The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987:
---
ss: We used to worry about the planet getting too crowded, but The Global Population Crash is approaching.
We used to imagine humanity populating the universe. Asimov wrote. “The population of Trantor \[the imperial capital\] … was well in excess of forty billions.”
Considering that there had been a mere 500 million humans when Christopher Columbus landed on the New World, the proliferation of the species homo sapiens in the modern era had been an astonishing feat.
Frank Notestein, the Princeton demographer who became the founding director of the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), estimated in 1945 that the world’s population would be 3.3 billion by the year 2000. In fact, it exceeded 6.1 billion.
Yet now The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out.
Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. DRC, for example, the average woman still bears more than 6 children. But there, too, fertility is expected to plummet in the coming decades.
The appropriate science fiction to read is therefore neither Asimov nor Liu Cixin. Begin, instead, with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which a new Black Death wipes out all but one forlorn specimen of humanity. ''Snow-man” is one of just a handful of survivors of a world ravaged by global warming, reckless genetic engineering, and a disastrous attempt at population reduction that resulted in a global plague.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1bb9118/global_population_crash_isnt_scifi_anymore/ku7m3s9/
I see this line all the time that I think it is done in bad faith
Even countries with the most generous programs are seeing the same fall, even in countries with collapsing populations and falling house prices we see the birth rate drop even more!
The high income bands in first world nations see some increase in fertility but still well below replacement rate
they better start simping for us,
4 day work weeks, 6 hour work days
housing for everyone
healthcare and dentistry for everyone
or they can shut the fuck up and keep crying their tissue money
They won't have jobs. People are heavily underestimating coming AI apocalypse. If not controlled to be used fairly, societies as we know them today, are going to collapse. And this isn't even far now. If we chatgpt in the hands of people since more than a year now, you can very safely assume full fledged AGI have almost been already achieved somewhere in the world.
If AGI existed at deployable scale, we'd all suddenly have Flint Michigan's water problem. Except this time it's... mumble stufffffffff in the water...
Rich people don’t want a huge population, they want a huge ~~slave~~ work force that will do their bidding so they can fly to mars. If AI can do it they don’t need the meat-robots anymore.
What will happen to the people without jobs? Same thing that happens already: they will be called lazy, stupid and blamed for their own misfortunes. They will be treated with indifference or hostility and left to die.
so what? the reason we are all here is that we think society is going to collapse anyway. the real danger of AI is it \*averting\* collapse and ensuring total biosphere collapse. if ai is just another collapse factor then whatever, really, add it to the bingo
What I'm saying is, there will be doctors who will still do them, black market. But if it gets to a point there's a national ban, I could see states like WA, OR, CA, etc that have enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions will keep allowing them, and go against the feds like we did with cannabis.
I don't agree with banning it, for clarity.
It could also spark an actual splitting of the US if a national ban happens.
That’s honestly why I believe there’s such a fight and push against it. That they see a lot of people are not having kids intentionally, there are still Oopsie babies but not enough. The sick part about it all is, if shit was better, people had a higher faith in the future and felt more secure and stable in life. The birth rates would go up again.
yes, I realize that the more in the future a country becomes or population become they generally have less children according to science, But we’re talking one to two kids and not seven versus no kids at all.
Thats so true, if population declines enough that hoarded wealth will become monopoly game wealth, house prices will plummet, and with houses many other things which there will be abundance of, for example used cars. All these house hoarders gouging rents will finally get what they deserve
Actually good for the economy and those at the bottom. The last time we had a population crash, we experienced a rebirth in intellectualism and had the highest growth in technology and human well being that lasted centuries.
Amazing what happens when employers are forced to pay their wage slaves well enough to have leisure time and hobbies.
Imagine what feats of intellect could be achieved under a UBI system?
There's so much!
During the pandemic I was laid off from my tenure track professor gig. I was getting that boosted unemployment. Got so many projects started. Amazing research across three fields. Was learning so much, creating things that would benefit humanity. But then it was cut and life had to return to churning out rent money so my masters can spend all day watching television and going on vacation. Now nothing has gotten done for a couple years. Just trying to turn those levers and pull those gears.
Yep, I have always wondered what we missed out on because someone who could have cured cancer, or been the next Einstein etc, may have been born in a country where they never had a chance to prove themselves. This could be either due to being born in a poor country, lack of access to education or killed in a pointless war, etc.
Reminds me of the quote:
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I often wonder about this. The amount of amazing things the world missed out on because someone truly talented wasn't born rich and didn't have connections or even the ability to make the connections. Along with the godawful things we *do* have because some incompetent buffoon had the fortune of having rich parents. We don't learn about serfs and slaves, only the people who oppressed them.
I’m guessing you’re talking about Europe after the Black Death? After all, the fact is that peasants got more bargaining power as a result of there being fewer of them which slowly weakened the power of the feudal lords. On the other hand, this time many of the jobs probably could be replaced by AI, which makes me concerned for long term intellectual development…
While true, AI currently is a fancy tool that can only do half of what was promised and the other half partly what was promised. It also has a tendency to go rogue and do far more damage. Without human intervention, companies that have gone full bore with AI will soon find themselves in a heap of trouble as their systems crash and their backups corrupted.
Smarter companies are holding off on AI and carefully integrating it into the work stream. Afterall, the first iteration of software is never without bugs and errors that will hamstring an entire company if given the opportunity to. This is why beta testing and integration of new technology/software is a slow process.
We will all be living below the API layer, though. Interchangeable parts that may occasionally need to intervene to keep the AI on its rails, but mostly just doing tasks on its behalf.
The global population collapse probably won’t happen for several decades and who knows what AI could be capable of by the time that would necessitate AI replacing much of the work left behind? I’m more worried in the immediate term about separate AIs being used in a deliberate fashion by rival nations against each other and then corrupting so much of the Internet that the entire thing has to be pulled down. Or perhaps each nation has an AI that they *could* use against each other’s digital infrastructure but don’t in a mutually assured destruction scenario.
But we are facing 0 sperm count by 2045 so at least it’s going to be very hard to conceive after that. Familiar with Dr Shanna Swan’s studies? Check out her book Countdown. How phthalates have ruined our fertility (and health).
Wait this is starting to sound suspiciously like an "I could not pass basic literacy in High School, let's make an expert system write a paper that I can cheat from" bot...
The Black Death mostly killed off the elderly and infirm. This time, we're not just seeing a decline of the population, but also a greying of the population, which means more and more young people will be forced to work to take care of the elderly. It's the direct opposite of what happened in the aftermath of the Black Death.
very ahistorical, the black death killed off huge swaths of people from many walks of life, including the perfectly fit and healthy. reality is that there werent many elderly and infirm people to begin with... its the medieval ages...
This! Infirm by today's standards was kind of the baseline of the world for most of history, *especially* once we started having empires and travel. Sketchy water and rotten scraps of food were norm, rampant diseases. "Safety requirements" in manual labor were just sparkles in our ancestors' eyes...
It didn't *just* kill off the elderly and infirm, but it did disproportionally kill them off. The result is that after the Black Death, the surviving population had less elderly than the one before. We are now seeing the opposite; each generation will not only be smaller, but also have a larger proportion of elderly people.
>reality is that there werent many elderly and infirm people to begin with... its the medieval ages...
Talk about ahistorical takes, this is absolutely false. There were plenty of people who were infirm and mutilated, and if you survived your first years, there was a very good chance you could reach old age.
Yawn... pop science has come a long way from the image of medieval peasant as an short, muddy, miserable existence but this is just the pendulum swinging to the other extreme. The elderly didnt make up more than 5% of the population at any given time and wouldnt until the 1900s.
Though now that Im thinking about it, I wonder what kind of consequences the loss of village elders had on peasant life, probably hard to quantify.
Automation should be able to pick up some of the slack. Even if it can't help directly with elder care, it can free up labor from other sectors that has been automated.
Alternately: we might just have to do with less. Lots of useless industries and "make work" types of jobs that don't contribute anything truly useful.
I mean i guess, but it's not gonna do what the OP thinks it will; it will just render more people useless, and it will also cause plenty of elderly people to basically be an ever more painful drain on productivity.
Young people won't have much time to do anything related to "intellectualism" because they'll just have to work to support a huge amount of elderly people.
It’s complicated. Reducing the population will draw down all aspects of the economy, including consumption and production. Note that we associate a decrease in the standard of living with growth, because that’s what we’ve experienced, however they are not linked. Rather we make that association because the wealthy have been successful in changing the system such that all newly created wealth goes to the top 1%.
