by Dukasaur on Sat Sep 06, 2025 8:25 pm
If we could get the population down to a reasonable level, a lot of our global warming, pollution, and extinction level problems would end. Luckily, it seems that is a self-correcting issue. The main driver of population growth seems to be poverty. As people get wealthier, they naturally spend less time procreating. Basically, when you're a subsistence-level serf, there isn't much to do on a Saturday night except get drunk and f*ck, and the population grows fast. Once you have money to go do fun things with your life, you realize the fun things are a lot funner without rugrats in tow, and you become naturally resistant to the idea of breeding. We have done a good job in the last couple decades of increasing wealth and reducing the birth rate, and if current trends continue, there will be a day when the human population goes down to something reasonable like 200 million worldwide instead of 8 billion.
That would cure most of the self-inflicted problems like pollution and global warming.
Of course that leaves open the possibility that some nutjob will blow up the world with nukes or designer viruses, just for fun. We can't completely eliminate that possibility, but we can do work-arounds with survival bunkers either below ground or in orbit.
That leaves the possibilities of various external extinction-level events -- an asteroid crashing into earth, a gamma-ray burst from a supernova somewhere close, and of course the unavoidable fact that the sun will eventually die. I think those, also, can all be solved, assuming a few more centuries of improvement in our space colonization efforts. We will eventually get into interstellar space, and hopefully be able to find new lands faster than old ones die.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire
