Surely this is an irresponsible increase in our population? Doesn't this mean population control is a critical priority to ensure our species survival?
Unless someone can highlight the dangers in a real and effective way it's going to be an extinction level problem.
this is unnecessarily alarmist.
first of all, it's unlikely that humanity would ever go extinct due to overpopulation, because, long-term, overpopulation corrects itself. too many people for the water supply? a lot of people starve to death and die of thirst, no more overpopulation, problem solved. it's an ugly place to live for a few generations, but in the life of a species on an evolutionary scale, that's just a blip. disease, malnutrition, and such will prevent us from going extinct over this, for better or worse.
second, top-down population control may be more trouble than it's worth. i don't have a problem with it in principle, but let's take a look at China's one-child policy. Chinese society places a lot of cultural importance on families having a male heir, so if people are going to only have one kid, there are a lot of people who are going to make sure it's a boy. aside from the inevitable infanticide, which i frankly could give a shit about but i realize i'm in the minority there, there are issues with population imbalance. the ratio of males to females under a certain age in China is way, way off, and there's been a lot of work to suggest that an overabundance of males in relation to females is a big demographic predictor of instability and wars of aggression. not because males are more violent or what-have-you, but people end up getting raised with social and cultural expectations that cannot be filled by the society itself. you grow up as a hetero male, seeing adults paired up in hetero couples and being told that you're going to find one one day when you get older, you're going to expect to be able to find a suitable partner. even a fairly small imbalance is going to make that difficult. you're pissed off, and so are all your friends. pretty soon you have crowds of pissed-off young men just ripe for someone to come along and give them a target to blame for society screwing them over. that's a recipe for trouble, and a lot of people expect serious trouble out of China within a generation as a result.
that's just one of the many things that can go wrong. if nothing else, people resent having their reproduction overtly interfered with because it's the primal evolutionary drive, so if you're going to do something to get their numbers down, you really should do something less blunt if you don't want trouble.
third, all this is presuming that everything except the current rate of population growth either stays the same or doesn't change the rate of population growth, but that's not necessarily true. economic development slows down population growth after a certain point. in other words, when industrialization first hits, all the health care and sanitation and social services cause the population to skyrocket for a while, but then after the dust settles, parents change their evolutionary tactics. at some point, having fewer kids and investing more resources in each of them is a better strategy for the long-term propagation of your genes, and so birth rates slow down. that's why Europe, Japan, and the US have low birthrates compared to most developing countries. so as economic development proceeds in the developing world, birth rates will go down. even if you have little to no faith in development in the southern hemisphere, a lot of the population of poorer countries is going to end up in the developed countries, who are going to be a little short of labor power due to the slow population growth rate, so a lot of the children being born in the developing world will be having children in the developed world, where they will be absorbed into psotindustrial societies and their birth rate will slow down.
another thing that can change is technology. the amount of water available isn't fixed - it fluctuates with the efficiency with which we use it. right now, pollution is a major inefficiency dragging down overall water availability, and we should make combatting that a priority. the point about overall meat consumption is also well-taken, so maybe we should look at ways to scale that back. another technology that we can work on making more efficient is water desalinization, which is already seeing extensive use in certain parts of the world. if we can turn seawater into freshwater cheaply and efficiently, we have no drinking water problem (though we might need to worry about what that does, long-term, to the ocean ecologies). |