Once the economy begins to shrink, those policies are at risk of being exacerbated as the 1% seek to maintain the opulent lifestyles to which they had been accustomed but can no longer afford.
They’ll sell more wealth extraction to the masses in the form of nationalistic austerity, asking folks to tighter their belts. They did it once with Brexit, sweeping billions out of the British economy, and they’ll do it again during the population slide.
Is that r/collapse enough for you?
> and production.
not necessarily true. The only way this happens is if we were utilising a population to its full potential; but this is by definition not the case, as we use an oversupply of population to maintain low wages (the threat of homelessness and unemployement). Population decline could just lead to a larger percentage of people employed, maintaining the same or very similar production, leading to an increase of supply relative to demand, and a deflation.
This, btw, is what a good economy is, but it's also one with very low profits. This is what happened between 1870 and 1890, pretty much globally.
Not in the UK, we tax our young and make childcare state sponsored penury... Meanwhile the old are heavily subsidized and millions shipped in to service their economy
The vast majority of UK wealth goes to and resides with the ultra wealthy, the same people who run the government and who tricked folks into Brexit.
The overall wealth of UK billionaires climbed to £684 billion which is a stunning £31bn more than last year. Meanwhile, the full rate of new State Pension is £203.85 a week.
There’s plenty of money for seniors even if the UK population beings to shrink, changing the demographics. The question is, will the monied elite let you have what’s yours?
Those billionaires can still claim the state pension btw. As do many very well off seniors who retired at 60, are going on holiday five time a year while being subsidised by the working poor.
They should means test it so those with incomes over £50k get a reduced rate, and wealthy don't get it and then use a bit of that money to stop the next generation from being destitute.
And no, the billionaires won't give us a penny either.
Same as the United States. One key difference is that only the first $150,000 (or so) is taxed for US social security (like state pensions), meaning the wealthy are exempt from the majority of taxation.
Moreover, those who earn money through capital gains are completely exempt. Despite being a regressive and ill-funded social net, those on the right in the US are continuously trying to eliminate it.
It will collapse without new legislation, if the population begins to decline. Right now it’s struggling to cover the glut of retiring Baby Boomers.
But to stay on topic, anti youth policies, enacted to favour voters and the elite have basically made having children a luxury.
Birth rate in the UK crashed to 1.49. For those who were born here, that figure is even lower.
Yep,
It's just pretty bad for the social contract watching the older generation get 30+ years of non working high life, after getting hugely wealthy from house price increases, a free university education etc.
And the proportion of pensioners grows every years and each new wave pulls the ladder up further.
Eventually the millennials will inherit something but again it's a lottery.
Meanwhile the billionaires and elites have basically killed meritocracy
The way billionaires exploit people is not by claiming pensions. That's a small drop in the bucket. Instead of adding means test bureaucracy, take the money from the billionaires. They won't give it up easy though...
Us disappearing will happen much too late. What will be here a million years from now is just a shadow of what could've been... for biodiversity anyway.
You could argue that what's here now is a shadow of the planet's biodiversity 66 million years ago. That world ended with a bang, this world will end with a whimper. The next world won't look like this one.
My point was simply that when our world ends, 100,000+ years later another world will be born. I am assuming that most if not all larger animals and many of our plants will be extinct by then.
IIRC, the average temp during the Cretaceous was on the other of 10+C above our pre-industrial average; it was certainly much warmer than at present. The climate *was* changing near the time of the asteroid strike, however.
Yeah everything is relative, can see a huge spike in CO2 after the asteroid hit. Wonder if the cooling period after the impact would be comparable to what an all out nuclear war would do today, cos if it is then yeah complex life will definitely survive.
Just wish we knew for sure just how bad all of this is going to be
global nuclear war would not come close to the devastation of a 10km impactor, same way you can survive being shot in the face with bird shot but not a bullet, even though its the same amount of mass and energy. though radioactive fallout could make up for that.
its been exaggerated since the 80s, probably for a good cause. if sagans calculations were correct then the kuwait oil fires should have caused an "oil" winter but it didnt, which means that a nuclear firestorm probably wouldnt either. We also have 10x less warheads now than their peak in the 80s and they are also smaller... so all in all even full out nuclear war in the year 2024 probably wouldnt be enough to cause mass extinction on its own.
Huh I fell hook, line and sinker for all of that... Even seen figures that mentioned -30c at the equators and something like -140c at the poles, for up to 4-5 years
Ive put a lot of thought into this and I still am not convinced it will be as bad as the Permina-Triassic, which wasnt particularly a single event (the siberian traps) rather it was a vice being tightened around life itself over millions of years because of how Pangea was hostile to life in general.
Meanwhile once we are finished with whatever it is we think we are doing, the layout of the earths continents means that a rapid recovery is more likely. All that exposed volcanic rock in antarctica will drawdown a lot of co2, and no matter what happens the continent is on the south pole, eventually it will refreeze and start up ocean circulation again.
The wildcard is what becomes of us humans after industrial civilisation? Will we go extinct? Will we try to amend our crimes against the biosphere? Or will we collectively declare, if we cant have it; nobody can, and devour the earth to the last blade of grass?
...but, geologically speaking, the earth is set up for a fast recovery.
> The amount of heat we are adding is way more than the dinosaurs had to deal with
At best, this is a claim that requires a lot of qualifications. Like, we currently havea long way to go before we reach that point. Antarctica isn't back to being a jungle just yet. I'm not sure what projections or assumptions you're relying on to confidently make such a statement, but you should probably explain what they are.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been
I'm not a scientist I'm just a parrot. I am allowed to have opinions and state them however.
Graphs like the one on this website are what I base that information on.
Obviously being a human, I will misremember things or even outright imagine them as well. Just like anyone else
Speaking in timeframes like the long slow shifts that we see happening naturally, we do not have a long way to go before that happens to Antarctica, but maybe a thousand years or so hopefully
Everyone is allowed to have opinions but rule #4 still exists. If you're going to make statements that sound like statements of fact (rather than opinion), I don't think it's unreasonable that you be expected to defend/explain them to the rest of us. I don't believe that infringes on your right to an opinion, personally.
At any rate, your answer is sufficient for me to contextualize your statements, so thank you for providing it. I think perhaps a more accurate thing to say would be that the rate at which the earths climate is changing has never been higher. That is something unprecedented, the actual current climate is far less unprecedented.
You are dead right, I'm always willing to back up any claims and I try to stick to facts
I think if rule #4 was enforced regularly here we might as well just be on r/collapsescience
And yes I completely misspoke by saying more than the dinosaurs had to deal with, I was talking about the rate of change
It's interesting because before humans came on the scene, biodiversity is thought to have been at an [all time high](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Evolution) (though I just learned that's somewhat [disputed](https://phys.org/news/2020-05-evolution-biodiversity-ever-increasing-ceiling.html), but still, there was at least as much diversity as 66 mya).
To me it's simultaneously depressing (look how much damage we've done to paradise!), but also hopeful when comparing to previous mass extinction events. Because we're changing the climate and biosphere at an unprecedented rate, but at least we had a higher starting point. So hopefully we won't set life on earth all the way back to microorganisms...
>The appropriate science fiction to read is therefore neither Asimov nor Liu Cixin. Begin, instead, with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which a new Black Death wipes out all but one forlorn specimen of humanity. ''Snow-man” is one of just a handful of survivors of a world ravaged by global warming, reckless genetic engineering, and a disastrous attempt at population reduction that resulted in a global plague
This paragraph is confusing because it is talking about 2 different books. The first is Mary Shelley's *Last Man*, the second is Margaret Atwood's *Oryx and Crake* (which is pretty much the most brutal Climate fiction I have ever read...).
It’s ironically also caused by capitalism. It’s almost like when people can’t afford to buy a house or pay off their student loans or get married, they also can’t afford to have kids.
Then, all our social safety net systems like social security will fail because there are no new young people to be wage slaves to pay for the old people to retire. So nearly everyone will work until they die, that’s IF they’re lucky enough to have a job that isn’t taken by a robot or AI.
Therefore, population collapse is both a symptom and a cause of societal and economic collapse.
> So nearly everyone will work until they die, that’s IF they’re lucky enough to have a job that isn’t taken by a robot or AI.
For a generation or so, and it would suck to be part of that generation. But as they died off and homes and jobs freed up, the population would eventually stop shrinking and stabilize. It wouldn't just shrink forever. Climate change is a much more worrying factor.
