Best approach for global human overpopulation?

[jooxis]

Alright. So we all know our human population has been increasing globally like, ever since we figured out how to make babies. The BBC reported the other day that "The world's population is expected to rise from the current 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050, the UN says.".
That's a LOT of people (duh). I don't think there is any doubt that this all puts an enormous strain on the planet and possibly human society as well.

But do you think we should actively do anything about it? I mean, what can seriously be done (that isn't inhumane, obviously)? From my point of view it all seems out of our control. You can't exactly force people in poor developing countries not to get pregnant... so what do you think?

[Mistermook]

The best as in most effective, the best as in most practical, or the best as in "this would work and I'd still be happy with myself if given the power to implement it?" Best has varying, and important, differences depending on how you interpret it.

A rogue plague that causes a 20-50% reduction in the population before it runs its course is great from the standpoint of "gets a lot of people off the planet in just a year or so" and would be sustainable by civilization in the long run, especially if it hit the customary poorer nations hardest (because you'd want the wealthiest nations to be hit less hard, because of their ability to recreate infrastructure and reeducate.) It's a messy solution with several really horrifying secondary effects, and it's not clean - but wiping the planet clean of significant population while leaving infrastructure more or less intact probably gives people a big leg up in sustainable population growth for at least a while.

A land war between China and India, between the nations of Europe, or a civil war in the United States might be the most practical in reducing the strain on resources, at least in the long term. Chinese/Indian conflicts would short-circuit some of the fastest industrializing economies in the world, and having either Europe or the US kill a lot of themselves would target the world's largest per-person resource consumers. Not a big fan of this one either, because it would almost certainly spill outside the initial concept with potential to spread too far. Destroying vital links of infrastructure and economy means that there could be a cascade effect beyond the expected. The true extent of how badly things got screwed up might take a hundred years to recognize. War gives rise to nationalism and worse sometimes, which is an impediment to future progress. The actual conflict could last longer than the war. Some wars provoke thousands of years of oppression and racism.

From a "I would rather sleep at night" standpoint though, I think secularization, lifting economies out of poverty, womens' and civil rights, and the like seem to do the trick of giving people more to do than just sit around and spit out babies. Wealth turns the curve for nearly everyone, and kicking outdated religious concepts that objectify women and turn their wombs into artifacts of oppression finishes most people's baby booms off. It's more reckless because it takes longer and there are people who are opposed to even normal capitalist wealth redistribution and economic growth in the third world for various reasons, so it's always a longer and more sustained political dialog. I think it's the sanest option though.

That and getting off the planet in enough numbers that flatlining the ability of any single planet to sustain our population is more of a nuisance than an apocalypse scenario.

[ElementMK]

Do you do as China does? The magic number is 1.8.

[Sunbee]

Female education levels are correlated pretty strongly with reproduction rates. So are First World standards of living. (I hate those terms: First World, Third World. Anybody have a better set?) Countries where the retirement system is that your sons support you have higher birthrates than countries which have other systems.
While the world population is going up right now, if you disallow immigration, the First World populations are mostly declining, with the exception of the US at just a tad over replacement rate. Part of population increase at the moment is increasing life expectancies in poorer nations. So there are several things to take into account in looking at the numbers. I've seen curves projected over a longer period of time that show a decrease in population after the turn of the next century, assuming ongoing modernization in the Third World. With the environment the way it is, though, that may be too big an assumption to make.
What we can do personally? Fund education. Particularly in the countries which do not have free public education in the grade schools. It's amazing just how cheap education is in many countries. There are many charities, some religious, some not, that are working on this right now. Or if you have contacts in the area, just do it on your own. Fund environmentally friendly development, choose your purchases carefully and consider how you can help with the situation as it stands. There are many people still who do not have running water or electricity, and they will not, over the long term, accept that they don't get those luxuries and we do.

[fakepeeps7]

Educate the populace, reduce the influence of religion, and have fewer babies. That's about all you can do.

[Oaktree]

I don't think there is any ethical means of preventing the population growth, short of allowing people to make the decision to have fewer children. I agree with those before who have said to educate people, as educated people are less likely to have a dozen children.

I think what it will come down to, though, is that, if our current population is too high, or if our population continues to grow to the point where it becomes unsupportable, is that nature will take its course. Starvation, disease, natural disasters, and the like will reduce the population when it gets too large. It's sad, but unpreventable. The best we can do is to increase our arable land to support a larger population and take some of the strain off of the planet's resources, but that can only ever go so far, and may simply be pushing off the inevitable.

I would hope that people choose the route of having only one or two children rather than allowing natural disaster to wipe out a chunk of the population.

[fakepeeps7]

Did you mean Islam?

The full quote was:

Wealth turns the curve for nearly everyone, and kicking outdated religious concepts that objectify women and turn their wombs into artifacts of oppression finishes most people's baby booms off.

That can be applied to other religions besides Islam. And, to be frank, most people probably think of Catholicism when they think of wombs being "artifacts of oppression". All you have to do is look at the Pope's stance on condoms.

It's the idea that "a woman's sole purpose is to pop out kids" that needs to go. And that idea isn't exclusive to one particular religion.

[potatoehead]

More kids = more Catholics. Why do you think organized religions encourage childbirth?

[fakepeeps7]

More kids = more Catholics. Why do you think organized religions encourage childbirth?

Problem is, it's an outdated idea from a time when there weren't very many people on the planet. Some religious people don't seem to understand math. You can't keep the population growing at this rate indefinitely... no matter how much God wants it.

[iCad]

*sigh* To steer this away from another "religion is evil" shouting match... ;)

The problem isn't that too many babies are being born. The problem is that over the past 100 years or so, we have greatly lengthened the human lifespan. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that the population started to rise greatly right after the turn of the 20th century. Do you seriously think that people suddenly had tons more babies starting then? No. Average family size has actually been DECLINING since then, globally, and markedly so in non-agrarian areas. Rather, the thing that happened at that time is the advent of modern medicine. So instead of people routinely dying in their 40s/50s/60s, they now routinely die in their 70s/80s and sometimes even much older than that. People suddenly hanging around for an extra 20-30 years in areas where "modern medicine" was available made the population numbers start to jump very quickly, and that same thing continues to this day. It really is that simple.

If you do a bit of research, you'll see that in most of the "developed" world and even in some less-developed countries, the birth rate is already at or below replacement levels. In those places where it isn't at or below replacement, infant/child mortality is generally still high, meaning that many children who are born do not live to see their reproductive years and so they do not ultimately contribute to the population. So, babies aren't the problem, really. The problem is that we went and monkeyed with the human lifespan. The way to "fix" that is a method that no one wants to hear: Culling the currently-alive population. More tyrannical people have suggested enforced euthanasia at a certain age and/or to cease efforts to keep people alive longer. Wars cull local populations, too, but generally not enough and not for a long enough time to have any global effect. A global-enough plague might do it, and AIDS is currently ravaging Africa as the Black Death ravaged medieval Europe. Or, we could get our acts together and simply ship a portion of the population off to live elsewhere, but given that budgets for space exploration and travel and such have been savagely cut...yeah.

Anyway, it's so much easier to yell, "STOP HAVING BABIES!" isn't it? But the thing is that, as "easy" as that sounds, even if were somehow to happen, even if it were possible to lower the global birth rate to zero for a number of years, it doesn't solve the problem. It's like trying to use a pea shooter to deflect an ICBM, like spitting into the wind. Think about it: even fifty million fewer babies born per year (Currently, about 130 million babies are born per year although of course not all of them survive) will not make a dent in a population of 6 BILLION for a long, LONG time, not if the death rate remains relatively constant, and it will take much longer if the human lifespan continues to lengthen so that fewer people die per year. (A little appreciation of Really Big Numbers is necessary to comprehend this. Recall that a billion is ONE THOUSAND MILLIONS.)

In any case, after the population peaks in fifty years or so when my generation -- the largest one, after the "Baby Boomers," the generation currently starting to die -- is all or at least mostly dead (assuming no new medical advancements that keep people alive even longer between now and then), the population will go down rather quickly because the generations behind mine are successively smaller. Because, as I said, the birth rate is already going down, globally, and has been since the 60s. (Yet the population still keeps growing. Why? Because the factor causing the population growth isn't babies being born, obviously, but people living longer than they ever have.) So, the "best approach" to solving the "overpopulation problem" is...to wait about 60 years. :) Because, from a practical and likely ethical point of view, it's all that we CAN do.

But don't you young 'uns cheer too loudly now. Even though some of you will likely still be alive in 60 years or so, there are effects of a rapidly-declining population that are just as bad as -- perhaps worse than -- a rapidly-expanding one, most of them biological ones having to do with reduction of genetic diversity. And that, my friends, is potentially a far bigger danger to the long-term survival of the human species than any ecological collapse. I refer you to the problems inherent in saving the cheetahs, a species that is in grave trouble due to lack of genetic diversity. Yeah. That's no fun, either. We can likely get around environmental issues using Almighty Science and Technology; genetic engineering, though, is a field littered with practical and ethical minefields.

[fakepeeps7]

Culling the herd? That's not a very nice solution. Effective, perhaps. But not very nice. And it kind of assumes that we in the developed world are not part of the problem. We're a HUGE part of the problem. We may have fewer kids, but we use more resources. I recall reading something to the effect that the resources used for 200 Somali children is about the same as the resources used for 1 child from a developed country. So when we go having more kids than we need, we're not only crowding the planet, we're also using up more than our fair share of resources.

Yes, the population will have to decline at some point. But saying that "having fewer babies is not the answer" implies that we should continue the way we've been going. And that's not the answer, either. Genetic diversity isn't much of a factor. We've got more than enough diversity to keep things going for a long time. Heck, we managed to survive a near-extinction 150,000 years ago relatively unscathed when the population went down to as few as 2000 people. If that didn't screw up our genes, I doubt reducing the population to a couple billion (which is what it was less than 100 years ago) is going to make much difference.

As for the population living longer, I've heard it said that this current generation of kids will not even live as long as their parents (due to factors like obesity). So the longevity factor won't be in play forever (in fact, we may see the shift within our own lifetime).

If we really want a better world for our children, shouldn't we be giving them a planet that's not overcrowded and prone to resource wars?

[Sunbee]

It is not a rule. Poland is an example of this system where the young work for the elderly pensions and notices a declining population.



I've never used the quote function on this board before, so let's see if I screw it up! Wojtek, this is the opposite of what I mean. What I mean is if you (general, not you specific) must have a son survive to adulthood to support you in your old age or you will be destitute on the streets, you will have many more children than someone who can rely on other people's children's incomes, or even on their own daughter. This is, probably, natural in a society where everyone is farming and there is little stored wealth. It's certainly the most common way of taking care of elders. Many if not all western cultures used to function this way, but we've changed how we do things.

Edit: Fakepeeps, I wanted to say that the industrialized nations are where life expectancies are starting to decrease. Third world life expectancies are increasing as medicine and medical care become more available.

[SuicidiaParasidia]

im still waiting for the day when someone gets too power crazed and a nuclear war erupts.

[Mistermook]

Those wars are very inhumane. The countries of Europe suffer from aging population and it declines gradually. As far as war in Europe is concerned I think we're fed up with wars.
I presented three fairly general options, and fairly clearly (I think) presented two as less than favorable. I mean, fuck it - I think I've been fairly outspoken and consistent over time in outlining my personal views on war. Sure, it's almost always a bad idea, a horrifying proposition even when it's unavoidable. I even explicitly said so in this specific instance that it was a bad idea. But bad ideas and inhumane ideas can sometimes have correlative effects. The Europe you enjoy today is a product of two devastating and transformative violent conflicts that killed millions of people and provoked a ruinous economic cost upon millions more. That doesn't make wars any less horrible, but to ignore the effects of violence is stupid. Don't be stupid.

As for whether or not Europe is "fed up with war?" I could care less. I don't think the US is anywhere near the point of a civil war either, but I tossed that in there too. The point of the question, I thought, was to present options and analysis.

Did you mean Islam?
If I'd meant Islam specifically then I wouldn't be shy about saying Islam specifically. Therefore I meant exactly what I said, which is to say - not specifically Islam.

I don't want this debate to turn into a Catholic-bashing one.
But apparently you wanted this to turn into an Islam bashing debate?

[Nekowolf]

People suggested better quality of life in other nations?

That's a nice idea, but the problem in many is the government of those nations. Too corrupt, too weak, too authoritarian, etc. So then the problem becomes how, as outsiders, can you really do anything to change that without descending into war? You pretty much can't. You can help try to influence revolt or whatever, but that's about it. Furthermore, in some areas, just the violence in general. Again, it's a question of, what could you really do?

[Purity4]

I could care less.

Well, if you could care less, then you must care some. Unless you mean you could not, or couldn't, care less.

[Honeywell]

Well, if you could care less, then you must care some. Unless you mean you could not, or couldn't, care less.Isn't the pause and "but I don't" implied? I know over at MATY they have a hard-on for that figure of speech but I thought everywhere else it was understood. Guess not. *shrug*

[Mistermook]

When I read what people wrote about the problem of overpopulation I came to conclusion that the real problem is the aging societies.
That's great, but irrelevant to the discussion of solving global population issues unless you're suggesting by implication that we should either kill old people or let them die quicker?

