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Too many humans in Earth's future, for sure. I've always thought that humans should never have strayed too far from the equator, where food and shelter would not be a big deal, nor an unsustainable issue. Yet, obviously, the mismanagement of the warmer environments forced people to find new lands, just as today plans are actually being drawn for terra-forming Mars. Below, you said: It would seem unlikely that managing population numbers would not be combined with some form of eugenic practice in such a world. Each child born would be expected to have something about it which justified its right to life in place of others whose would-be parents were thwarted. Prophetic as this may be, I hope, instead, barring the most sane choice of relevant mass education to effectively reduce over-population, it would be prospective parents who are carefully screened for reasonable competence to raise a child prior to conception. Given the huge numbers of unwanted and abused kids, too often the results of abusive relationships, I harbour reservations about the right of such people to conceive under these stressful and truly harmful conditions. If any successful program could be implemented, we might just arrive at sustainable numbers of 2-3 billion. Raising only potential prodigies is no guarantee of their continued uniqueness. I think it would be difficult to screen for such potential, and that screening would still lie within parental genetic/epigenetic potential. Implementing parental screening without racial, cultural, religious, intellectual, educational, income, or sexual orientation profiling would be hard enough. Convincing people that it's the right thing to do for the sake of continuity of Earthly life itself, given how easily this could become a biased catastrophe, and considering the shameful recent history of all sterilization and eugenics controls, would first require conditions on Earth to become quite dire and would also require bureaucratic enforcement. Likely an impossible measure. We have only to recall the children who died at the hands of their guardians within systems of protective child welfare to gauge how difficult full implementation of a screening program would be. Some reports indicate that education is reducing violent crime and domestic violence. Whether or not this is even true, however, doesn't address the population issue itself. Now would be the time to ensure education around sustainable populations. What with abstinence still being promoted over prevention and science, there's a long way to go. Natalia On 20/08/2012 2:15 AM, pete wrote:
Extracting a section... On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote:But most of the populations of advanced countries are declining anyway. For the past two generations, ever since the post-WWII baby-bulge, families have decreased to much less than replacement sizes. Within two generations from now, populations will be halved; within three generations, populations will be less than a quarter; within four generations there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck, the bulk of the population (what I term the 80-class) will decline pari passu with the onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way will have to be made up with welfare payments from governments.I disagree entirely. No country has yet seen an actual decline in population, that I am aware. Certainly lots of regions have, but the national totals still hover at manifestly unsustainable numbers, ...and everybody knows it. Talk to people. Everyone I talk to is just waiting for the other shoe to drop. On a discussion in a random web forum the other day, someone asked "How many are we?", and the unchallenged answer came immediately: "Too many!" People aren't stupid, they know we're courting catastrophe, and they aren't going to breed recklessly in that situation. Everyone has seen the growth curves, they know the numbers, and they can see that this sort of thing doesn't usually end well. However, it is a matter of habituation. People will tend to estimate that a sane population ought to feel like what it was like back when they were small children, and so each generation will have a different sense of what is excess. So, what I expect to happen is at some point there will be a slight decline in populations which will show up at the whole country, and then the whole world, level. This will cause a huge mental sigh of relief, followed shortly by a tiny uptick in the birth rate, so that the total population drop will not amount to more than ten or perhaps fifteen percent below maximum before it levels off, assuming that the long term pathologies to the environment due to human overburden have not yet ripened to the point of inflicting overt impact on our numbers. At this point, I expect that those long term pathologies are going to play the determining role. Each different, unforeseen, presenting a new and different assault which will hack at some portion of the population. Some will be simply the stochastic inevitability of epidemics. You keep a homogeneous population at unsustainable density long enough, and it will be vulnerable to pathogenic culls, not all of which will be controllable by our medical technology. Again, the longer the time scale, the more likely something too tricky to solve will come along. The situation essentially selects for it. Other assaults will arise from our corruption of the un- or underacknowledged necessities of our environment, air water, soil, healthy bacterial populations, etc. I don't expect these events to occur quickly, nor do I expect things like warfare to substantially affect the population total. I do expect that life will go through a fairly long period where we will experience as a planetary species a pretty wretched time, and how long and how bad it will be will be chiefly dependent on how long it takes us to acknowledge the superiority of cooperation over individual struggle. It may be that the population takes a massive dive due to a particularly vicious assault of the type mentioned above, but certainly not due to a massive social neglect of breeding. Barring such a hit, I expect the total population to subside slowly as reality sets in. Where it finally settles will be contingent on how our technology solves each challenge I've outlined above, including those just sketched vaguely. In the shorter medium term of the next 3-400 years, I expect a stepwise downward trend as apparently viable population levels prove unsustainable, due to inability to manage the challenges noted above, and population reduction is recognized as the only available solution. It may be that in a half a millennium or so we will decide that the planet cannot sustain more than 2.5 or 3 billion, or we may devise ways of supporting 8 or 12, or even 30, but with extraordinary technological intervention and considerable energy flows onto and off the planet. At any rate, at each stage along the way, people will tend to breed to the point of filling up the planet to the maximum regarded as viable, and I expect there will be a permanent struggle to hold the numbers to what is seen as desireable at any time. At any time ahead, with the planet at what is then generally perceived as a safe and manageable population level, there will never be a problem keeping the population level up, only with keeping it down, and the latter problem may result in a permanent undercurrent of nastiness. It would seem unlikely that managing population numbers would not be combined with some form of eugenic practice in such a world. Each child born would be expected to have something about it which justified its right to life in place of others whose would-be parents were thwarted. -Pete On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote: --
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