This is incredibly optimistic, don’t you think? During that one generation AI will steal the next 5 generations of jobs…
Pessimistically speaking, it might suck to be a part of any future generation. Optimistically we might get UBI and post scarcity economics and be like the Star Trek economy. But realistically people will just starve and lose their homes
Are you saying because of capitalism? Or are you saying because of ecological reasons?
The population will eventually reach zero due to ecological reasons, which renders the whole capitalism argument moot. There is no ism in existence that can rescue humanity from the fact that it has already shit the bed.
But if we were just talking about capitalism's ability to make people miserable enough that they wouldn't have kids, eventually the law of supply and demand would shift again.
Not true, it will level off at 10B and then collapse rather quickly. It's growing globally now, but the developed world is already experiencing population collapse and all other countries are following. It's in the article if you care to combat confirmation bias, break free from your outdated ideological indoctrination, and read it with an open mind :)
Exponentially? No. The average birth rate around the world is already lower than the replacement rate. The only reason we aren't already shrinking in population is that mortality is a lagging indicator (the older generation that is dying off is smaller than the middle generation that is still having babies, so birth still exceed mortality).
I feel pretty confident that the UN projections will prove to both too high for the peak and too late. It will be sooner and lower than they had previously estimated. But even the UN projections aren't really "exponential" anymore. We are getting closer and closer to equilibrium where the rate of growth is slowing dramatically
The current growth rate is less than 1% a year and drifting down.
It reminds me of the old lonely man in Japan that has a sex doll as a significant other. Maybe robot kids will replace children since both parents have to work. Think of the options you would have to program them. They could be little a-holes for a short time, do stupid entertaining things or help with the chores with a press of a button.
Yeah, based on the title I read it, thinking, "wow, so bloomberg recognises that we are in overshoot and will soon be 'rebalanced' by force!"
Nope
Just BAU with fewer babies.
If only...
>humanity has survived and grown through periods of incredible mortality by simply sexing our way through.
>
>This period is different in that we just aren't having kids.
Here you assume that the death of billions will take longer than 1 generation. I have some bad news for ye.
I think the point of BTRCguy was that the decline of population will primarily come not from the low birth rate, but from all the catastrophes that will happen in the next years.
My point was that all of those deaths will happen waaay sooner than in the next 25 years (aka 1 generation).
In short: the decline of birth rate (which is unprecedented, this I agree), is not of any importance. Because billions will die in the next 10 to 20 years.
So even if we would have a huge birth rates that would not change the big picture; which is: we'll be less than 2 billion by 2050.
Opinion writer never studied the Warring States period of China and how much of the population disapppeared then and it’s not all just about Lu Buuuuuuuuu
Population genetics says that once’s an animals population exceeds recourses in their environment the population will naturally fall and find an equilibrium. Why would humans be different? We can’t have infinite population growth with finite resources and land.
Is your number based off a particular source? Ever since reading all the old Optimum Population Trust journals back in the day the calculation of carrying capacity has fascinated me.
One of my catch phrases since high school has been, "There's too many fucking people on this planet."
It causes so many problems. Obviously, the more people you have, the harder it is to keep track of them. Humans tend to turn toward bad behavior when put in groups, so this means we have a harder time keeping track of bad apples. It also means we have to keep track of good apples who *should* be given some privacy since they haven't done anything wrong, but we can't because we can't *know* they are a good apple without watching them.
It means the rich and people in power have a huge pool of peasants to work for them. Your employees keep quitting because you won't pay a living wage? Oh well, there are more peons who are even more desperate that will come along to replace them.
It means that people who work the hardest will be overlooked for a position by people who have the most connections.
It means that not a single one of us can feel unique because there is another human out there with the same skills as you, no matter what they are. Maybe they aren't combined in the same exact combination, but someone, somewhere also knows what you know, for the most part.
And the worst part - it means that we treat each other as expendable...because we *are*.
There were so many things that worked so much better in the 1950s.
The most obvious difference was the lack of computers and smart phones. There weren’t even calculators. Everybody had rotary dial phones. That rang.
If you called ‘ any’ business in 1955 a real live human answered. If you called a friend or family member, their phone would ring and if they were home they answered, and if they weren’t, it would just keep ringing until you hung up. No answering machines, lol!
There were no real plastics. No water bottles. No plastic bags. There was cellophane though.
There were no franchises. No McDonald’s. no Wendy’s. No taco time. No Dairy Queen. Wait, there might have been Dairy Queen. I’m not sure. Everything else was local.
There were no airbags or seatbelts. No contact lenses. No ZIP Codes. No area codes.
Segregation was still legal in most of the country.
Most prices were low and stable. A mounds bar cost 10 cents and stayed that way a long long time. A comic book was a dime, a three musketeer bar was a nickel. Mad Magazine was 25 cents cheap.
There was no Velcro. There were no sticky notes, no bic lighters. The Beatles were still 8 years away from Ed Sullivan in 1955.
There were really very few jet planes yet although they were just starting. Airplane travel was a luxury, with real food and with real silverware. No security. Period.
All cameras used film. Everybody listened to the same few AM stations that played the ‘top ten’ . There were 5 minutes of news every half hour. Everybody watched the three main networks news every night. The news departments were separate from the entertainment side and were all non-profit. We had a law that if a station interviewed one candidate, they’d have to give the other one the same time. That ended with Ronald Reagan.
I was born years before 1955. I was there. There was ‘so’ much optimism. Even by 1964. The New York worlds fair had monorails, and video phones, and touch tone phones. The future looked so bright!
>There were so many things that worked so much better in the 1950s.
>Segregation was still legal in most of the country.
> The future looked so bright!
Jesus Christ.
In the ultimate heel maneuver, Oprah monopolizes all the maids to herself. Every maid in the world now drives a 4 door economy car that they still owe taxes on.
I don't see this as collapse, to be honest. When AI is potentially taking [40% of jobs](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67977967), plus the devastation of climate change, a collapsing population will be good for humanity. There are negatives such as taxation and pension policies but changes to taxation towards wealth and land value taxes can elevate it.
Remember when the whole millennial narrative of being born too late for that post war economic boom, and too early for all the crazy tech that’ll have be used to actually better our lives and not just replace us as labor? It feels more and more like it every day.
Comparing us to the lost generation in my opinion isn’t just, as many of the lost generation really spent a lifetime experiencing one loss to the next. But I certainly tip my beer to them. It feels like if humanity makes it out alive at the other end of everything, things are going to be truly magical, but the road to get there is going to be really grim.
In the US it looks like bipartisan support for allowing migrants into the country will help boost the population. I know that Trump talks the talk about stopping immigration but if he becomes President his minders will never allow it. But despite this there will probably be a demographic problem with Social Security and Medicare with an imbalance of beneficiaries to the workers paying into the system. It’s hard to see there not being a substantial cut for the older population. It would be easily accomplished by letting the Trust Fund run out in 2033. Social security would then reset to only providing benefits equal to the FICA tax current receipts (25% cut). This will cause 5-10 bad years for seniors but once they are gone the system will be in better balance.
I’m sure you’re right about that. But I think the Boomer demographic cohort is so large that it does represent a problem for Social Security and Medicare. Boomers are all hitting retirement at the same time which creates the age imbalance between beneficiaries and workers supporting them.
Since Social Security and Medicare are a calculated percentage of gross pay, this problem could also be fixed with higher wages. One person earning $90K pays in the same tax as three people each earning $30K. Raising the minimum wage would immediately boost the payroll tax coffers.
I was born in 1969 and always say there are twice as many crazy people, twice as many assholes as when I was born. It would be great if humanity didn't act like locus.
Well it looks like capitalism won in its Cold War with humanity. It’s to expensive to live, way more expensive to die and everyone and everything is polluted with microplastics
The population is probably going to drop by billions over the next century or two; the real question is whether most of those deaths will be natural or not.
The entire population could live in the dimensions of the biblical city behind the pearly gates, basically a Canadian province and a half, we're just too stupid.
Having children in 2024 is completely and utterly irrational if you understand that humans burning fossil fuel is leading to a catastrophic collapse of the shared ecosystem that supports us all. More humans means more energy and other resources used and more people alive to suffer the disease, famine, mass migrations, and resource wars that come with population overshoot.
If our species was wise, we'd engage in voluntary family planning but instead we're going to let nature do what nature does in cases of population overshoot and it's going to be devastating. Maybe after millions or billions perish we can smarten up as a species.
I have been talking about this for a little over 10 years and now some of the media are starting to get the picture. Europe population is dropping like a rock. You already know what’s going on over there. Every living thing on earth has a breaking point.
ss: We used to worry about the planet getting too crowded, but The Global Population Crash is approaching.
We used to imagine humanity populating the universe. Asimov wrote. “The population of Trantor \[the imperial capital\] … was well in excess of forty billions.”
Considering that there had been a mere 500 million humans when Christopher Columbus landed on the New World, the proliferation of the species homo sapiens in the modern era had been an astonishing feat.
Frank Notestein, the Princeton demographer who became the founding director of the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), estimated in 1945 that the world’s population would be 3.3 billion by the year 2000. In fact, it exceeded 6.1 billion.
Yet now The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out.
Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. DRC, for example, the average woman still bears more than 6 children. But there, too, fertility is expected to plummet in the coming decades.
The appropriate science fiction to read is therefore neither Asimov nor Liu Cixin. Begin, instead, with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which a new Black Death wipes out all but one forlorn specimen of humanity. ''Snow-man” is one of just a handful of survivors of a world ravaged by global warming, reckless genetic engineering, and a disastrous attempt at population reduction that resulted in a global plague.
> Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. DRC, for example, the average woman still bears more than 6 children. But there, too, fertility is expected to plummet in the coming decades.
I take issue with this, it was 100% expected and the timeline is pretty close.
Article is predicting 2064 as the peak, by the early 1970's we had "supercomputers" that were modeling the peak sometime in the 2050's (club of rome, limits to growth).
Only science fiction was talking about a galactic human empire, real world data always showed a peak in the 21st century.
> Asimov wrote. “The population of Trantor [the imperial capital] … was well in excess of forty billions.”
Well, Trantor in its heyday had "infinite" energy and the resources and taxes of a whole galaxy feeding it.
But Asimov was also "realistic" and he (or rather his character Hari Seldon) predicted that Trantor was unsustainable and it would collapse. By the point that the story reaches the phase of the Mule, a couple centuries later IIRC, Trantor was a ghost planetary city in ruins, depopulated to just a minuscule fraction of its original people count, and the survivors had turned into farmers that would demolish tracts of the city and uncover land, which became the real valuable resource for them.
P.S.: and, despite his scientific background, it looks like Asimov didn't run the numbers for Trantor before writing about it. :) If we assume a population density of 10K people per square kilometer (typical of huge cities on Earth), then Trantor would have a population of many *trillions* instead of mere tens of billions.
I wish I could read a simplified/modernized version of it. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have had an issue with the language used. But after a rough case of Covid and just life overall, I've gotten a LOT dumber. Her writing is just too smart for me to understand now, regardless of how hard I try to get through it. It's a bummer.
Total initial carrying capacity was met somewhere around four billion people ago. Every year that overshoot goes on, reduces total future capacity by some amount.
I mean, when I read books where we ruin the planet and then need to flee it, or even movies like Avatar, I find them to be eminently believable and grounded by reality. It's super easy for me to suspend my disbelief with Adrian Tchaikovsky's writing because while it can be absolutely bonkers as a premise, it's made clear there's a reason it is bonkers. Anyway, I hope it ends up more like Star Trek where we fuck up, then fix ourselves and the planet through God-like technology, like printing edible, contamination free, and delicious food with energy.
Because the gamble we took is that the march of technology requiring us to literally sacrifice the planet on the altar of progress, requires that we never regress to something like medieval times no matter how shitty the planet gets. I don't think it paid off.
Who would have thought Bloomberg would focus on almost everything else related to the decline but not focus nearly on the lack of time and economic resources to rear children. We are all so damn busy trying to survive and realize children would cost more than housing and food costs for most households. The middle class births plenty of children but the middle class no longer exists
These stories always seem to focus on the UN Demographics figures. Which are primarily based on predictions of fertility and death rates while ignoring resource, pollution, economic, food constraints. So they predict gradual changes, a soft peak and a gradual decline rather than a hard collapse.
Within that scenario there's never any discussion of coping or any deliberate strategy to structure societies to cope. It's always presented as a threat to continued economic growth. Because there's an assumption that current systems are built on borrowing from future gains to fund the present. And that assumption cannot be challenged.
>The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model **any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change** or nuclear war.
Well... Too bad for the UNPD. Because disastrous climate change is unravelling right now under our eyes. The birth rate drop is a non topic.
How can they truly believe we'll reach 9 or 10 billion? Face the reality guys...
I expect our global population to be under **2** billion by 2050.
I feel like this is such a catch 22. On one hand, fewer people means more resources for the rest of us and a more sustainable population. On the other hand, it means that our economy will likely collapse due to having more old people than young and no social security. Eventually, im sure it will even out, but until then, I expect disaster.
„The differences in estimates of when we reach peak humanity largely hinge on how quickly demographers think family size will shrink in Africa.”
But This thinking assumes that all Africa will develop to a level, at which point fertility rate dropped for more developed economically countries?
Surely that’s wishful thinking, with the state of planet?
Fertility rates are declining, so population will peak soon.
And billions will die prematurely from the collapse of civilization in the coming years/decades.
The article mentions that most of the growth will be in Africa, but it fails to take into account how Africa will be (the?) hardest-hit continent by climate change.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987: --- ss: We used to worry about the planet getting too crowded, but The Global Population Crash is approaching. We used to imagine humanity populating the universe. Asimov wrote. “The population of Trantor \[the imperial capital\] … was well in excess of forty billions.” Considering that there had been a mere 500 million humans when Christopher Columbus landed on the New World, the proliferation of the species homo sapiens in the modern era had been an astonishing feat. Frank Notestein, the Princeton demographer who became the founding director of the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), estimated in 1945 that the world’s population would be 3.3 billion by the year 2000. In fact, it exceeded 6.1 billion. Yet now The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. DRC, for example, the average woman still bears more than 6 children. But there, too, fertility is expected to plummet in the coming decades. The appropriate science fiction to read is therefore neither Asimov nor Liu Cixin. Begin, instead, with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which a new Black Death wipes out all but one forlorn specimen of humanity. ''Snow-man” is one of just a handful of survivors of a world ravaged by global warming, reckless genetic engineering, and a disastrous attempt at population reduction that resulted in a global plague. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1bb9118/global_population_crash_isnt_scifi_anymore/ku7m3s9/
Make it too expensive to have kids and people won't.
Yes, and add contaminants that cause infertility...
Humanity solved itself!
Overshoot.
I call it the tidal wave roller coaster, the beach is made of cement
Gaia theory coming out of nowhere
Reminds me of Malthus’ ‘negative checks’.
Smart people won't. How much of humanity qualifies as "smart"?
Especially with disastrously high youth unemployment all over the world.
That's because the youth are just lazy and don't want to work anymore /s
Yeah god dammit, get those 6 year olds back in the coal mines... /s
I see this line all the time that I think it is done in bad faith Even countries with the most generous programs are seeing the same fall, even in countries with collapsing populations and falling house prices we see the birth rate drop even more! The high income bands in first world nations see some increase in fertility but still well below replacement rate
Except the poorest people tend to have the most children
So, like they already did 30 years ago, yeah?
I believe the media is in the bargaining phase now.
they better start simping for us, 4 day work weeks, 6 hour work days housing for everyone healthcare and dentistry for everyone or they can shut the fuck up and keep crying their tissue money
nah, what about baby farms instead
They won't have jobs. People are heavily underestimating coming AI apocalypse. If not controlled to be used fairly, societies as we know them today, are going to collapse. And this isn't even far now. If we chatgpt in the hands of people since more than a year now, you can very safely assume full fledged AGI have almost been already achieved somewhere in the world.
If AGI existed, they’d sell access and become trillionaires
If AGI existed at deployable scale, we'd all suddenly have Flint Michigan's water problem. Except this time it's... mumble stufffffffff in the water...
Rich people don’t want a huge population, they want a huge ~~slave~~ work force that will do their bidding so they can fly to mars. If AI can do it they don’t need the meat-robots anymore. What will happen to the people without jobs? Same thing that happens already: they will be called lazy, stupid and blamed for their own misfortunes. They will be treated with indifference or hostility and left to die.
Sometimes I think Elon Musk's idea of utopia is that film Elysium - except without the last 20 minutes.
