair, mmaunder didn't say which 10% he thinks should be allowed to live. He may be in favour of eliminating the rich cheap-airline flying, consumerist car owners first.
I can definitely say that the statement 'Have as many kids as you want' is not considered a basic human right in a resource constrained place in India where a lot of discussions among educated public was the ill effects of population and the competition for scarce resources it generates. It is a privileged first world view where education, development and high standard of living led to falling birth rates. On a second level it is to do with religious ideologies like Catholicism, Mormonism and Islam where even educated people have 3+ kids many times. Also it was a norm in societies with high infant mortality rate and lack of education (Africa, India of the 50s to 80s etc.) I feel a replacement level fertility of 2 kids should be the norm personally and Govt should never provide any future assistance like UBI to people with more kids.
Any ways this assumes that the world resources (land, water, minerals, technology ) are divided fairly in the population. This is definitely not true and the people who managed to conquered distant lands have much more of this available per person. Simply compare per capita stats of Canada v Bangladesh and the answer becomes clear.
> But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population.
I can't imagine maintaining that in anything other than a brutal and arbitrary way. It's very difficult to separate humans from their humanity, and even in countries where birth limits have been tried, we know that it is an ineffective policy and is ultimately cruel.
> Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway.
Just take your ideas one step further. Earth is not a home for humans, it is a crucible that seeks to find the most suitable form of life. There's no reason we should expect to succeed, and if we can't, half-measures that only prolong suffering and the failure of our biology are illogical.
We’re going to have a brutal and arbitrary reduction of our population no matter what. It is surely already too late for birth reduction to be the instrument. Ecological collapse is upon us.
Ah, great, just be rich. Or be poor and don't register your kids anywhere. Let's not either forget single moms, missing dads, widows, disabled kids, not hitting replacement levels, etc.
A growing population leads to numerous economic, militaristic, and scientific advantages. Why would any country willingly shackle themselves to their detriment
isn't the 70B of farm animals just a part of the "7.5B humans" problem?
Anyway, i think that it is a crying shame that we're still farming animals instead of growing artificial meat. Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings, i think that would result in a great leap in our conscience, empathy, etc. - it will unleash a great deal of human mental development with natural results in social and economic development.
"The world now produces more than four times the quantity of meat as it did fifty years ago"
"The average person in the world consumed around 43 kilograms of meat in 2014. This ranges from over 100kg in the US and Australia to only 5kg in India."
"Meat consumption increases as the world is getting richer."
When the earth has finite resources, why not reduce the amount of resources used per person before talking about population control? Even with less people, you have to draw a limit somewhere on resource usage.
> Anyway, i think that it is a crying shame that we're still farming animals instead of growing artificial meat. Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings, i think that would result in a great leap in our conscience, empathy, etc. - it will unleash a great deal of human mental development with natural results in social and economic development.
Are there any realistic timelines on when lab grown meat will be available and affordable? How about lab grown steaks, whole ducks and whole salmon? At what stage do you think people who won't switch to alternatives now would switch?
Continue eating them as usual but stop breeding new ones. Most of them only live a few months, they'll all be gone within two years.
The species won't go extinct either, we can still keep some around in their natural habitats and zoos, which are both much nicer conditions than most farms. Preferably we won't keep around the breeds that were created for farming, they just aren't healthy animals.
The next quandaries are what do farm owners, farm workers, slaughterhouses, tanners, textiles, feed companies, agriculture focused veterinarian services and products, etc, do now that they're no longer needed?
>Every time I see discussions like this I never see thoughts on what to do with all those animals.
[until the aliens bring tomorrow the mass production lines of cheap lab meat] Because of naturally gradual process of lab meat quality increase and price decrease there will be no point in time when suddenly "we have 70B animals we're no longer consuming "
>Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings...
But that's literally in your scenario. If you don't have an answer, that's fine, because all of this is idealism. I just never see any conversation pertaining to what we do with all the animals.
It seems like it comes down to a substantial culling, as letting them loose would be disastrous for a few obvious reasons.