...

We were all young once, but believe me that sort of crap starts sounding a lot less sane once you get old enough that you can imagine some idiot kid deciding to pull a Logan's Run on you.

[dutch]

From the perspective of someone from a developing country, I've got a couple of thoughts to bring up too.

Firstly, I agree that conflicting religious views do create a barrier in spreading the message about birth control, and since that has been addressed above, I'd try to move onto other factors.

I for one believe overpopulation is the consequence of various other issues. The rich-poor gap for example. In some countries, a lot of people have unprotected sex, neglect birth control because they are either ignorant, irresponsible or simply uneducated. However in many poorer countries that heavily rely on the primary sector (labourous, physical, low-skill jobs), even if they are educated, giving birth just gives them that much more long-term benefits than practicing birth control. To them, generating household income comes first, and the more children they bear, the more manpower they have to fend for the family in the long run. This situation could be alleviated, sure, if such countries' standards of living are improved and they can rely a little more on the secondary or even tertiary industries. However, it's next to impossible to for that to happen over night. One possible solution might be international aid and higher order decisions from world leaders. But we all know governments also play an important role in determining what happens to their countries. Chances are (and we have seen it all) the aid they receive might not be efficiently devoted to improve the country's standards as what the aid is actually meant to be, and instead use them to serve other private purposes (this is especially the case in Africa, countries like Zimbabwe or Kenya just to name a few). Moreover, a lot of developed countries are unwilling to extend a helping hand if it means to sacrifice part of their development process, or the maintainance of it.

Therefore, from my personal stand point, although education is indeed an essential method in theory, we need more cooperation amongst nations in order for overpopulation to really be slowed down (NOT eradicated, or even alleviated, since I'm talking about maybe the next two or three decades - and unless there's a global pandemic or a war outbreak, slowing down is the most feasible option). My point might sound funny or superficial, or some might say unrealistic since it'd affect countries' national interests, but I truly think it carries some weight and is nevertheless an approach, if it can't be the best.

After all, this is "global human overpopulation", so shouldn't it be countered in a more globalized way?

Just my two cents.

[Undercovers_Agent]

It's called war. War is a great population limiter.

[dutch]

Or not. Who knows what people will do AFTER the war? With the remaining population, people might just go batshit crazy, have sex and give birth all over again, especially if they're reduced into poorer nations and forced to rebuild them. Seriously war isn't all that much of an effective deterrent, unless you're talking about someone who goes and nuke the whole world and reduce the global population to a complete zero. Even with one, that person might have a chance to somehow reproduce with air or something.

We should aim to tackle the process of creating overpopulation, i.e excessive baby making, rather than dealing with the babies that were already made. xD In other words, looking to improve the future rather than fixing the past.

[Safyre420]

How would you solve the issue of aging population? I did not come up with any reasonable solution so far.

Kill them all! :jest:

All jokes aside, as dutch_1991 said, global cooperation would be absolutely essential in slowing down overpopulation. You can't have a handful of countries limiting population while the others are popping out more mouths to feed. Even if you were to get all the countries of the world to limit their population growth on paper it could not ever be fully implemented, china is a great example of that.

Also, as was mentioned earlier, shipping people off world would help to alleviate overpopulation here on Earth, but before you can start shipping people off world you first need to provide a place that can support the population you are shipping off world. Otherwise, those being shipped off would be using more resources than if they weren't shipped off.

Personally, the culling the herd option doesn't bother me, yeah it might be inhumane but when you have people like the phelps clan running around, perhaps you should think about culling the herd.

[fakepeeps7]

Even with one, that person might have a chance to somehow reproduce with air or something.

See, this is why we need more sex education in schools! :lol:

Damn it, I breathed when I was laughing. Am I going to get pregnant now?

[anothereyjana]

It's called war. War is a great population limiter.
Actually, no, no it's not.
Who knows what people will do AFTER the war? With the remaining population, people might just go batshit crazy, have sex and give birth all over again,
For this exact reason. Studies have shown that birth rates actually increase after wars, since people seem to have some sort of "nesting" reaction after periods of large civil/social unrest, especially wars. The largest one in the US (not as certain about other countries) was after WWII, hence part of the reason why the kids born during that period became known as "baby boomers."

[Mistermook]

How would you solve the issue of aging population? I did not come up with any reasonable solution so far.
I know. You didn't come up with any solution, that's what I was pointing out. That's not a debate. That's someone asking you what to cook for dinner and you going "cheese is very expensive." So what?

I've already presented my opinions sans specifics addressing aging population issues. I'm not really sure there needs to be anything specifically addressing aging populations when you're already talking about limiting population growth. If population growth is stable and resource usage is more or less stable then I'm not sure if anything about aging populations really adds anything to the conversation, unless you think you've got some sort of amazing insight and research into the subject to share. At least for now there's still a shelf life on living, and until we manage to be in the position to have a practical conversation about immortality that means that aging populations is nothing more than more of the same.

Fifty thousand years ago we probably all died before thirty, and maybe we were all wondering what we'd ever do once all the good rocks for making axes were all used up and how many children could we force upon our women and still be able to follow the elk. That doesn't mean that we haven't learned a lot in the intervening time, but it's worth considering when trying to present issues as new when very few issues are really new. Overpopulation is a resource management issue. We've had (often admittedly poor or brutal) solutions to resource management since we were walking on two legs.

Adding aging populations isn't some simple or new addition to the conversation on resource management re:overpopulation. People living longer add to resource inventories as much as they consume them, until they inevitably cross over into the area of their lives where they can't work. I think I remember studies that suggest that longer lived populations correlate with less children too, probably because the longer a population lives suggests advanced medical infrastructure which comes with the educational advances mentioned elsewhere. This will change the longer we manage to stretch our lives out, but there does seem to be a shift in medical care to not merely preserving life at all costs but working on quality of life. And really, given the lives that some people have these days I'm not sure that an aging population is quite the impediment to a person's contribution to society that it once was, given that so much of our lives seems to be maintained online anyways. That's a trend that's not likely to decrease, I think.

Finally, Poland might be a very bad example of population issues entirely. Your personal anecdotal experiences are about Poland. Poland is nation of emigrants, not immigrants. From the late 60s emigration of twenty thousand Polish Jews, to the 1980s when hundreds of thousands of Poles left to flee hyperinflation, to the situation now with Poles moving about the EU, Poland doesn't seem to have quite hit the stride, internationally speaking, that Ireland enjoyed when recent Irish immigrants to other countries started returning. If people of working age in Poland are moving to Germany or America (the two top destinations as of 2002 in the paper I sourced before I opened my mouth) then it's no wonder that the people remaining in Poland are going to be statistically older because of that bias. I grew up in Florida, until I started traveling elsewhere in the country and around the world I had no idea that there were as many young people in the world. ;)

[dutch]

You might not have meant that and maybe it's just the phrasing, but it's not so much to 'compensate the people they lost'. That phrase makes humans look like replaceable objects that are only used to fill up unoccupied space just to meet a certain population criteria or something.

