Extrapolations over a century into the future are worthless.
We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population because the explosion that has happened is unsustainable and so are current global population levels. That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
This does not mean that population should or will collapse to extra low levels...
>> Extrapolations over a century into the future are worthless.
Its just math showing the trend and it's not worthless as it should give you something to think about.
>> We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population
Of course, but it will be painful.
>> That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
That simple math, which you deem worthless also tells you this is impossible. There will be a small number of young active people having to support a big group of elderly. They will not have the time to solve world problems. In fact a lot of knowledge will be lost as economy will contract and there will be less people available for specialization.
I don't know what point are trying to make, beside being sarcastic. Knowing that each succeeding generation will be a 1/3 of the previous one has huge influence on how to prepare a society to function when population pyramid will be so inverted.
If they don't change something drastically this is exactly what will happen according to science. It's like there is a comet on course with Earth, but you are saying, knowing it would be meaningless because something might change it's path. I still don't know what your point is.
According to science, the only thing that can change the second derivative of population is public policy? What has caused changes in this number throughout history?
The debate would go much nicer if you could just explain your point of view, which I kindly asked you twice now. Instead you are asking me what I assume are rhetorical questions from your perspective.
My point of view is that it is not useful at all to carry out predictions assuming that the second derivative of population will stay constant for a long time and that it is even sillier to propose public policy based on this.
By that logic we should not act upon anything. E.g. if a car is accelerating towards you while you are crossing the road it would be prudent to speed up or delay your crossing and not to ignore it and say they will surely decelerate at any moment now.
It is not impossible. It is going to happen and it is unavoidable. Even with a constant population this will happen if people live long.
We need to embrace this and use existing and new technologies to cope. We have AI, automation, robots progressing fast, this is exactly what we need in addition to investing in education.
The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
>> It is not impossible. It is going to happen and it is unavoidable.
Based on history it hasn't happened. How do you know it's going to?
>>The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
That is absolutely not the only alternative. One would be to have a stable population at the current size. Another on would be decreasing population slowly and not as drastically as it will happen in Korea. A third one would be growing it slowly. The fourth one would be oscillating around the current size, etc.
We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population because the explosion that has happened is unsustainable and so are current global population levels. That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
This does not mean that population should or will collapse to extra low levels...