The question doesn't make any sense, because it presupposes that everybody changes behavior in a timeframe that is very short compared to the typical lifespan of the animals. But I don't think that's conceivable. The total number of chickens in the world may be tens of billions but is a fraction of the number consumed in a year, I believe. Feel free to correct me if you have some knowledge about farming.
First: Your English is perfectly fine. As someone that speaks English as a first language; I greatly respect and appreciate you even trying. That's an admirable trait, friend; don't ever feel bad, or especially let someone else make you feel bad for trying to communicate. It's the most human thing there is.
Second: That's kind of my perspective. Ideas are cheap and easy. Idealism paints the perfect outcome, without the really hard parts of making it happen, or the incredibly complicated network of systems that would be effected by trying to reach the target. These are huge problems; entrenchment is incentivized and reinforced on many levels. We often don't solve problems, we treat symptoms, because it's easier than doing what needs to be done to solve the problems.
One quote from the article regarding media sharing tips for farmers:
Most people do not understand the complexity of raising pigs and getting pork from the farm to their table. That means, “[a] good rule of thumb is to speak to a level a third grader [eight to 10 years old] would understand to ensure that things are not taken out of context.
It's unlikely the world would decide all at once to not need farm animals anymore so I think it would be a case of the population falling over years as less were bred.
Also, some species have been altered through selective breeding so much they would have trouble survinging normally e.g. rapidly growing animals that would have difficulty supporting their own weight after the age they would normally be slaughtered.
There would hopefully be more land for wild cows, chickens, pigs etc. to thrive after too.
I don't think that would fix the issue. The majority of the pollution used to come from developed countries, now it comes from developing countries and their products are used by only the minority of the total population. Reducing the population would only make the surviving ones more lavish. I don't believe in humanity enough to see that work.
And there it is. A sudden torrent of downvotes. Dropped from 4 to zero in seconds. Like is said, having kids is considered a basic human right. We’re so arrogant, yet so basic as a species.
I had a rather mundane but profound moment in my life about a year ago in which I felt like a non-verbal (cerebellum, amygdala, I dont know) part of my brain communicated with the part of me that I know as ‘me’ and talks to myself in my head. Ever since then I feel as though ‘I’ am just the captain of the ship, and that a good portion of my actions are influenced but not fully controlled by that part of me.
That same part of others might be the part that’s downvoting you. The reflexive, non-verbal, maybe not even particularly cognitive part of us that run the engine room of our human machine. The part that really likes to reproduce.
One exercise that might help draw the distinction I’m talking about is to pick a part of your body, esp a specific hand or foot or even more specific...select fingers or toes. Then do something totally normal like make some coffee or go brush your teeth. While doing this, pay very close attention to the nuances of motion and coordination of that part, and observe how specific those are vs the rather coarse-grained instruction in your head...if there is one at all. For example, the automatic rolling of the toothpaste cap into your ring finger for storage and the way your pinky is cradling the bottom of the tube while your other fingers close in cadence to squeeze the toothpaste in the right direction. I sometimes wonder if this part of us is responsible for some of that silent hand on the Internet.
Anyway, not sure what this has to do with visibility in Nepal, haha
isn't this is a very simplistic view on having children? There are much more obvious reasons to have some. also, .. most of use have enough mouths to tell them what they wanna hear, including you and me and our supposed echo chambers all over the internet (yes, having children is egoistical and naive! you're right aSplash0fDerp man! .. yes, we will overcome those problems, children are our duty, you're right alehander42 ! )
I'm in the states, but using your "mate" reference as a cue... I'm currently looking at Austrailia to settle down and raise a family.
I think the opportunity to find a young lady with natural resilience is much higher in AU. Using Mick Jagger as an example, we can populate the planet well into our 70's, so unless you age like a fried turd, there is no hurry.
A case can also be made that those who want the least children for sustainability reasons should try to have more children who grow up to make a compounding difference in the future.
