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Shrinking population

Continuing the discussion from Covid misinformation & social media content moderation:

[Specifically, this is a reply to @RhisiartGwilym’s last post. Again I’m wrong-footed by the system not making this fact apparent, as I thought it would. It’s the first time I’ve tried to use the facility to “reply as a new topic” (or words to that effect), so I may have screwed up.]

You’re not convinced by this, then?

Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born - BBC News [15 Jul 2020]

Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.

And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.

Hey Twirlip

I just made a post about replies that you might find interesting, or at least might be able to catalogue some of your frustrations so we can keep working on them.

Cheers

That’s quite a chart Twirlip! To be honest I have to say I breathed a sigh of relief just looking at it. I think that as a species we will need to get a grip on what is a reasonable population based on how we choose to live on this planet. I would prefer that we think about that as a species, rather than just let nature decide for us…

My feeling is that many of the folk that have spent time projecting our population out into the future have come to the conclusion that our population will decrease over the next 100 years or so. The Limits to Growth model was pretty clear about that, as was James Lovelock in his latest thoughts about the future.

To @RhisiartGwilym main point - are there people among the GICS that would consider the possibility of using a virus (or similar) as a device to reduce the population a bit more than will happen anyway? My feeling is absolutely yes. I can easily believe that there are folk who seriously consider such designs (possibly while cackling to themselves and stroking a pure white cat on their knee at the same time)

As the lastest Chris Martensen link I just posted discusses, it might be the case that Covid has implications for fertility. This is still very early and the evidence is very sketchy, but it would be a terrible thing if some proportion of the the apparently unharmed young people who get this illness end up suffering fertility problems as a result.

Obv I’m just speculating through my tinfoil hat here. Let’s hope I’m completely off-track! (And let’s hope that things like the Gerogia guidestones are just harmless little pranks!)

Cheers

PP

Hi Twirl! Oh yes, entirely convinced. Exactly what I expected, in fact. When I speak of Gaian strategies of population re-balancing, this is precisely the sort of thing I’d predict to start popping up. I think that when I write ‘Gaian methods’ people always get instant images of mass super-pandemics and hyper-famines, with dead piling up in the street. Sometimes, it’s true, the Gaian way does lead to that with some species. But only locally, and in fairly small incidents.

I expect that the bulk of the natural reduction will come about far less dramatically, as I’ve often sketched, by the aggregate global birth-rate and death rate quietly switching places from where they’ve been for some centuries, with the birth rate maybe a couple of percentage points, or even less, ahead of the death rate. I expect these two indices to change places, again by the same small margin, and thus lead to a steady, unmistakable overall decline in human world population in the middle decades of this century - just as the remarkably accurate-so-far ‘Limits To Growth’ and ‘The Thirty Year Update’ have foreshadowed. But I imagine that this trend will be just as low-key and unobtrusive as the build up to the current overshoot has been.

It may be a significant straw in the wind that Dmitry Orlov, speaking from Russia where he now lives, points out that from the Russian viewpoint, their country is rather underpopulated, and the situation in Bangladesh, Japan, or Hong Kong, for example, is simply not the same. They have a serious local problem; other parts of the world not so much.

Responding to P’s point about unexpected side-effects of novel pathogens leading to much lowered fertility in humans: yes, another entirely expectable Gaian tactic; in exactly the same way that I’ve been expecting for some time to see novel microorganisms which can make a life by eating plastics; and whaddya know, exactly that has just been reported recently!

Expect that to extend. Gaia has an old, well-established way of taking a novel catastrophe - such as the plastic junk gyres in the oceans, or before that the sudden, apparently disastrous build up of oxygen in the ancient atmosphere many millions of years ago because of new, oxygen-excreting micro-organisms - and turning it into a solid advantage, by canny evolution of appropriate new life-forms that actually profit from the ‘disaster’, so that now we can’t do without it!

You may surmise that there are no, or very few, Chicken Little strains in my ancestry… :laughing: