“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.”
-- Goodall at 2002 WEF panel discussion on Amazon rainforest
The population 500 years ago was around 500 million. The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization.
Paul Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb" almost 60 years ago - all of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.
If I’m not mistaken, she goes on to say “but we don’t live in that world, and so we must…” and goes on to argue for policy that doesn’t neglect the poorest and least fortunate members of society.
>The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization.
Unfortunately, we will return to that level. Then 25 years later, we'll be only half that number (or worse).
>all of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.
Hilariously wrong, you mean. I especially like the ones about how the UK would be filled with cannibal savages by the 1980s, because everyone would be starving.
> Unfortunately, we will return to that level. Then 25 years later, we'll be only half that number (or worse).
What are your main reasons for thinking that?
There is a very simple metric, called "fertility rate". It is the average number of children born per woman over her entire lifetime. Since the male/female ratio in humans is nearly 1:1, she has to have 2 children (one to replace herself, one for the corresponding man) plus a tiny bit of extra... usually said to be about 2.1 children.
If she has fewer than that, population is shrinking, each generation is smaller than the last. In China and other parts of East Asia (not just China, this isn't the One Child Policy and its effects), it's already at or below 1.0. Heading that way everywhere else. This isn't a prediction, it's already happening. And in Europe, in North America, everywhere but a few countries in Africa (and they're trending towards this too).
This is real, I would say it can't be denied or ignored except most people are ignorant and in denial. Low fertility rates can become social norms, they do become social norms, and after that they never raise back to safe/healthy ones. Little children grow up thinking that having one child or no children at all is normal and they do not buck the trend when they become adults themselves. It's how humans become extinct.
> It's how humans become extinct.
Don’t you think it’s likely more of a pendulum? Maybe the equilibrium is 5-7 billion, and there are times when people have more kids, and times of fewer. Even if we drop to 3 billion, the world would find ways to go on, likely implementing policies that make big families more favorable again.
>Don’t you think it’s likely more of a pendulum?
No. For it to be a pendulum, it would have to be true that some little girl, herself the only child from a long line of only-children, who grows up in a society where people have only one child or more likely no children, all her role models being childless... her school teachers, celebrities, everyone she's heard of, that little girl would grow up and say "I want to be a mommy and have 5/8/12 kids!" And that's so absurd I don't know why you'd even ask.
Nor is it likely, as many of those with unearned optimism believe, that some "high fertility families" can just outbreed everyone and come out the other side of this. Their children become indoctrinated faster than they can have them... the Duggars aren't on track for 400 (20x20) grandchildren. Insularity doesn't help, the Amish only survive with their lifestyle as long as our lifestyle exists... it requires too much technology that they buy from us. They either would need to change and become like us, or revert to technology from centuries before after which their fertility plummets.
>Maybe the equilibrium is 5-7 billion,
What's the life expectancy in China? Find that number, n. In that many years, China's population will be less than half what it is today. Much less. You have no intuitive sense of the math here. The current generation being born will live until that life expectancy number, then die (on average). So the current generation being born right now will evaporate in that number of years... but the generation they'll start giving birth to in about 25 years, it will be only half the size. The older generations, almost all of those will be dead in n years, since they're way past life expectancy.
It's fucking bleak.
>Even if we drop to 3 billion, the world would find ways to go on, likely implementing policies that make big families more favorable again.
There are no policies that can incentivize this that are also affordable. How much do you think you'd need to bribe someone who calls themselves "childfree" to have children? Sure, everyone has a price. Is that $1mil, or $1bil? And sure, the US government can afford even the $1bil number. But the United States can't afford $1bil times the 500,000 births we need next year. And if the US can't afford it, how the fuck will Portugal or Taiwan or Australia afford it?
It's not that you're thinking unclearly about this. It's that you haven't thought about it at all. Because no one's ever rang the alarm bell. And why haven't they? They keep telling you that it's no big deal. This is human extinction.
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Taking a 23-year old phrase out of context to try to paint a just-deceased scientist as some sort of "freedom-hating vegan commie" attacking the Infinite Growth Paradigm (swt) that SV loves so much. Really great job.
"freedom-hating vegan commie" - this is what is known as a straw man. Hopefully you will develop a little more nuance in your thinking.
Why?
Yeah I've seen this before, we could all drive V12s and eat only beef but it's not a very meaningful insight. We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.
We came from the caves, we didn't know any better we just multiplied like a cancer. More population also brings more benefits, more geniuses more inventions etc.
The trick is doing it without wars and inequality, good luck with that.
It's pretty clear we're not going to hit 10B
At current trends, the global population will begin actively shrinking as soon as 2040, just 15 years away.
We have improved a lot on eliminating wars front.
Inequality not so much but much progress has been made in eliminating abject poverty.
> We have improved a lot on eliminating wars front.
Have we? After the nightmare of The War to End All Wars, did anyone in the mainstream honestly expect Europe to turn into an even bigger charnel house (~30-50 million dead) two decades later?