[potatoehead]

Your attitude is unbearable. Be nice, dammit!
What, because he disagrees with you? He seems civil enough to me. Besides, you're not allowed to ape HP.

[iCad]

@fakepeeps: Actually, for the most part, we in the "developed world" aren't just a huge part of the the problem. We, in fact, CAUSED the problem, and we are also the ones who sustain the problem, all while self-righteously pointing fingers at places like Africa or people like Catholics or Muslims or what-have-you because OMG! They have large families! How DARE they when the world is so "overpopulated!"

How horribly, SHORT-SIGHTEDLY hypocritical. If it weren't so horrible, I'd laugh, even.

Because, in reality, we in the "developed world" are in fact the ones who increased the human life span in the first place, and WE are the people who are living longer as a result, so WE are the ones who are causing the "overpopulation." Not people in Africa. Not Catholics in the less-developed world who have 10 children. Us. Us folks in the US or Canada or Australia or Europe or Russia or what-have-you, many of us yelling about other people having far too many babies and how horrible that is. But WE are the cause of the problem. Not "them." Because in terms of causing "overpopulation," NOTHING is or can be as devastating as an unnaturally lengthened life span. In fact, if we ever got to a point where we were desperate enough to overcome ethical objections to culling the population, I daresay that, logically, those to be culled should come exclusively from the developed world. Because those people are far more likely to live to be 100 or more, not someone in the so-called "third world." But I doubt that we will ever get to that point.

Nor, I should add, do I advocate doing so. Mostly because, all ethical considerations aside, as a "problem" that will rectify itself in a relatively short period of time, I do not see "overpopulation" as a devastating, all-threatening "problem." But really my opinion or anyone else's opinion on that subject is irrelevant. Because even if I thought overpopulation to be a huge and imminent threat, to be blunt the genie is out of the bottle. We cannot in good conscience deny people medical treatment that will lengthen their lives. And no sane person would advocate going out and killing people in order to reduce the population. Finally, we cannot return to the conditions that kept life expectancy low in the past, things such as poor hygienic conditions and poor-quality food and such. Society is what it is. It is as we have made it, in fact, and we can't turn back the clock. We must simply ride out the situation that we have unwittingly created. As I said, science and technology will no doubt help us to do so, even in the face of dwindling resources.

But you know what? Having fewer babies once the population naturally declines MIGHT help to restore some balance. In a healthy, balanced population the birth rate and the death rate more or less match each other. Right now, the birth rate greatly exceeds the death rate but not because more and more babies are being born (in fact, fewer and fewer babies are being born each year) but simply because fewer and fewer people are dying each year. (Globally speaking, of course; in more localized terms -- such as in the AIDS-ravaged parts of Africa -- the death rate is rising precipitously.) So you might think that having fewer babies now will help to solve the problem, but if you do the math (And I did, once (http://nene.modthesims.info/showthread.php?p=2326948#post2326948) , in a greatly simplified, non-logarithmic fashion), you'll see that it won't. Not for a long, long time, at least, well after the population will adjust itself naturally. Once that lower population is in place, however, efforts to balance the population by equalizing the birth and death rates will help, if such a thing can be achieved. It would, as has been said, require a concerted global effort and, historically, we've never been able to get our collective act together to that kind of extent.

But with our current population level...The real truth that no one wants to hear is that having either more or less babies right now and for the next 50-or-so years will have no appreciable effect on the existing population either way. Why? Because there are already 6 billion people here and they aren't dying "on schedule." Think about it: A few tens of millions fewer or more babies per year isn't really going to make a difference in a population of SIX THOUSAND MILLION people in any practical time frame. (Remember what I said about big numbers? There you go.) Especially because global life expectancy continues to increase, not decrease. Life expectancy has already surpassed 80 years for white females in the developed world, when only 150 years ago or so, it was 40(ish) for white males, when they lived longer than women. Now, IF you could sustain such a lowered birth rate in the (very) long term, if the death rate remains constant, it might start to have an effect in...oh, a thousand years or so. But as it is, the population will begin to go down all by itself in 50 years, so having fewer babies before that happens as a well-intentioned but ultimately fruitless means of "population control" is, as I said, spitting into the wind. Of course it won't HURT to have fewer babies, either, so if it makes you feel better, by all means advocate doing so. Just don't delude yourself into thinking that it will make any appreciable difference before the population declines all by itself. Because it won't. Math doesn't lie.

As for genetic diversity...The easiest ways to create it are:

1) Isolating breeding populations from each other such that the available local gene pool contracts due either to actual physical barriers between populations...or social ones. Humans are instinctively really good at doing the latter. We create taboos against reproducing with/marrying individuals outside of one's own race, religion, social class, nationality, or cultural heritage, all of which serve to reduce diversity. Thankfully, THAT is slowly falling by the wayside in more parts of the world, so perhaps we've managed to avoid that iceberg. But perhaps not. Perhaps the damage has already been done. Ever wonder why, in general, fertility rates are falling? It's basically because we made it so, with things like the above. A consequence of reduced genetic diversity is reduced fertility and/or embryonic viability. And we are most efficient at reducing our own genetic diversity even without the "help" of the occasional genocidal maniac like Hitler or of popular social movements like the eugenics movement in the 20s.

2) Lowering the birth rate in a declining population. And guess what we're doing? Sure, our overall population is not declining at present, but it will soon, extremely soon on a more cosmic scale of time measurement. If you focus down on a generational level, you'll see that, globally-speaking, each generation is smaller than its predecessor. In addition, more people in each generation are consciously choosing not to have children, partly, no doubt, because of this prevailing attitude that we MUST have fewer babies or else we will destroy the planet. And of course in some places like China, fewer babies are mandated by law.

So, if this trend continues unabated over enough generations, it is a mathematical certainty that, eventually, you'll reach a point where there will be longer and longer stretches of time when there will be fewer and fewer women of reproductive age. The genetic effects of such a thing would be devastating and, should it go on long enough, the result could well be a non-viable population or at least one where breeding would have to be carefully monitored in order to deflect inbreeding as much as possible. Don't believe me? As I said, check out what's happened to the cheetahs. Ten thousand years after their species was suddenly reduced to perhaps a few hundred individuals, they are struggling to survive mostly because they are so inbred that they are all effectively genetically identical, which makes them vulnerable to...anything and everything. As a result of the lack of genetic diversity fertility rates in cheetahs are abysmally low, embryonic/infant mortality is high, and it's quite possible that the species will not be able to recover.