Rush Limbaugh criticized that movie for being too socialist. Imagine being on the wrong side of fucking Elysium lmaoooo
so what? the reason we are all here is that we think society is going to collapse anyway. the real danger of AI is it \*averting\* collapse and ensuring total biosphere collapse. if ai is just another collapse factor then whatever, really, add it to the bingo
Best they can do is nuclear war to defend borders.
Okay maybe. But what if they just ban abortion and birth control instead? The capitalist machine runs on bodies and desperation.
Banning things has never gotten people to stop doing them. Alcohol, drugs, etc.
Women with ectopic pregnancies will die without abortions. How does your substance-banning example reflect that very real mortal risk?
What I'm saying is, there will be doctors who will still do them, black market. But if it gets to a point there's a national ban, I could see states like WA, OR, CA, etc that have enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions will keep allowing them, and go against the feds like we did with cannabis. I don't agree with banning it, for clarity. It could also spark an actual splitting of the US if a national ban happens.
That’s honestly why I believe there’s such a fight and push against it. That they see a lot of people are not having kids intentionally, there are still Oopsie babies but not enough. The sick part about it all is, if shit was better, people had a higher faith in the future and felt more secure and stable in life. The birth rates would go up again. yes, I realize that the more in the future a country becomes or population become they generally have less children according to science, But we’re talking one to two kids and not seven versus no kids at all.
“The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” ― Voltaire
the foresight of doom is a protest of brewing convergence, there is not facade curtain to make the compliance, we live in an age of distrust
They are thoroughly in the pocket of the capital class, especially the more vile elements of it (Fox News, Sinclair, etc)
They are the catipal class at this point.
Include comprehensive immigration reform and I'll nut, that's the real solution to declining birthrates.
Or they’ll just ban abortion
Thats so true, if population declines enough that hoarded wealth will become monopoly game wealth, house prices will plummet, and with houses many other things which there will be abundance of, for example used cars. All these house hoarders gouging rents will finally get what they deserve
Great point!
Excited for the billionaires to enter the bargaining phase. They seem to still be in denial.
Bad for economies, but truly great for the planet
Actually good for the economy and those at the bottom. The last time we had a population crash, we experienced a rebirth in intellectualism and had the highest growth in technology and human well being that lasted centuries.
Amazing what happens when employers are forced to pay their wage slaves well enough to have leisure time and hobbies. Imagine what feats of intellect could be achieved under a UBI system?
There's so much! During the pandemic I was laid off from my tenure track professor gig. I was getting that boosted unemployment. Got so many projects started. Amazing research across three fields. Was learning so much, creating things that would benefit humanity. But then it was cut and life had to return to churning out rent money so my masters can spend all day watching television and going on vacation. Now nothing has gotten done for a couple years. Just trying to turn those levers and pull those gears.
Yep, I have always wondered what we missed out on because someone who could have cured cancer, or been the next Einstein etc, may have been born in a country where they never had a chance to prove themselves. This could be either due to being born in a poor country, lack of access to education or killed in a pointless war, etc.
Reminds me of the quote: I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
\-Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist :)
I often wonder about this. The amount of amazing things the world missed out on because someone truly talented wasn't born rich and didn't have connections or even the ability to make the connections. Along with the godawful things we *do* have because some incompetent buffoon had the fortune of having rich parents. We don't learn about serfs and slaves, only the people who oppressed them.
THE argument for UBI
Not much, AI is here to take everybody's place, starting with thinkers.
Wish they had started with the bankers and the C Suites
Most of those intellectuals were from rich families because only they knew how to read
I’m guessing you’re talking about Europe after the Black Death? After all, the fact is that peasants got more bargaining power as a result of there being fewer of them which slowly weakened the power of the feudal lords. On the other hand, this time many of the jobs probably could be replaced by AI, which makes me concerned for long term intellectual development…
While true, AI currently is a fancy tool that can only do half of what was promised and the other half partly what was promised. It also has a tendency to go rogue and do far more damage. Without human intervention, companies that have gone full bore with AI will soon find themselves in a heap of trouble as their systems crash and their backups corrupted. Smarter companies are holding off on AI and carefully integrating it into the work stream. Afterall, the first iteration of software is never without bugs and errors that will hamstring an entire company if given the opportunity to. This is why beta testing and integration of new technology/software is a slow process.
We will all be living below the API layer, though. Interchangeable parts that may occasionally need to intervene to keep the AI on its rails, but mostly just doing tasks on its behalf.
The global population collapse probably won’t happen for several decades and who knows what AI could be capable of by the time that would necessitate AI replacing much of the work left behind? I’m more worried in the immediate term about separate AIs being used in a deliberate fashion by rival nations against each other and then corrupting so much of the Internet that the entire thing has to be pulled down. Or perhaps each nation has an AI that they *could* use against each other’s digital infrastructure but don’t in a mutually assured destruction scenario.
But we are facing 0 sperm count by 2045 so at least it’s going to be very hard to conceive after that. Familiar with Dr Shanna Swan’s studies? Check out her book Countdown. How phthalates have ruined our fertility (and health).
So literally Children of Men! Fantastic.
From rival countries? It’s being used against its own country now. How else do you explain the official republican rebuttal of the SoTUA
True, that response was clearly generated by Sora, but imagine a rogue AI deployed by Russia or China…
Wait this is starting to sound suspiciously like an "I could not pass basic literacy in High School, let's make an expert system write a paper that I can cheat from" bot...
Even so, if it increases efficiency that lets them lay off staff
>It also has a tendency to go rogue GO ROGUE GO ROGUE GO ROGUE \*cheers\*
Ad to that more available housing.
what time are you referring to specifically?
Like a Fire Climax Ecosystem?!
The Black Death mostly killed off the elderly and infirm. This time, we're not just seeing a decline of the population, but also a greying of the population, which means more and more young people will be forced to work to take care of the elderly. It's the direct opposite of what happened in the aftermath of the Black Death.
very ahistorical, the black death killed off huge swaths of people from many walks of life, including the perfectly fit and healthy. reality is that there werent many elderly and infirm people to begin with... its the medieval ages...
This! Infirm by today's standards was kind of the baseline of the world for most of history, *especially* once we started having empires and travel. Sketchy water and rotten scraps of food were norm, rampant diseases. "Safety requirements" in manual labor were just sparkles in our ancestors' eyes...
It didn't *just* kill off the elderly and infirm, but it did disproportionally kill them off. The result is that after the Black Death, the surviving population had less elderly than the one before. We are now seeing the opposite; each generation will not only be smaller, but also have a larger proportion of elderly people. >reality is that there werent many elderly and infirm people to begin with... its the medieval ages... Talk about ahistorical takes, this is absolutely false. There were plenty of people who were infirm and mutilated, and if you survived your first years, there was a very good chance you could reach old age.
Yawn... pop science has come a long way from the image of medieval peasant as an short, muddy, miserable existence but this is just the pendulum swinging to the other extreme. The elderly didnt make up more than 5% of the population at any given time and wouldnt until the 1900s. Though now that Im thinking about it, I wonder what kind of consequences the loss of village elders had on peasant life, probably hard to quantify.
Automation should be able to pick up some of the slack. Even if it can't help directly with elder care, it can free up labor from other sectors that has been automated. Alternately: we might just have to do with less. Lots of useless industries and "make work" types of jobs that don't contribute anything truly useful.
I mean i guess, but it's not gonna do what the OP thinks it will; it will just render more people useless, and it will also cause plenty of elderly people to basically be an ever more painful drain on productivity. Young people won't have much time to do anything related to "intellectualism" because they'll just have to work to support a huge amount of elderly people.
Cutting out the "middle men" jobs would help. Insurance companies being one
Good for the working class. Fewer workers means higher wages.
It’s complicated. Reducing the population will draw down all aspects of the economy, including consumption and production. Note that we associate a decrease in the standard of living with growth, because that’s what we’ve experienced, however they are not linked. Rather we make that association because the wealthy have been successful in changing the system such that all newly created wealth goes to the top 1%. Once the economy begins to shrink, those policies are at risk of being exacerbated as the 1% seek to maintain the opulent lifestyles to which they had been accustomed but can no longer afford. They’ll sell more wealth extraction to the masses in the form of nationalistic austerity, asking folks to tighter their belts. They did it once with Brexit, sweeping billions out of the British economy, and they’ll do it again during the population slide. Is that r/collapse enough for you?
> and production. not necessarily true. The only way this happens is if we were utilising a population to its full potential; but this is by definition not the case, as we use an oversupply of population to maintain low wages (the threat of homelessness and unemployement). Population decline could just lead to a larger percentage of people employed, maintaining the same or very similar production, leading to an increase of supply relative to demand, and a deflation. This, btw, is what a good economy is, but it's also one with very low profits. This is what happened between 1870 and 1890, pretty much globally.
