Item — HN Reader

This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions. A drastic reduction could cause serious short term issues for humanity (not for any other form of life) but were not here at all, curves are stabilizing around 2kids.

You shouldn't be afraid to let go of the gas pedal on the freeway, the car won't stop straight away. Especially if your speed is exponential for 300 years and everyone know keeping accelerating is gonna harm the majority life conditions.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1500..lat...

2 comments

The issue is that retirement systems are built on a certain assumption of the population pyramid. This will cause very serious political and societal strife as the retired will largely have more political and financial power and the few young will be (attempted) to be bled dry to maintain the system

> a certain assumption of the population pyramid

What is this assumption? The pyramid should look like… a pyramid? Don’t you see the elephant in the room: the population can’t infinitely grow on a finite universe.

GDP, dept, income… anything that is virtual can grow as long as you find a way to describe and write them. Ressources and space can be optimized within the boundary of what the known science let us do and what the humans tolerate.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a future with 100s Billions humans eating delicious and healthy meals made of pure fusion energy in a Saturn orbit cafè. Let’s find out solutions of the problems caused by the current demography before increasing it, otherwise it’s betting our descents future on the retirement system.

>This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions

So the operation succeeds but the patient is dead? The survival of people and cultures trumps GHG emissions. Unless you prefer an empty planet with no GHG emissions.

We’re at the highest the human population has ever been. Worrying about an “empty planet” seems extremely silly.

The incentives will change as population decreases to where having kids is profitable at some point in the curve