Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-maybe dept.

By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations.

But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?

That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."

The World Might Actually Run Out of People (archive)

Empty Planet

Who do you think is right ? The United Nations or Darrel Bricker/John Ibbitson ?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @01:18AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @01:18AM (#796407)

    People of the future will have a burning desire to make children, not merely to go through the motions without producing anything.

    Why do you think that a painful childbearing/birth will not be outsourced to machines at the first opportunity?

    Besides, people rarely have burning desire to have children. In past centuries they had a need to breed; today there is no need, and populations of first world countries goes down. Often a woman wants her first child, has her hands full with it, and cools down. In other cases men and women know ahead what a child will cost them, and walk away. A good deal of others understand (or should understand) that they are not fit to deal with children.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Tuesday February 05 2019, @07:44AM (1 child)

    by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday February 05 2019, @07:44AM (#796546) Journal

    Besides, people rarely have burning desire to have children.

    That's not how evolution works. The environment of selection now includes birth control. Doesn't matter if it's rare*, the desire to have children will be strongly selected for and will spread through subsequent generations. Of course that assumes our society continues in its current state for multiple generations.

    *it's actually not that rare. I've met plenty of people who really want kids.

    --
    If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 06 2019, @07:26PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday February 06 2019, @07:26PM (#797331) Journal

      *it's actually not that rare. I've met plenty of people who really want kids.

      As have I. Some of those women who really want kids are physically incapable of doing so though. One has had her tubes surgically removed, all the while still saying how much she wants kids (but recognizing that, logically, it'd be an awful idea). Others still want kids, but gave up on it ever happening once they reached 40 or 50 and hadn't had any yet. There's a lot more to the issue than just wanting kids.

      Having said that, a lot of the reason I see people forgoing reproduction these days is due to their personal economic situations. You've got kids with hundreds of thousands in student loan debt, who can't afford to see a doctor, who are *hopefully* responsible enough to realize that it's not a great idea to be having kids when you can't even afford *your own* healthcare and education. But that's probably an easy enough problem to solve if the situation really starts to look desperate -- just send some goons down to the maternity ward to give each new mother a big stack of cash! (Or more reasonable child care programs, but whatever works)

      But until something changes, keep in mind that social factors do play into natural selection too. So you might not be selecting for a burning desire to have kids. You might be selecting for people who are too irresponsible to consider their own circumstances first. Or too irresponsible to use protection. Or you might be selecting for people from wealthy families, regardless of their own traits.

      Irresponsible and wealthy...my god...THE FUTURE IS OVERRUN WITH TINY TRUMPS!