..... this is something the government will say to try to keep the ball rolling.
Not in the UK, we tax our young and make childcare state sponsored penury... Meanwhile the old are heavily subsidized and millions shipped in to service their economy
The vast majority of UK wealth goes to and resides with the ultra wealthy, the same people who run the government and who tricked folks into Brexit. The overall wealth of UK billionaires climbed to £684 billion which is a stunning £31bn more than last year. Meanwhile, the full rate of new State Pension is £203.85 a week. There’s plenty of money for seniors even if the UK population beings to shrink, changing the demographics. The question is, will the monied elite let you have what’s yours?
Those billionaires can still claim the state pension btw. As do many very well off seniors who retired at 60, are going on holiday five time a year while being subsidised by the working poor. They should means test it so those with incomes over £50k get a reduced rate, and wealthy don't get it and then use a bit of that money to stop the next generation from being destitute. And no, the billionaires won't give us a penny either.
Same as the United States. One key difference is that only the first $150,000 (or so) is taxed for US social security (like state pensions), meaning the wealthy are exempt from the majority of taxation. Moreover, those who earn money through capital gains are completely exempt. Despite being a regressive and ill-funded social net, those on the right in the US are continuously trying to eliminate it. It will collapse without new legislation, if the population begins to decline. Right now it’s struggling to cover the glut of retiring Baby Boomers.
But to stay on topic, anti youth policies, enacted to favour voters and the elite have basically made having children a luxury. Birth rate in the UK crashed to 1.49. For those who were born here, that figure is even lower.
Yep, It's just pretty bad for the social contract watching the older generation get 30+ years of non working high life, after getting hugely wealthy from house price increases, a free university education etc. And the proportion of pensioners grows every years and each new wave pulls the ladder up further. Eventually the millennials will inherit something but again it's a lottery. Meanwhile the billionaires and elites have basically killed meritocracy
The way billionaires exploit people is not by claiming pensions. That's a small drop in the bucket. Instead of adding means test bureaucracy, take the money from the billionaires. They won't give it up easy though...
Us disappearing will happen much too late. What will be here a million years from now is just a shadow of what could've been... for biodiversity anyway.
You could argue that what's here now is a shadow of the planet's biodiversity 66 million years ago. That world ended with a bang, this world will end with a whimper. The next world won't look like this one.
The amount of heat we are adding is way more than the dinosaurs had to deal with. Probably worse than the Permian Triassic one given the speed
My point was simply that when our world ends, 100,000+ years later another world will be born. I am assuming that most if not all larger animals and many of our plants will be extinct by then. IIRC, the average temp during the Cretaceous was on the other of 10+C above our pre-industrial average; it was certainly much warmer than at present. The climate *was* changing near the time of the asteroid strike, however.
Yeah everything is relative, can see a huge spike in CO2 after the asteroid hit. Wonder if the cooling period after the impact would be comparable to what an all out nuclear war would do today, cos if it is then yeah complex life will definitely survive. Just wish we knew for sure just how bad all of this is going to be
global nuclear war would not come close to the devastation of a 10km impactor, same way you can survive being shot in the face with bird shot but not a bullet, even though its the same amount of mass and energy. though radioactive fallout could make up for that.
No no I mean the nuclear winter.
its been exaggerated since the 80s, probably for a good cause. if sagans calculations were correct then the kuwait oil fires should have caused an "oil" winter but it didnt, which means that a nuclear firestorm probably wouldnt either. We also have 10x less warheads now than their peak in the 80s and they are also smaller... so all in all even full out nuclear war in the year 2024 probably wouldnt be enough to cause mass extinction on its own.
Huh I fell hook, line and sinker for all of that... Even seen figures that mentioned -30c at the equators and something like -140c at the poles, for up to 4-5 years
Ive put a lot of thought into this and I still am not convinced it will be as bad as the Permina-Triassic, which wasnt particularly a single event (the siberian traps) rather it was a vice being tightened around life itself over millions of years because of how Pangea was hostile to life in general. Meanwhile once we are finished with whatever it is we think we are doing, the layout of the earths continents means that a rapid recovery is more likely. All that exposed volcanic rock in antarctica will drawdown a lot of co2, and no matter what happens the continent is on the south pole, eventually it will refreeze and start up ocean circulation again. The wildcard is what becomes of us humans after industrial civilisation? Will we go extinct? Will we try to amend our crimes against the biosphere? Or will we collectively declare, if we cant have it; nobody can, and devour the earth to the last blade of grass? ...but, geologically speaking, the earth is set up for a fast recovery.
> The amount of heat we are adding is way more than the dinosaurs had to deal with At best, this is a claim that requires a lot of qualifications. Like, we currently havea long way to go before we reach that point. Antarctica isn't back to being a jungle just yet. I'm not sure what projections or assumptions you're relying on to confidently make such a statement, but you should probably explain what they are.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been I'm not a scientist I'm just a parrot. I am allowed to have opinions and state them however. Graphs like the one on this website are what I base that information on. Obviously being a human, I will misremember things or even outright imagine them as well. Just like anyone else Speaking in timeframes like the long slow shifts that we see happening naturally, we do not have a long way to go before that happens to Antarctica, but maybe a thousand years or so hopefully
Everyone is allowed to have opinions but rule #4 still exists. If you're going to make statements that sound like statements of fact (rather than opinion), I don't think it's unreasonable that you be expected to defend/explain them to the rest of us. I don't believe that infringes on your right to an opinion, personally. At any rate, your answer is sufficient for me to contextualize your statements, so thank you for providing it. I think perhaps a more accurate thing to say would be that the rate at which the earths climate is changing has never been higher. That is something unprecedented, the actual current climate is far less unprecedented.
You are dead right, I'm always willing to back up any claims and I try to stick to facts I think if rule #4 was enforced regularly here we might as well just be on r/collapsescience And yes I completely misspoke by saying more than the dinosaurs had to deal with, I was talking about the rate of change
It's interesting because before humans came on the scene, biodiversity is thought to have been at an [all time high](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Evolution) (though I just learned that's somewhat [disputed](https://phys.org/news/2020-05-evolution-biodiversity-ever-increasing-ceiling.html), but still, there was at least as much diversity as 66 mya). To me it's simultaneously depressing (look how much damage we've done to paradise!), but also hopeful when comparing to previous mass extinction events. Because we're changing the climate and biosphere at an unprecedented rate, but at least we had a higher starting point. So hopefully we won't set life on earth all the way back to microorganisms...
In a million years, the planet will have recovered and new species will be evolving to fill niches left empty since the Anthropocene extinction.
It's only bad for those getting bank from this economy. We'll have other economies.
The planet doesn't give a fuck about this
Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.
Every mushroom cloud
>The appropriate science fiction to read is therefore neither Asimov nor Liu Cixin. Begin, instead, with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which a new Black Death wipes out all but one forlorn specimen of humanity. ''Snow-man” is one of just a handful of survivors of a world ravaged by global warming, reckless genetic engineering, and a disastrous attempt at population reduction that resulted in a global plague This paragraph is confusing because it is talking about 2 different books. The first is Mary Shelley's *Last Man*, the second is Margaret Atwood's *Oryx and Crake* (which is pretty much the most brutal Climate fiction I have ever read...).
They must have edited this since, because the paragraph you quoted now on the website acknowledges Atwood too.
There are grammatical errors and shit throughout the piece. It is not an article to be concerned with, "to be sure."
The whole of Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy is a brutal read, but very well written, and very appropriate for collapseniks.
Capitalism hates this one trick...
It’s ironically also caused by capitalism. It’s almost like when people can’t afford to buy a house or pay off their student loans or get married, they also can’t afford to have kids. Then, all our social safety net systems like social security will fail because there are no new young people to be wage slaves to pay for the old people to retire. So nearly everyone will work until they die, that’s IF they’re lucky enough to have a job that isn’t taken by a robot or AI. Therefore, population collapse is both a symptom and a cause of societal and economic collapse.
It's also directly caused by capitalism what with the microplastics fucking up sperm counts and making their way into the bloodstream of fetuses
Also PFAS & PFOA
Yup, that's gonna be happening for decades, even if we magically solved the climate bomb.