Ithink the ratio was chosen randomly, and is not important. What's important is to get the population number down in the longterm. Or, in other words, make sure that longterm the population doesn't grow beyond control. If you're having 2 kids in your lifetime, you're helping to drive the population down. Having at most2 kids is fair, don't! ou think?
Sadly, at this point it does seem like in order to significantly curb emissions it will take a catastrophy of biblical proportions which wipes out much of humanity.
That, or an endless succession of airborne diseases that keeps the population isolating itself .
Unless you're advocating some sort of genocidal cull of the population, which would be quite extreme, population reduction isn't going to work fast enough to solve the climate problem. Even if you could globally enforce that every couple could only have one child it would take 6 or 7 generations to reduce the population to ~10%. We don't have the 100+ years that would take. It needs fixing now.
I’m not sure how to interpret your directive (“we need less humans...” “10% of our current population”) without deep disgust. Your critique of others’ presumption of rights as humans clashes with your ideal where 90% of humans lack even the right to live. Most appalling is that this world view might be treated as anything less than macabre.
I see no macabre at all in these statements. I don't think anyone was talking about taking away the right to live from 90% of population. It is enough to limit number of children born and population will naturally decrease.
Birth rates, at least in the US, have been on the decline without needing to enact laws limiting reproduction. I'm curious what the people suggesting such thought about it when China did it.
There’s a very real chance that strategy would significantly increase the likelihood of human extinction in the medium to distant future. We need minds to solve problems.
Of course, that’s not to say that it’s impossible to have too many people, or even that decreasing the likelihood of human extinction is necessarily one of the most important goals.
No, not equally argued. We didn't put asteroids into motion that can destroy the earth's ability to sustain human life. I'm sure you could infinitely fill a list of things we have no control over that could make humans extinct.
Forced stagnation might be able to effectively eliminate human-caused extinction, but you still have to worry about the external extinction events (like changes in solar output, or asteroids, or supernovae).
But without stagnation, yes, you have the human-caused problems to worry about, but you also have people working to solve those problems, as well as people working to solve the external problems.
Yes, I have read it. The book is about how it is difficult to improve matters by adding more software engineers to an overdue software engineering project. The book does not claim that, for instance, 100 astronomers and 100 construction workers can not solve more problems than merely 100 construction workers.
Malthusians do, and have, for more than 200 years. Two hundred years.
Now, if we keep growing our population, then yes, eventually the Malthusians must and will be right. And perhaps that eventually is now. It's worth exploring that, even if Malthusians are like the boy who cried wolf.
But I'm skeptical that we're finally at our and the planet's limit for the simple reason that population is already predicted to go flat and then begin declining very soon.
Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, Russia, China, India, Iran -- all of these are below replacement rate fertility now or nearly there and getting there fast. Much of Latin America is well on its way there too. That leaves places like Nigeria, for example, as having high fertility rates, but even there it's a pretty safe prediction that fertility will eventually go down.
Decreasing fertility correlates very well with GDP per capita, and it's understood how wealth has caused low fertility rates. That dynamic need not be universal, but it's a pretty safe bet.
Meanwhile, Malthusians have been perennially wrong not only because they've failed to predict or accept the reality of low and declining fertility rates, but also because they've consistently failed to predict or accept the market's ability to adjust to demand growth. So far we've always found ways to produce more food and so on -- no, there's no guarantee that we will continue to be able to, but the fact that total population will peak soon then begin declining means we probably won't need too much more in the way of food production revolutions.
Malthusian also complain about pollution but don't seem to understand that more wealth == cleaner environment -- not at first, maybe, but certainly at some point. Just look at Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic: Haitians are so poor that they cut down their tree for firewood, while Dominicans are wealthy enough that they do not -- same island, same climate, different stories. Or look at the U.S.! In the 1930s river fires were so commonplace as to not be news. In the late 40s river fires were rare enough that they made Time magazine's cover. Now they're even rarer. Those are just some examples. Of course, most Americans have no idea how clean the U.S. is because they've not been to, e.g., Beijing, but that's good anyways: we can always get cleaner.
> ... because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population.
