Thoughts on standard of living, population, and the future of humankind.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

DEAR PROFESSOR EASBY, if you find this through Google, please note that I posted this only minutes before turning my journal in to you in class this morning. It was inspired by conversations here so I thought I'd share it. Thanks, you're the best! Love, K.


One of the things that I think about often is the future of humanity; despite the mounting evidence that we are, through overpopulation, climate change, and resource depletion, making the planet inhospitable to ourselves, there are those who argue that the Earth can sustain 20 billion human beings, and that as-yet-undeveloped technology will take care of our emerging problems. Many of these same people argue that we will take to the stars, and the population crisis will be taken care of through expanding to other frontiers.

For me, the question is not how many people Earth can sustain, or whether we will colonize space, but what happens when people have a high standard of living, and how many people can be realistically sustained at such a standard. What advantage is there to a planet with 20 billion people? As a species, none. There is certainly no advantage to other species, and the standard of living could not possibly be as high as I personally would want it to be, if we lacked forests, greenspaces and wilderness, species diversity and wildlife.

There's another factor, too, that is often overlooked; I believe that we, as a species, must choose between expansion and a high standard of living. We cannot have both, for reasons that seem as hard-wired into us as the desire to procreate in the first place. One thing we have learned from experience is that, over and over again, all over the world, women who are given a choice overwhelmingly choose not to be brood mares. Given a choice, most women who choose to have children choose to have only one or two children; rarely, three. Alternative families do not alter this fact; people in general, both men and women, who choose to be nurturers rarely feel called to nurture a large brood, and certainly not in enough numbers to offset the vast majority who find much of their fulfillment in life through other expressions of accomplishment.

This is not a limitation that technology can fix. Even if we could replicate gestation and lactation, there is no substitute for the crucial stable-nurturer connection that is necessary for the human child to grow up optimally healthy. This is not a factor that we can simply ignore or wish away in our science-fiction dreams of colonizing the stars, or even in our shorter-term goals of envisioning a better future for humanity; we can choose only one: a high standard of living, or an expanding population. Anything else is simple wishful thinking.

[Cainad (dec.)]

I've never bought the idea of alleviating overpopulation through planetary colonization. It would require moving enough people fast enough to offset population growth, which would in turn require a truly obnoxious amount of energy and resources. Even if we could do that, we'd just fill up the extra space again.

But that's the sci-fi, hopeful futurist stuff. In the shorter term, I agree that we do need ways to alleviate the growth of population. Technological advancements have succeeded in holding off a Malthusian catastrophe, but the fact that we've pulled back from the brink in the past is no guarantee that we will continue to in the future.

We are forced with a choice that I don't think we can actually make, in the sense of willfully choosing a course of action that we think is best.

I shouldn't try to think about these things before coffee. Trying to compose a meaningful, coherent thought is a little bit out of my grasp right now.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I'm inclined to just agree with you, until I have good reason not to from technology that exists in the real world instead of in TV shows and buried in science journals.

[Cainad (dec.)]

I'm inclined to just agree with you, until I have good reason not to from technology that exists in the real world instead of in TV shows and buried in science journals.

Yeah. We (the general "we" of people who think about this sort of shit through the ages) have been surprised before, and we may yet be surprised again, hopefully for the better. But I don't particularly like the idea of crossing our fingers for a genius to save us.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Here's the dilemma

Any restriction on population growth is an horrific infringement on the personal liberty of everyone to shit out enough screaming brats to wipe out all life on earth.

The choice is between mass sterilization (a fascist overfiend ripping the band aid off) or nature taking care of it for us (the way that makes option 1 look like an episode of the care bears)

The irony is, our complete resistance to the horrors of option one will lead us to option 2 as a default.

[Elder Iptuous]

that pretty much sums it up, imo.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Alternatively, we could go with option 3, where we do something on fucking purpose for a change, and stop allowing the top 0.05% of the world's population to hoard enough resources and wealth to raise the standard of living for all 7.3 billion of us to an average of somewhere between Brazil and China.

[Junkenstein]

It occurs to me that a significant change in population expansion would be created just by the new "pope" saying that Condoms were OK and Aids is bad.

So, we're doomed.

With the quality of life front, it seems to me that the first major problem would be defining an acceptable level for humanity. The wall street banker would probably not be happy with the same standard of living as the vast population of the world. I doubt this would be a peaceful change.

In an odd way, perhaps a massive humanitarian crisis could encourage people to not be such scum. I have a feeling that something horrific on an colossal scale really needs to happen before anything really changes.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

One of the things that I think about often is the future of humanity; despite the mounting evidence that we are, through overpopulation, climate change, and resource depletion, making the planet inhospitable to ourselves, there are those who argue that the Earth can sustain 20 billion human beings, and that as-yet-undeveloped technology will take care of our emerging problems. Many of these same people argue that we will take to the stars, and the population crisis will be taken care of through expanding to other frontiers.

Thing is, we don't have a functional star drive of any kind.  Extra-planetary habitats are a net drain.  The Earth we have now is all we know for sure we'll have, so let's not fuck it up, shall we?

Also, 7.3 Bn people is too many for most people to have anything resembling a life.  20 Bn - even if possible - would be an abomination.

[LMNO]

I've never bought the idea of alleviating overpopulation through planetary colonization. It would require moving enough people fast enough to offset population growth, which would in turn require a truly obnoxious amount of energy and resources. Even if we could do that, we'd just fill up the extra space again.

This is an aspect that I supposed never really occurred to me, and I feel silly for not considering it.

Interstellar exodus wouldn't solve Earth's problems; they'd just over-breed, again.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Intercontinental colonization backs the idea up certainly.

[AFK]

Humans are no different than any other mammal, or animal for that matter.  We have a hard-wired imperative to breed, procreate, and maintain our broods' lineages.  The only thing that will stop that is the end of the species itself.  There is no feasible way to reduce the Earth's population through man-contrived methods, not without infringing upon the individual freedoms that are held to such high esteem. 

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Heh we come in peace. Wed also like to purchase your planet for some beads and these here blankets.

[Elder Iptuous]

planetary colonization doesn't solve the terrestrial overpopulation problem directly, but it does allow for us to move some eggs to another basket.  and if we crap out on earth without rendering it totally uninhabitable to humans (which would be impressive given that we colonized some unholy place like mars or the moon) then we could come back and reinhabit it.
so, while it doesn't solve the problem of limited space in our petri dish, it does make it a bit more robust.

of course, that assumes the reason a population is wiped out isn't due to interplanetary MAD warfare... :/

[Cainad (dec.)]

Alternatively, we could go with option 3, where we do something on fucking purpose for a change, and stop allowing the top 0.05% of the world's population to hoard enough resources and wealth to raise the standard of living for all 7.3 billion of us to an average of somewhere between Brazil and China.

Based on my (admittedly limited and almost entirely speculative) understanding of things, the bolded may in fact be the only hope we have of preventing all of the dystopian sci-fi futures from becoming real all at once.