Now, all indications are that the cheetah population bottlenecked suddenly, possibly due to disease. But the same thing can happen to ANY species whose numbers experience a decline either suddenly or gradually, with the inevitable resulting inbreeding and reduced fertility rates/increased infant mortality rates. As might happen to us, once the population declines all on its own, if the generations continue on the current ever-smaller trend. Ahhh population genetics. So much fun. :)

[fakepeeps7]

You're thinking much more globally than I am.

What's wrong with encouraging a woman in Africa to have 4 babies instead of 10 babies, especially when there aren't enough resources in that immediate area to support 10 babies? That will have an immediate and noticeable effect on her family, and that effect could carry on into future generations. No, it's not going to make a difference on a global scale. But neither is getting rid of the resource leeches (we the people of the developed world); even if we all committed mass suicide, it wouldn't make people in the developing world have fewer babies and stop putting a strain on the existing resource pool, would it?

[iCad]

You're thinking much more globally than I am.

What's wrong with encouraging a woman in Africa to have 4 babies instead of 10 babies, especially when there aren't enough resources in that immediate area to support 10 babies? That will have an immediate and noticeable effect on her family, and that effect could carry on into future generations. No, it's not going to make a difference on a global scale. But neither is getting rid of the resource leeches (we the people of the developed world); even if we all committed mass suicide, it wouldn't make people in the developing world have fewer babies and stop putting a strain on the existing resource pool, would it?

Well, for one thing, of those 10 babies that said African woman will have, four MIGHT survive. :) If you ask her to just have four, she might end up with none. In less-developed places, part of the reason that people have more babies is precisely because they KNOW that not all of them will survive, due to the standard of living. Where standard of living increases, birth rates decline in part because people become more confident that their children will live.

And I suppose we're talking about different causes here. If your cause is to reduce very localized consumption of resources, then fewer people in a given area might be helpful. But usually when people talk about overpopulation, they're talking on a global scale, with a call to reduce the population on a global scale. Having fewer babies just won't make that happen.

On the other hand, those who live longer ARE ultimately a far bigger drain on resources than a larger number of people who live shorter lives. The developed world is far more resource-consumptive, particularly when it comes to non-renewable resources, than is the less-developed world. But really, family size in the developed world has little to do with resource consumption. A single person will own a car, use a ton of electricity, etc. Increasing family size doesn't generally greatly increase consumption of anything but food, other than the fact that a larger family will generally have more than one car. (Then again, most childless couples that I know own two cars, anyway, so...) And food availability isn't a problem in the developed world.

So I certainly don't know for sure, but I would wager that a single person in the developed world will consume as much or more resources than a family of 12 in the less-developed world, just by virtue of that single person owning a car and driving it everywhere, even just down the freakin' street. :) So I'm going to say that reducing the birth rate in the less-developed world actually won't do much in terms of resource consumption, and in the developed world the birth rate has already been greatly reduced, so...yeah. :)

[Mistermook]

Less developed countries produce less resources too though. So if less developed nations are producing one generic fictional representation of "resources" per 12 people and developed nations are producing 12 units per person, and if you've got a situation in some developed nations like the US and Canada where there are vastly underutilized resources because of globalization and minimal contributors to resource production dragging down staggeringly efficient ones...

I guess I just think it's a lot more complex a situation with many, many more factors going into the equation than I'm comfortable reducing to "industrialization = bad" or whatever, iCad. Not disagreeing with anything in specific that you're saying, just that I think you're missing a lot of things and I'm a little confused at what you're driving at. Math doesn't lie, but statistics and the conclusions we draw from math often does.

Besides, humans are already incredibly uniform thanks to the Toba event. We totally had our own cheetah moment a few years ago and came back rocking without a hitch. And if diversity becomes a real issue, it seems to me that we're just now getting to the point where we can make our own mixed drinks in the genetic cocktail that is people if we absolutely had to. We might make terrible people, biologically speaking at first, but I've got confidence that if we started being confronted with "mistakes" of that variety on any sort of scale we'd quickly force ourselves to become adept one way or another. :)

[anothereyjana]

Actually, about the cheetah thing, I heard that the numbers were much fewer than that, as in less than 100 cheetahs, and that the human population was more than 1000.

It does however, seem that most here can agree that longevity is contributing more to the overpopulation issue than babies are. VHMET is gonna be so disappointed and pissed...http://www.vhemt.org/

[Purity4]

Isn't the pause and "but I don't" implied? I know over at MATY they have a hard-on for that figure of speech but I thought everywhere else it was understood. Guess not. *shrug*

This is the first time I ever heard anyone defend this improper grammatical error. :lol: And this is also the first time I ever heard someone talk about an implied pause, :report: and that implied pause being able to replace the word "not".

[Honeywell]

This is the first time I ever heard anyone defend this improper grammatical error. :lol: And this is also the first time I ever heard someone talk about an implied pause, :report: and that implied pause being able to replace the word "not".Not to derail this debate anymore than we already have but a couple seconds with Google will show you that people have been doing just that for the last thiry years. It's a common, widely used phrase so, like I said, I was surprised you thought it was a grammatical error and not intentional considering Mistermook seems like s/he has a pretty firm grasp of the language.

Here are a few links to get you started:
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxcouldc.html

http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/02/could-care-less-or-couldnt-care-less.html

[yadarya]

I believe that the Earth will eventually take care of this problem for us on its own.

My vote is for a super volcano.

[Purity4]

Not to derail this debate anymore than we already have but a couple seconds with Google will show you that people have been doing just that for the last thiry years. It's a common, widely used phrase so, like I said, I was surprised you thought it was a grammatical error and not intentional considering Mistermook seems like s/he has a pretty firm grasp of the language.

Here are a few links to get you started:
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxcouldc.html

http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/02/could-care-less-or-couldnt-care-less.html

Well, I enjoy sarcasm as much as the next person, but intentionally saying the wrong thing is stupid. I've been around well more than 30 years and been around a lot of places and the only places I hear someone say it incorrectly is when they're uneducated, which I know Mistermook is not, which is why I thought it was so odd to find the mistake in Mistermook's writing.

[fakepeeps7]

So why did you comment on the comments?

[MadforSims]

in a few generation, this entire porblem may be gone. or at least postponed. My generation is the first one predicted to have a shorter lifespan that previous generations.

but if it keeps getting worse, and our population does not stop growing, i don't think there is any humane way to stop it. I think that's the truth we'll have to accept.

[Mistermook]

That's really the issue though: If we don't figure out a "humane" way to solve our current issues we're bound to resolve them in a very human way instead.