If some family wants to have six children, in a country that has below-replacement fertility rates, that won't move the needle. These are macro trends.
What you write comes across as rather ominous: a threat to impose Chinese-style family planning rules. Not only is it a very bad idea (ask China!) but it's also quite tyrannical, and completely unnecessary given the macro fertility trends.
How do you imagine we'll get to 10% of the current population anyways? War? Draconian family planning? Something worse? How much time do you think we can afford to let pass before we reach that 10%? Centuries? Decades?? If you say "centuries", it might happen naturally. Saying "decades" would strongly imply that you must have some truly awful ideas for how to make it happen.
You don't need genocide to reduce population, just birth rate policies. Most developed nations already have declining native populations (sometimes the overall population grows only through immigration).
China had a one-child policy for a while. I think the world would be much better if other countries would restrict the reproduction of humans in a sensible way. Only those who can afford to bring up children with a minimum quality of life should be allowed to.
That's a solved problem. It worked in China without forced sterilizations. Just like how we have laws against theft… doesn't mean theft won't exist, but the law and appropriate punishment does reduce it to manageable levels.
EDIT: I just remember. The Cherokee language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language turned a completely illiterate culture into one with more per capita readers than the recently introduced English culture. That's seems like a clear indication that there's no need for evolutionary selection specifically for literacy.
>Can you point to the studies which suggest that the ability to write is a strongly selected genetic ability?
You're confusing phenotype and genotype. The genes for the ability to write include the ones for the citric acid cycle, which I think we can all agree is selected for. Nobody knows what mutations would be necessary to stop antinatalism from catching on, but natural selection will probably be able to find them. If the answer was "humans are now too dumb to talk about antinatalism," then that would happen, although something else could happen as well. (Maybe "humans now love kids way more than previous generations thought possible.")
>I just remember. The Cherokee language turned a completely illiterate culture into one with more per capita readers than the recently introduced English culture.
Yeah, so obviously whatever genes give people the ability to write, from the citric acid cycle to the mysterious neurological stuff, are selected for strongly enough to be fixed in a population that was separated for a long time. You're not really disagreeing with me... I'm saying that "writing genes" are selected for, potentially because of benefits unrelated to writing, and you're saying that the behavior of writing isn't selected for. Those two statements do not contradict.
Which ones of your friends and family members should be culled? You get to keep 10%.
Usually this argument boils down to "everyone I know and like should still be allowed to live, but we should totally get rid of billions of anonymous (poor) people"
This is pretty bad faith. It is very unlikely that you're responding to Hitler, of course no one is suggesting we murder 90% of the world's population, that is unspeakably evil.
But, with magic, imagine we had every technology we have now but with only 10% of the world's population. It _would_ be incredible, you could fly all over the world to your heart's content, your neighbor could buy a big diesel truck, and your friend could all the sushi they could ever want, and the world wouldn't notice. There would be immense open spaces, untouched, able to be enjoyed and the permanent residents, the plants and animals, wouldn't be perturbed.
That sounds pretty appealing to me, maybe it doesn't to you, but that is what someone is talking about, they aren't gleefully suggesting genocide. Now, how would we get there without magic? If I were king the first thing on my list would be educating children, specifically educated girls have many fewer and later children. Other things that drive birth rates down? Increasing quality of life, access to healthcare, and a strong social safety net, none of those things smells like bad things. I hope the next time someone suggests that you assume they mean doing those things over murder.
It actually trends down, likely because children have historically been used as a retirement plan of sorts, and of course you'd never be sure how many of your ten made it to adulthood.
Financially comfortable and well educated families tend to have less children, this is a pattern that has been repeated many times across country and cultural borders.
Nature will take care of itself in the long run. It is adopting to reality and designing vehicles (ex: virus) that is getting closer and closer to optimal level of lethality to humans and it’s own survivability. Cold/flu viruses were not lethal enough anymore, Ebola was too lethal, SARS/MERS were with little more lethality, SARS2 with little more own survivability (likely, still to be known).