It's been 80 years since then, and we've not had a 'large' industrialized war since then. But we have all been living under an atomic sword of Damocles.
Do you think we're going to get to 200 years without that sword falling? What odds do you give on that (We've had many close calls since then)? How many people would die if it does fall? If in 2145, half a billion[1] people will die in nuclear fire, will we retroactively consider the brief stretch of history we live in to just be a brief ceasefire?
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[1] That would be a best case outcome for a nuclear war - a limited one, that wouldn't rise to the level of a global catastrophe.
> We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.
10 billion is gonna be the high end by the looks of things, and that decline is going to be hardly conducive to utopia. The math of dependency ratios is inescapably painful.
Utopia literally means "no place" for a reason. We're always going to be just what we are right now . . . humans.
Whatever subset of projections you're looking at seems to leave out any that take global warming into account.
> hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point
it is so dangerous and naive to think that utopia is possible, even if we all could agree that Star Trek is one, which we shall not, because I certainly do not think its depiction of watered down "luxury space communism with military ranks" is a desirable society.
The world/utopia as described in Star Trek is a world where there is no poverty and free electricity. You describe Starfleet. Obviously, the series do contain elitism. Joining Starfleet is seen as prestigious. And even on Earth there are slums during the time of the federation. So the “Utopia” is not complete. And Starfleet is necessary to protect the utopia from outside influences.
It is largely based on the premise of having copious amounts basically free energy, free food (through replicators), safety, and a wide open universe for settlers to join when they do not want to stay in the Federation. Basically, it is based on the absence of contention of resources. Until we have that, either through shrinking or expansions of habitat, we will retain conflict.
Thank you Mr. Spockz.
That’s the real trouble with Utopia, differing ideas on what kind of Utopia we want.
to advocate for the death of 8 billion people is a hell of a stance. there's pro genocide and then there's... I guess this is just hating the whole species.
I think she advocating for fewer births. The 8 billion deaths would eventually happen by themselves, most of them of old age.
She’s not doing either. In that same conversation, she goes on to talk about how we don’t live in that world and can’t return there, and what the implications should be for policy.
The thing is that if you depopulate by reducing the birth rate, you end up in a situation where you have a whole lot of old people and very few young people, which cannot be sustained.
It doesn't need to be sustained, the whole point is that eventually when the next generation ages up, the number of old people won't be as high.
However, in the intermediate stage, you are desperately short of working-age people to help support the massive aging population.
This isn't a theoretical - most of Western Europe has been in this boat for a long time, and relies heavily on immigration to fill the labour gap (despite however much political posturing about wanting to restrict immigration)
If we do this on a global scale, there is nowhere to draw immigrants from, and a bunch of old folks are going to be abandoned to die...
What's the alternative though? Creating new humans purely to be able to have them work and pay for stuff for other existing humans? That doesn't seem a bit dystopian for you?
The problem I have with this logic is that it seems to assume a binary of the population either staying at least as high as it is or massively reducing. The idea that there's no middle ground where the population goes down slowly rather than massively spiking all at once feels like it needs much more justification rather than just assuming it.
Oh, for sure, that alternative is not great either. We've built a society on the myth that infinite growth is possible, and at some point the chickens are coming home to roost...
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Humans are humans, at the end of the day. Especially as someone who grew up at the height of EU open borders, I'm not real bothered which side of an imaginary line on a map someone happened to be born on
If you don't want Europe to look like Sudan or India, you might want to start caring about those "imaginary lines" that your ancestors until very recently held in such high regard that they would fight and die to defend or advance them.
If Europeans are replaced by foreigners, there is no Europe any more.
If the only argument behind why Europe should exist is that you don't like people who look like the people from Sudan or India, then maybe it shouldn't.
(If you instead want to claim that you're not trying to talk about ethnicity and are instead talking about economies or whatever, consider whether the ancestors you mention drawing those imaginary lines over places like Sudan and India were motivated by their desire to colonize and extract wealth from them at the expense of the local populations, and whether that's more responsible for the economic differences between them and Europe than the lines themselves)
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From what I can tell, all of the hate against minorities is coming from you, not anyone else
Europe is built on foreign things. What would life in England be like without Tea, Coffee and Curry?
I for one do not welcome an exclusionist Europe
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You're the only one obviously full of hate in these comments
europe to here with the ethnicism!
I can see why it might be undesirable socially but why not, economically? That's what technology is for.
In order to achieve this, though, we desperately need to get every country well below replacement-level fertility rate, and sustain that for a long, long time. Not sure it's possible, particularly when some political factions still consider "below replacement" to be a bad thing.
It's happening though. Birthrate in many countries are below replacement rate, and birthrates in all countries have declined:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2025/09/11/hu....
here's an AP news fact check article from 2022 if anyone is curious about what Goodall actually said: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-jane-goodall-populatio...
to straw-man what someone says and then get indignant is a waste of your emotional budget
And that's a charitable evaluation.