[iCad]

@Mistermook:

*laughs* I'm not sure I'm really driving at anything! :) In general, it just seems to me that there's this habit, particularly amongst people who think that "overpopulation" is going to destroy the world due to global resource drain, of pointing fingers at everyone except people in the developed world with small families or no children at all. For instance, they'll point at people who "breed like rabbits" and accuse them of contributing to some impending global catastrophe while turning a blind eye to the fact that that small family in the developed world has a far larger impact, environmentally-speaking, than a large family in the less-developed world. And when people start yelling about overpopulation, of course the "No more babies!" call starts going out, too, and people start looking down their noses at people who have more than what they consider to be an acceptable number of children, even though it's pretty commonly-known amongst people who actually study population dynamics that the population explosion was/is caused by a rapidly falling death rate, not by any increase in the birth rate. The birth rate has been globally falling, quite precipitously, for 50 years now, and yet the population is still growing. If babies were the problem, that wouldn't be true.

Quite frankly, I think that "overpopulation" is neither here nor there, since it will resolve itself in a few decades, assuming that current trends continue and there are no major medical advances that will further reduce the death rate. To me, the far greater threat in terms of environmental issues is atmospheric damage, not "overpopulation." And it's industrialization that caused and continues to cause that. Again, that can be laid at the feet of the "developed world."

I'm not saying that development is bad and I'm not on some "humanity is evil" crusade. Far from it. I guess I'm saying that everything has consequences, often unforeseen, and that it's unfortunately only hindsight that's 20/20. When the internal combustion engine was invented, no one knew that it would contribute to atmospheric damage. We only found that out much later. When penicillin was discovered and put into widespread use and other medical advances were discovered and put into play, it was (and is!) wonderful that lives were/are saved that otherwise would have been lost. No one could see any down side whatsoever. Because we just didn't think about things like antibiotic-resistant strains of "super bugs" or about the fact that lengthening the human lifespan would cause a huge jump in the worldwide population that would last for decades.

So I guess I'm saying that there is a possible damaging side to every advance. You just can't have one without the other, so you have to accept the good with the bad and simply hope that the former outweighs the latter. And in the meantime, one should put "blame" where it's deserved, not on scapegoats. And if one wants to try to solve a problem, one needs to address the problem's actual cause, not to stab enthusiastically but uselessly at some "straw man" cause.

[fakepeeps7]

The birth rate has been globally falling, quite precipitously, for 50 years now, and yet the population is still growing. If babies were the problem, that wouldn't be true.

The population is still growing because people keep having babies. You can't have growth without the addition of new humans; that's just not possible. The population simply isn't decreasing because people are living longer. There's a bit of a difference.

[iCad]

The population is still growing because people keep having babies. You can't have growth without the addition of new humans; that's just not possible. The population simply isn't decreasing because people are living longer. There's a bit of a difference.

No, it's actually this: The population keeps growing because, even though people are having fewer babies every year, the death rate is dropping at a faster rate every year. Therefore, people who might normally have died are not dying and are still contributing to the population. The key to population control of any species is a balanced birth and death rate. Look at what happens in the animal world when a predator species is quickly eradicated: The population of that predator's main prey immediately jumps not because more were suddenly born but because, suddenly, far fewer died. Which is exactly what happened to the human population with, among other things, the defeat of a number of our own greatest predators: Bacteria and some viruses, due to antibiotics and immunizations.

Overall, what we're doing is lowering the birth rate AND the death rate at the same time, but not at all in proportion. At least that's been the trend for the past 50 or so years. This is why the overall growth rate in the population has been leveling off. (Not the population NUMBER, but the RATE of growth.) The growth rate is still increasing but not exponentially, as it did at the beginning of the 20th century when modern medicine suddenly greatly decreased the death rate.

Look, I'll do a simplified version of the math I did before, because I know it seems like a paradox that the population can increase while fewer and fewer people are being born. Say that you have a starting population of 50 million.

After a year passes, say that 5 million individuals have been born but 10 million have died. Your death rate has exceeded your birth rate by 5 million, so your population has decreased to 45 million.

The following year, say that people became alarmed by the decrease in population, so they have more babies, say 25 million are born while the death rate remains the same 10 million. So, you have an increase of of 15 million, so your population is now 60 million. People feel comfortable with that, so it stays at that level for a long time, fluctuating back and forth only negligibly, as stable populations will do. The birth rate stays at, say, 15 million babies, but the death rate more or less matches the birth rate, resulting in a stable, balanced population.

Say a hundred years pass. The population is now 70 million. And suddenly someone makes a great discovery that greatly reduces the death rate. Say that the same normal 15 million babies are born, but the death rate, instead of 15 million, is suddenly reduced to 2 million. Suddenly your population jumps by 13 million people NOT because more babies were suddenly born but because a greatly fewer-than-usual number of people died. Your population has jumped to 83 million even though the exact same number of babies were born.

Say this same thing goes on for a while. People rejoice in their lengthened lifespans and don't think about their growing population. Say that after five years of the death rate exceeding an unchanging birth rate, with a resulting surplus of, say, 12 million people a year, the population has swelled to 125 million. People become alarmed. The population has almost doubled in a mere five years. (Again, NOT because the birth rate has increased but because the death rate has decreased.) Still, people decide that some people somewhere MUST BE breeding like rabbits because you can't have an increasing population without more people being born. That makes no logical sense, after all.

So strictly-enforced laws are passed restricting the number of babies that people are allowed to have. Say this works wonders and immediately (and unrealistically, but we're simplifying here) cuts the birth rate roughly in half, to 7 million babies a year. However, the death rate remains the same, at 2 million people per year. So you still have a surplus of 5 million people.

So after a year of draconian law governing baby-having, the population still increases to 130 million, and if the same trends to continue, it will continue to increase even though the birth rate was halved. The population will STILL grow even if you miraculously halve the birth rate again to 2.5 million because the birth rate, although greatly reduced, will STILL exceed the death rate. Do you see the trend here?

Of course, as I said, this is greatly simplified. Birth and death rates are proportional to population number and won't be the same gross number in a population of increasing size. Still, the math is the same. If you keep your birth rate exactly the same or even greatly decrease it, but your death rate is quite low, your population WILL grow so long at the birth rate exceeds the death rate. In other words, in terms of gross population number, the death rate is the more important factor than the birth rate in an unbalanced state, which is exactly what we have. What is affected by the number of births if the death rate remains stable and low is the RATE of population growth, not whether or not the population will grow in gross numbers.

Since we have decreased the birth rate globally, the global rate of population growth has slowed, indeed, but since the death rate is going down steadily as well, the population is still growing in gross numbers and will continue to do so until the current larger generations have finally died. That threshold continues to be pushed back due to the current steady increase in life expectancy, but at the moment, assuming that all current trends continue, that threshold is about 40 years from now. Until then, as I said, having a greater or lesser number of babies will have no appreciable impact on world population in terms of gross numbers, although as I also said it could have localized effects in terms of resource consumption and such. But since the topic at hand is addressing global human "overpopulation," the number of babies being born isn't currently the issue.