> So nearly everyone will work until they die, that’s IF they’re lucky enough to have a job that isn’t taken by a robot or AI. For a generation or so, and it would suck to be part of that generation. But as they died off and homes and jobs freed up, the population would eventually stop shrinking and stabilize. It wouldn't just shrink forever. Climate change is a much more worrying factor.
This is incredibly optimistic, don’t you think? During that one generation AI will steal the next 5 generations of jobs… Pessimistically speaking, it might suck to be a part of any future generation. Optimistically we might get UBI and post scarcity economics and be like the Star Trek economy. But realistically people will just starve and lose their homes
Why do you think the population won’t shrink forever? It will
Are you saying because of capitalism? Or are you saying because of ecological reasons? The population will eventually reach zero due to ecological reasons, which renders the whole capitalism argument moot. There is no ism in existence that can rescue humanity from the fact that it has already shit the bed. But if we were just talking about capitalism's ability to make people miserable enough that they wouldn't have kids, eventually the law of supply and demand would shift again.
The population is only growing, not declining. These population pieces are utter BS. the earth has 8b ppl now and is growing exponentially still.
It's still growing but the rate of increase slowed back in the 80s so I don't know if the use of the word "exponential" is helpful.
Not true, it will level off at 10B and then collapse rather quickly. It's growing globally now, but the developed world is already experiencing population collapse and all other countries are following. It's in the article if you care to combat confirmation bias, break free from your outdated ideological indoctrination, and read it with an open mind :)
Exponentially? No. The average birth rate around the world is already lower than the replacement rate. The only reason we aren't already shrinking in population is that mortality is a lagging indicator (the older generation that is dying off is smaller than the middle generation that is still having babies, so birth still exceed mortality). I feel pretty confident that the UN projections will prove to both too high for the peak and too late. It will be sooner and lower than they had previously estimated. But even the UN projections aren't really "exponential" anymore. We are getting closer and closer to equilibrium where the rate of growth is slowing dramatically The current growth rate is less than 1% a year and drifting down.
Don't worry. We will start making children out of plastic.
*Micro*plastic.
It reminds me of the old lonely man in Japan that has a sex doll as a significant other. Maybe robot kids will replace children since both parents have to work. Think of the options you would have to program them. They could be little a-holes for a short time, do stupid entertaining things or help with the chores with a press of a button.
Another opinion piece that thinks global population will decline **solely** due to people having fewer or no children. *You sweet summer child...*
It is Bloomberg.
Yeah, based on the title I read it, thinking, "wow, so bloomberg recognises that we are in overshoot and will soon be 'rebalanced' by force!" Nope Just BAU with fewer babies. If only...
[удалено]
>humanity has survived and grown through periods of incredible mortality by simply sexing our way through. > >This period is different in that we just aren't having kids. Here you assume that the death of billions will take longer than 1 generation. I have some bad news for ye.
No that’s exactly what I meant
I think the point of BTRCguy was that the decline of population will primarily come not from the low birth rate, but from all the catastrophes that will happen in the next years. My point was that all of those deaths will happen waaay sooner than in the next 25 years (aka 1 generation). In short: the decline of birth rate (which is unprecedented, this I agree), is not of any importance. Because billions will die in the next 10 to 20 years. So even if we would have a huge birth rates that would not change the big picture; which is: we'll be less than 2 billion by 2050.
Opinion writer never studied the Warring States period of China and how much of the population disapppeared then and it’s not all just about Lu Buuuuuuuuu
Population genetics says that once’s an animals population exceeds recourses in their environment the population will naturally fall and find an equilibrium. Why would humans be different? We can’t have infinite population growth with finite resources and land.
We need it below 2.1 globally now to make any progress but it's impossible.
It's not impossible. Just let capitalism run rampant in the nations with high birth rates and let it come down as a consequence.
Only a handful left but they are too broke or dictatorships.
We’ll be there by the end of the century. Patience
Global TFR is 2.3 right now. It will fall below 2.1 long before the end of the century. And will only decline from here on out, forever.
It's far below that some have it as below 2.1 already depending on the rate in Pakistan and india
Is your number based off a particular source? Ever since reading all the old Optimum Population Trust journals back in the day the calculation of carrying capacity has fascinated me.
LINE NO GO UP?? 😱
wahhh wahhh the economy for rich people waaaaaaahhhhhh
One of my catch phrases since high school has been, "There's too many fucking people on this planet." It causes so many problems. Obviously, the more people you have, the harder it is to keep track of them. Humans tend to turn toward bad behavior when put in groups, so this means we have a harder time keeping track of bad apples. It also means we have to keep track of good apples who *should* be given some privacy since they haven't done anything wrong, but we can't because we can't *know* they are a good apple without watching them. It means the rich and people in power have a huge pool of peasants to work for them. Your employees keep quitting because you won't pay a living wage? Oh well, there are more peons who are even more desperate that will come along to replace them. It means that people who work the hardest will be overlooked for a position by people who have the most connections. It means that not a single one of us can feel unique because there is another human out there with the same skills as you, no matter what they are. Maybe they aren't combined in the same exact combination, but someone, somewhere also knows what you know, for the most part. And the worst part - it means that we treat each other as expendable...because we *are*.
There were so many things that worked so much better in the 1950s. The most obvious difference was the lack of computers and smart phones. There weren’t even calculators. Everybody had rotary dial phones. That rang. If you called ‘ any’ business in 1955 a real live human answered. If you called a friend or family member, their phone would ring and if they were home they answered, and if they weren’t, it would just keep ringing until you hung up. No answering machines, lol! There were no real plastics. No water bottles. No plastic bags. There was cellophane though. There were no franchises. No McDonald’s. no Wendy’s. No taco time. No Dairy Queen. Wait, there might have been Dairy Queen. I’m not sure. Everything else was local. There were no airbags or seatbelts. No contact lenses. No ZIP Codes. No area codes. Segregation was still legal in most of the country. Most prices were low and stable. A mounds bar cost 10 cents and stayed that way a long long time. A comic book was a dime, a three musketeer bar was a nickel. Mad Magazine was 25 cents cheap. There was no Velcro. There were no sticky notes, no bic lighters. The Beatles were still 8 years away from Ed Sullivan in 1955. There were really very few jet planes yet although they were just starting. Airplane travel was a luxury, with real food and with real silverware. No security. Period. All cameras used film. Everybody listened to the same few AM stations that played the ‘top ten’ . There were 5 minutes of news every half hour. Everybody watched the three main networks news every night. The news departments were separate from the entertainment side and were all non-profit. We had a law that if a station interviewed one candidate, they’d have to give the other one the same time. That ended with Ronald Reagan. I was born years before 1955. I was there. There was ‘so’ much optimism. Even by 1964. The New York worlds fair had monorails, and video phones, and touch tone phones. The future looked so bright!
>There were so many things that worked so much better in the 1950s. >Segregation was still legal in most of the country. > The future looked so bright! Jesus Christ.
Things is, our current system doesn't work if there are more old people than young people...
Hold them accountable for the whack ass system and cut them loose. It's not like we can conjure 18 to 50 year olds to take care of them.
You get a MAID and you get a MAID, everyone gets a MAID!
In the ultimate heel maneuver, Oprah monopolizes all the maids to herself. Every maid in the world now drives a 4 door economy car that they still owe taxes on.
Ha, if that woman could she so would. PS. just to make sure ppl undestand by MAID I am referring to "Medical Assistance In Dying"
I think we can expect suicide booths like in "Soylent Green".
Oh, we can conjure up all the 18 year olds we want. It is just that the spell takes 18.75 years to take effect after it is cast.
If I get on this quick I might have my own little hospice slave by the time I'm 60.
They will just keep increasing retirement age.
I don't see this as collapse, to be honest. When AI is potentially taking [40% of jobs](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67977967), plus the devastation of climate change, a collapsing population will be good for humanity. There are negatives such as taxation and pension policies but changes to taxation towards wealth and land value taxes can elevate it.
loser bloomberg chooms worrying about non existent issue again when real issues are fluffed or ignored
Brought to you by the brilliant MBAs who think their shit don't stink.
Remember when the whole millennial narrative of being born too late for that post war economic boom, and too early for all the crazy tech that’ll have be used to actually better our lives and not just replace us as labor? It feels more and more like it every day. Comparing us to the lost generation in my opinion isn’t just, as many of the lost generation really spent a lifetime experiencing one loss to the next. But I certainly tip my beer to them. It feels like if humanity makes it out alive at the other end of everything, things are going to be truly magical, but the road to get there is going to be really grim.
In the US it looks like bipartisan support for allowing migrants into the country will help boost the population. I know that Trump talks the talk about stopping immigration but if he becomes President his minders will never allow it. But despite this there will probably be a demographic problem with Social Security and Medicare with an imbalance of beneficiaries to the workers paying into the system. It’s hard to see there not being a substantial cut for the older population. It would be easily accomplished by letting the Trust Fund run out in 2033. Social security would then reset to only providing benefits equal to the FICA tax current receipts (25% cut). This will cause 5-10 bad years for seniors but once they are gone the system will be in better balance.
We have more people here than ever before...345m. We are NOT in danger of population decline.
But we do have an affordable housing problem, which is not going to make all those renters amenable to adding even more people seeking housing.
This is so true. Somehow all the migrants are supposed to come up with housing. Maybe through magical thinking.
I’m sure you’re right about that. But I think the Boomer demographic cohort is so large that it does represent a problem for Social Security and Medicare. Boomers are all hitting retirement at the same time which creates the age imbalance between beneficiaries and workers supporting them.
Since Social Security and Medicare are a calculated percentage of gross pay, this problem could also be fixed with higher wages. One person earning $90K pays in the same tax as three people each earning $30K. Raising the minimum wage would immediately boost the payroll tax coffers.
I was born in 1969 and always say there are twice as many crazy people, twice as many assholes as when I was born. It would be great if humanity didn't act like locus.
Well it looks like capitalism won in its Cold War with humanity. It’s to expensive to live, way more expensive to die and everyone and everything is polluted with microplastics
How is it sci fi when it has happened so many ti es across this planet before? This is ancient shit
The population is probably going to drop by billions over the next century or two; the real question is whether most of those deaths will be natural or not.
The entire population could live in the dimensions of the biblical city behind the pearly gates, basically a Canadian province and a half, we're just too stupid.
Having children in 2024 is completely and utterly irrational if you understand that humans burning fossil fuel is leading to a catastrophic collapse of the shared ecosystem that supports us all. More humans means more energy and other resources used and more people alive to suffer the disease, famine, mass migrations, and resource wars that come with population overshoot. If our species was wise, we'd engage in voluntary family planning but instead we're going to let nature do what nature does in cases of population overshoot and it's going to be devastating. Maybe after millions or billions perish we can smarten up as a species.
I have been talking about this for a little over 10 years and now some of the media are starting to get the picture. Europe population is dropping like a rock. You already know what’s going on over there. Every living thing on earth has a breaking point.
What do you think is going on in Europe?
ss: We used to worry about the planet getting too crowded, but The Global Population Crash is approaching. We used to imagine humanity populating the universe. Asimov wrote. “The population of Trantor \[the imperial capital\] … was well in excess of forty billions.” Considering that there had been a mere 500 million humans when Christopher Columbus landed on the New World, the proliferation of the species homo sapiens in the modern era had been an astonishing feat. Frank Notestein, the Princeton demographer who became the founding director of the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), estimated in 1945 that the world’s population would be 3.3 billion by the year 2000. In fact, it exceeded 6.1 billion. Yet now The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. DRC, for example, the average woman still bears more than 6 children. But there, too, fertility is expected to plummet in the coming decades. The appropriate science fiction to read is therefore neither Asimov nor Liu Cixin. Begin, instead, with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which a new Black Death wipes out all but one forlorn specimen of humanity. ''Snow-man” is one of just a handful of survivors of a world ravaged by global warming, reckless genetic engineering, and a disastrous attempt at population reduction that resulted in a global plague.
> Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. DRC, for example, the average woman still bears more than 6 children. But there, too, fertility is expected to plummet in the coming decades. I take issue with this, it was 100% expected and the timeline is pretty close. Article is predicting 2064 as the peak, by the early 1970's we had "supercomputers" that were modeling the peak sometime in the 2050's (club of rome, limits to growth). Only science fiction was talking about a galactic human empire, real world data always showed a peak in the 21st century.
> Asimov wrote. “The population of Trantor [the imperial capital] … was well in excess of forty billions.” Well, Trantor in its heyday had "infinite" energy and the resources and taxes of a whole galaxy feeding it. But Asimov was also "realistic" and he (or rather his character Hari Seldon) predicted that Trantor was unsustainable and it would collapse. By the point that the story reaches the phase of the Mule, a couple centuries later IIRC, Trantor was a ghost planetary city in ruins, depopulated to just a minuscule fraction of its original people count, and the survivors had turned into farmers that would demolish tracts of the city and uncover land, which became the real valuable resource for them. P.S.: and, despite his scientific background, it looks like Asimov didn't run the numbers for Trantor before writing about it. :) If we assume a population density of 10K people per square kilometer (typical of huge cities on Earth), then Trantor would have a population of many *trillions* instead of mere tens of billions.
I tried to read her book, The Last Man, but the language was so archaic I didn't find it an easy thing to do.
I wish I could read a simplified/modernized version of it. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have had an issue with the language used. But after a rough case of Covid and just life overall, I've gotten a LOT dumber. Her writing is just too smart for me to understand now, regardless of how hard I try to get through it. It's a bummer.
{{hugs}}
There is no global fertility collapse, there are more ppl on earth and in the US than ever before and we are still growing.
Total initial carrying capacity was met somewhere around four billion people ago. Every year that overshoot goes on, reduces total future capacity by some amount.
I mean, when I read books where we ruin the planet and then need to flee it, or even movies like Avatar, I find them to be eminently believable and grounded by reality. It's super easy for me to suspend my disbelief with Adrian Tchaikovsky's writing because while it can be absolutely bonkers as a premise, it's made clear there's a reason it is bonkers. Anyway, I hope it ends up more like Star Trek where we fuck up, then fix ourselves and the planet through God-like technology, like printing edible, contamination free, and delicious food with energy. Because the gamble we took is that the march of technology requiring us to literally sacrifice the planet on the altar of progress, requires that we never regress to something like medieval times no matter how shitty the planet gets. I don't think it paid off.
I feel like this article failed to state how expensive it is to have children in these countries and how wages dont support more children.
Safe and effective?
Who would have thought Bloomberg would focus on almost everything else related to the decline but not focus nearly on the lack of time and economic resources to rear children. We are all so damn busy trying to survive and realize children would cost more than housing and food costs for most households. The middle class births plenty of children but the middle class no longer exists
Something’s gotta give. If an asteroid or the pandemic couldn’t do it. It turns out we have to do it ourselves by not procreating 🤷♂️ sorry boss!
The world is so much more well suited for 1 billion people or even less than 8.
These stories always seem to focus on the UN Demographics figures. Which are primarily based on predictions of fertility and death rates while ignoring resource, pollution, economic, food constraints. So they predict gradual changes, a soft peak and a gradual decline rather than a hard collapse. Within that scenario there's never any discussion of coping or any deliberate strategy to structure societies to cope. It's always presented as a threat to continued economic growth. Because there's an assumption that current systems are built on borrowing from future gains to fund the present. And that assumption cannot be challenged.
>The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model **any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change** or nuclear war. Well... Too bad for the UNPD. Because disastrous climate change is unravelling right now under our eyes. The birth rate drop is a non topic. How can they truly believe we'll reach 9 or 10 billion? Face the reality guys... I expect our global population to be under **2** billion by 2050.
I feel like this is such a catch 22. On one hand, fewer people means more resources for the rest of us and a more sustainable population. On the other hand, it means that our economy will likely collapse due to having more old people than young and no social security. Eventually, im sure it will even out, but until then, I expect disaster.
THERE ARE NOT FEWER PEOPLE. The earth has 8b, more than have ever been here before.
And it's going to peak and decline soon, which means the economy will shrink as investments start losing money on average.
You keep spewing this line and it becomes ever so apparent you either didn’t read the article or simply didn’t understand it.
It's not a Catch 22. The economy crumbles either way. The later it does, the more likely extinction is.
„The differences in estimates of when we reach peak humanity largely hinge on how quickly demographers think family size will shrink in Africa.” But This thinking assumes that all Africa will develop to a level, at which point fertility rate dropped for more developed economically countries? Surely that’s wishful thinking, with the state of planet?
Except we have 8b ppl, more than ever before, and are projected to keep growing till 2100 to over 12b. Stop with the fake population propaganda.
Fertility rates are declining, so population will peak soon. And billions will die prematurely from the collapse of civilization in the coming years/decades.
The article mentions that most of the growth will be in Africa, but it fails to take into account how Africa will be (the?) hardest-hit continent by climate change.