41–50 of 81 posts
"The table above already shows that birth rates go to zero by 2065." Uh.... This seems incorrect. Sure we can extrapolate the declining birthrate all the way down to zero, but realistically it will level out somewhere since humans will never stop producing more humans. Granted it might be a lower birthrate, but never 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth not sure if there's anything more to say.
Limits to Growth, whether you agree with their conclusions or not, is an actual model.
The google docs above is one guy fiting a curve to a bunch of demographic statistics. There is no real causality there, no attempt to make an interpretation of the numbers. If he would have done so, he would - as others have already pointed out - reached the conclusion that: "Since birth rates decrease when people's lives improve, Progress will make our life so fulfilling that we will stop having children altogether. Then we will live happily ever after until we all die of old age."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume he is talking about net birth rate.
He is not, and that is the primary flaw in this analysis. Estimates that the recent declines in birth rate will continue until 0 annual births, once the birth rate stops the death rate continues at pace, and kills everyone eventually. Flawed in many ways, but that is the biggest mistake. A good example would be the temperature has dropped 20 degrees in the last month at this rate we will reach absolute 0 in around 2…
It makes about as much sense to me to continue the trend below zero, and assume that eventually people start consuming children.
Is this such a bad thing. Third world countries are becoming westernized giving us a continued growth of our markets even though the population might shrink. Automation might make manual labor a thing of the past. We might not have enough jobs or natural resources to support a growing population. Sadly I feel like studies like this don't take into consideration what a ww3 might do on the world's population long term.…
Also revolution. Automation vs labor vs 1848 and all that. Where there is food vs where there are hungry mouths are not obligated to match up as they do now. It would be interesting to analyze food production capability at various levels of petroleum production and then analyze the probability of those various levels of petroleum production. The days of powering your oxen with some acres of hay are long gone, takes q…
Jokes aside, it won't be easy, it won't be nice, but I'm pretty sure that if it comes to it California could start desalinating the Pacific. It will provide them with something to do for all that cheap solar power that's probably going their way in 20 years or so.
Once they get the ball rolling they could even export that fresh water, if it becomes so scarce...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Global resources are finite. The resources of the solar system are finite. The visible universe is finite. Finite is not another word for "meager." Discussions of physical resource limits would be better if pessimistic prognosticators did not write as if finite-is-meager, and if optimistic prognosticators did not write as if plentiful-is-infinite.
finite resources on earth can lead to meagar resources which stop infinite growth is what I took from that paper. So we'd have to get resources from elsewhere like asteroid mining or space colonization.
The BBC asked a bad question and got an obvious answer. (Maybe the badness and obviousness aren't apparent up front if you don't have a physical science background.)
Asking if fixed-percentage economic growth can continue forever is rather like asking if Moore's Law can continue forever. No, neither can continue forever. That doesn't mean that things get bad after the growth phase. Somehow both optimists and pessimists conflate "the end of growth" with "the end of prosperity." That's ridiculous, IMO. The median citizen is much better off in low-economic-growth (and negative population growth) Japan than in rapidly growing Bangladesh.
Why do almost no population projections take climate change into account? We're rapidly heading towards a much less habitable earth. The projections I've seen with Africa at a population of 3-4 billion people by 2100 would be laughable if the whole situation wasn't so damn tragic.
you think the earth's climate 100 years out is remotely predictable?
Why do almost no population projections take climate change into account? We're rapidly heading towards a much less habitable earth. The projections I've seen with Africa at a population of 3-4 billion people by 2100 would be laughable if the whole situation wasn't so damn tragic.
Because current projections don't reach population levels where we exhaust the capacity of the earth, at best we'd face reduced material wealth. Why the situation tragic? The universe does not care the sea levels or temperatures are different from what they were in 1700, just as the universe does not lament the great oxidation event which wiped out most of the species inhabiting the planet at the time. In fact I'd ar…
You could argue that we are already past the carring capacity of Earth as of today, and the reason we do not see a massive dieoff today is that we are, so to speak, burning our runaway instead of generating (enough) revenue.
With regards with your "Why the situation tragic?" comment... I also felt a great relief when I realized that we (as global society) will not wipe life on earth, and probably will not even wipe human life on earth with our colective stupidity.
However, a drastic reduction in population is due during the next 100 years or so, and most of it wont be voluntary. A lot of needless suffering is going to happen, and no, it will not matter much in the grand scheme of things. Do you really need to be so smug about it, though?
What if people aren't dying in 2065?
That's a huge "what if", on top of what's already an impossible-to-predict situation. But if we're going to entertain this, we should also factor in the other circumstances that are likely to come with this scenario: I spent a chunk of my life adjacent to bio/med research and my conclusion is radical life extension by purely biological means will probably remain unfeasible. Genetically, we're millions of years worth…
To me, it also means that the "upload to silicon" stage is unlikely, because it probably requires understanding and reimplementing (possibly bug-for-bug, in some places) the original, for, uh, carbon compatibility. (And if we really understood it that well, we'd probably just fix the original...)
Why do almost no population projections take climate change into account? We're rapidly heading towards a much less habitable earth. The projections I've seen with Africa at a population of 3-4 billion people by 2100 would be laughable if the whole situation wasn't so damn tragic.
Because current projections don't reach population levels where we exhaust the capacity of the earth, at best we'd face reduced material wealth. Why the situation tragic? The universe does not care the sea levels or temperatures are different from what they were in 1700, just as the universe does not lament the great oxidation event which wiped out most of the species inhabiting the planet at the time. In fact I'd ar…
This nonsense about "the universe doesn't care about our climate" has got to stop. No, it doesn't, but humans also don't care about what the universe cares about.
If you want to take such a large view that the fate of people doesn't matter, then go for it, but don't be puzzled when you end up in a tiny minority by doing so.
- Birthrates are assumed to fall linearly all the way to zero, despite an abundance of reasons why that's obviously not likely to be the case
- If I'm reading it correctly, countries' birth rate declines are estimated as a discrete property of arbitrary HDI labels rather than a function of actual HDI score. Which in practice means that minor threshold differences decide whether birthrates in a country to fall sharply across one decade and less sharply in another
- Small islands are given equal weight to China and India in gauging an HDI-bracket's average birth rate
- The HDI brackets aren't even copied correctly, and thus many ultra wealthy territories like Bermuda and Gibraltar are placed in the "low HDI" bracket. That probably means the model massively underestimates the YoY decline in birthrates in low development countries (which I suppose at least works in the opposite direction to incorrect assumptions made about birthrates dropping to zero)
- There's really no justification at all for projecting a death rate that varies between ~1 and ~15 per 1000 as a uniform 8 per 1000, especially not when data on population age distributions and life expectancies exists. (The only saving grace is that it isn't that far from the figure for India and China which have a disproportionate effect on the model)