Once the population does start to decrease...Well, that will be the time to put in place measures to decrease the birth rate (IF we don't have to worry about reduction in genetic diversity!) in an attempt to balance the death rate. But until the decrease happens...Well, as I said, the cold hard math says that with a decreasing death rate and a current population of 6 billion, having even drastically fewer babies will have no appreciable effect before the population starts to go down on its own. The only effect that it will have is producing yet another smaller generation, which may or may not be a good thing, especially when it comes to things like genetic diversity. Not to mention the social effects of having ever-smaller generations responsible for caring for its larger predecessors. But that's an entirely different ball of wax and is the reason that some countries, namely Russia and Australia, are offering financial rewards for having babies. They're thinking ahead, you see.

[fakepeeps7]

To me, the far greater threat in terms of environmental issues is atmospheric damage, not "overpopulation." And it's industrialization that caused and continues to cause that. Again, that can be laid at the feet of the "developed world."

Thought you might be interested in this study (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VFV-4V8FFCG-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=411a4bfd17ad84a0d2fd4c0a9061c717). Basically:

Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.

9441 metric tons of CO2 per baby?! And unless you're going to make your baby live naked in the woods and eat only the berries they find there, I doubt you can really cut that down by much. So yes, the developed world is largely to blame for the state of the environment. But when each new child brings an additional 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide with it, it gets kind of hard to defend the choice to have more than a couple of kids.

[iCad]

9441 metric tons of CO2 per baby?! And unless you're going to make your baby live naked in the woods and eat only the berries they find there, I doubt you can really cut that down by much. So yes, the developed world is largely to blame for the state of the environment. But when each new child brings an additional 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide with it, it gets kind of hard to defend the choice to have more than a couple of kids.

I understand that, fakepeeps, and in general I agree with you. I don't think there's much point in having a gigantic family unless you're working a large farm/ranch or something, where a large family means more help that doesn't have to be paid and/or less resource-eating machinery that needs to be bought. My neighbors across the road run a 2,000+-acre cattle ranch. They have a very large family. I do not begrudge them that very large family, particularly because I tend to think that their cattle herd produces more atmospheric damage (Methane is a greenhouse gas, and cattle fart. A lot) than the family does, especially since they're off-the-grid homesteaders who produce their own electrical power via a combination of solar panels and windmills, so they aren't producing CO2 that way. So really, I'd say that whether or not anyone "needs" a large family depends on the situation, and unless I know a given family's situation, I feel that it's just not my place to judge.

Overall, as I said, population does have an effect on resources. No one can deny that. But again, I think magnitude needs to be taken into consideration as well as geographical location. And even putting that aside, the population WILL go down relatively soon. Therefore, so will resource consumption and, one assumes, pollutant production. But until then I doubt fewer or less babies will really have an appreciable impact. SOME impact, sure, and I grant you that every little bit helps, particularly on a more localized level. But in order to have an appreciable global impact, the population will need to go down globally, as well, and as I've said, right now fewer babies isn't going to make that happen before the population starts going down all on its own. That's all I've been saying all along.

[fakepeeps7]

Yeah, I get that it's a math thing. But you can't help be alarmed by the birth rate when you watch something like a population clock.

And since the population of earth is projected to get to about 9 billion before it actually starts to decrease... well, I'd rather be proactive than continue along this same path. Considering that the estimates for a sustainable world population are between 2 billion and 5 billion, it sounds like things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

[Mistermook]

I'm still not sure what your point is about genetic diversity, iCad. Humans have already survived a horrifying bottleneck. I'm not sure we could reduce diversity much beyond what we're at, and we're definitely on the edges of being able to casually increase genetic diversity if only we didn't possess pesky things like ethics and a healthy fear of movie mutants (thanks Star Trek, thanks a lot). But in any case, I'm not sure we're in the place where our genetic similarity really makes us vastly more vulnerable to disease any longer. I mean, obviously when the zombie plague shows up all bets are off but until then we're a lot better off than cheetahs and the other bottleneck species. We give a damn, more or less, when people die, and lots of people dying tends to grab people's attentions.

[iCad]

I'm just saying that it's a possibility, Mistermook. Yes, we've survived past bottlenecks, but who's to say what will happen if another happens, particularly if it's one that we engineer rather than one that happens naturally. And given our tendency to put social barriers between people, as well...Well, like I've said, there's a possible downside to everything. Everyone seems to think that reducing the population will solve many problems, and certainly it will help to solve some of them. But perhaps it will cause others that we can't foresee. Perhaps one of those problems will be potentially worse than the ones that we currently face, much like we didn't foresee any down side to the widespread overuse of antibiotics. That's all I'm saying. Of course, a very real consequence of the drastic lowering of the birth rate is an aging population, which is already happening in most of the developed countries and is particularly happening in places like Japan, where people are particularly long-lived and there are entire towns where the vast majority of the population is over 65. Sure, it's mostly a social/financial problem, I suppose, but there are certainly potentially biological consequences, too, if it's not checked.

Overall, I just think that people get tunnel-visioned, that in advocating something, they don't see all of the possible consequences because they get so focused on what they believe to be the good outcome of an action. I just prefer to avoid that as best I can while trying in the meantime to do what I can about a given problem. I guess I just can't jump on the "Have fewer babies!" bandwagon because I know that, overall, it will make no real difference in terms of world population if we have even drastically fewer babies now. On the other hand, having fewer babies probably isn't going to hurt, either, so if people want to advocate that, then they should by all means have at it. I just won't be joining them, is all. I also know that my own efforts to reduce resource consumption (i.e. we're installing solar panels in the spring, assuming that nothing terrible happens to our finances between now and then) will have no appreciable impact on global resource consumption, but that it also can't hurt. So, I do it. When it comes to babies...Well, at almost 47, I'm quite beyond the age when I want to have more than three I bore, myself. And even though I really don't understand why people would want a ton of children (Unless, as I said, they're working a farm/ranch or something), I'm not going to begrudge anyone else having the family that they want to have, so long as they can provide for all of the children they have. Because, as I said, I know that it makes little difference, now.

In short, I guess I'm just not a very good "crusader." Mostly because I know that there are consequences of every action and that what may seem all good...may not be.

@fakepeeps: Yes, it will get worse, but the worst-case situation won't last long because it will happen as my generation -- which will be the largest one by then, and I'm one of it's oldest members -- will be in the process of dying out. And at this point there is little-to-nothing that we can do to divert the arrival of the situation, aside from widespread culling of the currently-alive population, which tends to be morally abhorrent to sane people. Really, the situation is analogous to an asteroid heading toward collision with the planet. For a certain amount of time, there's something that can be done about an impending asteroid collision if the technology exists to do so. As in, you can send up a powerful-enough explosive weapon that will nudge its trajectory just enough to make it miss the planet. But once the asteroid has crossed a certain threshold, it's too near to do anything about it, no matter what you do, and collision is a certainty. With the population, the truth is that we passed the failsafe threshold before we realized that there was a problem. So now, we can perhaps have an effect locally, but the "asteroid" is still going to hit. Perhaps fortunately, however, it will hit very soon, on a more cosmic kind of timescale, and the experts seem to agree that the worst situation won't last long, again on a wider timescale. Call me an optimist -- because I generally am -- but I believe that we will survive it, even if it means changes in lifestyle. We're good at survival and doing what needs to be done when we believe that disaster is imminent.

[Mistermook]

Okay, fair enough. I still don't really see how it's a relevant addition to the discussion at hand, but I accept that you're shoving it into there as important to you. Hey, I do that all the time, even here.

What's more interesting to me, in some respects, is trying to figure out how few people we could soldier on with. After all, that sort of stuff is critical once you start talking about shoving a bunch of people into a thin lead can and tossing it across the endless black of space to some mostly unknown destination for colonization. We know what we can do and work out in places very much like here already. Here is very like here, but elsewhere... we haven't really had to do the start up population thing in a very, very long time. Barring some magic unicorn of propulsion that transforms our current mathematics into something it expressly isn't, no matter how many people are back home the people we throw across the heavens to other worlds will be about as alone and isolated as anyone's been in ages. I don't know how good we would be at it, and I certainly don't have a clue how many people it takes to statistically ensure a successful colony in outer space where people are engaging in recognizably modern activities and not constant the edge of extinction. Well, more than any of us are always at the constant edge of extinction from events beyond our control.

[iCad]

Not to drag the discussion off-topic, because it's really not a debate kind of thing, but...It's an interesting question, Mistermook, one that interests me, too, but it's one that I can't answer as it's well beyond the realms of my own knowledge. :) I do know that it would require a proper distribution of ages to assure a continuing viable future population and that, if the starting colony was small, it would probably be wise for each woman to have children with several different men for future genetic diversity purposes. So monogamy might have to go by the wayside at least for a while in favor of a kind of polygamy. But I really have no idea what a minimum viable population would be. I'm sure someone knows, though. :)

I do know that I have something of a "colonizing" drive, myself, and if ever the call went out for volunteers to be shipped off, I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I have already vastly changed/simplified my lifestyle by moving from the big city to the utter boondocks, and I have discovered that I am much, MUCH happier and can easily do without things that I thought I couldn't part with. I also am currently surrounded by people who homestead, who are self-sufficient to varying degrees, from partly to completely. So I know that it can be done, here on Earth or on any sufficiently Earth-like colony if we can somehow manage to create one. It generally means giving up much of what we consider to be modern conveniences, at least to start out. I tend to think that it takes a special brand of person who can do that and who is willing to do that, especially nowadays.

[fakepeeps7]

Really, the situation is analogous to an asteroid heading toward collision with the planet. For a certain amount of time, there's something that can be done about an impending asteroid collision if the technology exists to do so. As in, you can send up a powerful-enough explosive weapon that will nudge its trajectory just enough to make it miss the planet. But once the asteroid has crossed a certain threshold, it's too near to do anything about it, no matter what you do, and collision is a certainty. With the population, the truth is that we passed the failsafe threshold before we realized that there was a problem. So now, we can perhaps have an effect locally, but the "asteroid" is still going to hit.

I don't really see it as being analogous. An asteroid is something we have no control over. There may be a certain threshold that will be crossed where we can no longer do anything to stop that asteroid, but our actions aren't going to cause a second asteroid to hit the planet, for example. Whereas, if you look at the population issue and say, "Oh, well, we've already crossed the threshold, so it doesn't matter what I do. I'm going to go and have as many kids as I want!"... well, that's not going to help, is it? It's kind of defeatist. We may not be able to stop that first population calamity, but we can stop a second (or prevent the first from being as bad as it could be). Having excess babies when we know that threshold has already been passed seems irresponsible and cruel. It's basically setting the next generation up to fail; we won't take responsibility for overpopulation, so we expect the next generation we create to magically solve the problem!

Frankly, that doesn't make much sense to me.

[iCad]

As I've said, once the population declines somewhat, efforts to balance the birth and death rates might serve to begin to stabilize the population, IF one can engineer global cooperation in the effort, for that would certainly be required. It's just that the CURRENT problem isn't solvable only by (further) lowering the birth rate, at least not before the situation already begins to right itself. It will right itself, or at least begin to or attempt to, entirely due to the fact that people already started drastically having fewer babies a generation or two ago. THAT had an impact, but in terms of gross population we've already reached a point of diminishing returns. What people did 50 years ago will have an impact on us 40 or 50 years from now, but what we do now in terms of having babies or not having them will have no effect on if or when the "natural" lowering of the population will happen. THAT will entirely depend on when my own generation will be mostly-dead and the one before me will be entirely dead. (I was born in 1964, so I'm either one of the very last Baby Boomers or one of the very first members of Generation X; I tend to think of myself as the latter.) So it isn't apathy and defeatism here; it's simply accepting the math for what it is and it's realizing that population dynamics is a slow process. The number of babies we have now will affect what will happen in the farther future than 40 or 50 years from now, when we will begin to feel the effects of what people did 50 years ago or so.

The asteroid analogy is simply to demonstrate that the window to fix the CURRENT singular problem being discussed -- the expansion in gross number of the world's population -- by simply having fewer babies is already closed. No matter what we do now in terms of having more of less babies right now and for the next few decades, the population will swell to its projected maximum so long as life expectancy follows the path that it is expected to follow. The reason that it will do so is precisely because the people who will "cause" it to swell have already been born and are not projected to die any time soon. The children born now and for the next several decades will have a greater impact AFTER the larger generations ahead of them have already died or have started to die. Since we're having fewer children than we used to have, as a species, it's possible that those children might actually be NEEDED in the future, every last one of them, so no cruelty is involved, I assure you.

So the analogy has nothing to do with whether or not we caused the problem or whether or not it is out of our control, and it has nothing to do with an "Oh well, we can't fix it so I'm going to do whatever the hell I want" attitude. And it has no bearing on any future problems that might arise. Future problems are future "asteroids," and whether or not they can or will be diverted will depend on each individual "asteroid's" failsafe threshold and whether or not it has already been crossed by the time we notice that it's heading our way.