AIBU The global fertility crisis is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced?

I'd prefer other life forms to survive to be honest. The sheer amount of cruelty and pain and environmental damage caused by humans is staggering. Humans are willfully nasty and cruel.

@NJLX2021

"This idea that its better if we die out is just 100% virtue signaling crap. If you actually believed this, you would do certain things that would be highly immoral and unreasonable."

Nope. It's an objective reality. It does not mean one wants the human race to die out, it's just an acknowledgment of a basic truth, that we fucked up the planet and whatever we get is our own doing. I wish people would stop using the ridiculous allegation of "virtue signalling" as an alleged "argument" against a POV they disagree with. It's actually not an argument and it's trite.

What do you mean by "you would do certain things that would be highly immoral and unreasonable."

"But the climate??? Every new child born is a new brain that can potentially help the scientific world invent new technologies and solve the climate crisis."

The obvious problems with this argument are; A) We don't know that there is a technological solution and if there is one it could only reduce warming, not stop it altogether (like carbon capture, for example.) B) It's probably already too late to solve the climate crisis. So even if a child born today, within the next ten years (or whenever) might potentially develop some amazing technology when s/he grows up, we may not have the resources to develop it, as everything we have would likely be devoted to raw survival.

Info on how late it is in the game here;

https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/point-no-return-how-close-world-irreversible-climate-change#:~:text=The%20global%20average%20temperature%20rise%20is%20predicted%20to%20climb%20permanently,very%20soon%20after%20%5B6%5D.

C) Development and implementation of technology is an incredibly carbon heavy process by itself. Do you know how much energy is used and how much heat is created by this process? So any reduction in warming the technology might foster could be negated by the development and use of the technology itself.

Other than that I don't disagree with what you have said, but I would point out that before you complain about faulty logic you'd better make sure your own is sound.

I don't believe that anyone in this thread would actively want a genocide...

But I do find the repeated endorsement of the idea of the end of humanity, for the good of the planet, to be rather callous.

I'm trying to prompt people to reflect on that by posing, as a though expirement, a scenario where active steps are taken to more quickly reduce the human population. E.g., if those same posters truly would be happy to see, and think it a good thing for, humanity go extinct (for the greater good), then surely its not a big step from that position to making a moral argument could be made for taking active steps to accelerate this perceived good?

Again, I'm not saying that I think anyone in here would actually make that argument. I'm just challenging the repeated embrace of the perceived goodness of human extinction, and what that attitude (if genuinely held) implies re. the value of human life.

I think it’s known by many but the alternative isn’t viable.

I agree on not wiping out human race and used to find that frustrating on these threads but just had to let go. Hopefully it won’t happen.

Of course exponential growth is not sustainable.

Resources scarcity is absolutely another extremely pressing issue (and necessitates either reducing our consumption of resources and negative environmental impacts or having a smaller global population).

I was highlighting that the current concerns around population decline are not to do with the topline total population numbers, but the demographics of the decline (e.g., the againg population), which some people (like the PP I was addressing) dont seem to be appreciating.

I wish I had got to this post earlier.. so much awful illogical information in the first page.

Couple of key things:

1 - The issue with depopulation is not less people = bad. It is less young people = bad. When you end up with 20, 30, 40, 100 retired elderly people to 1 young workers, your society fails. No ifs or buts, unless there is an AI miracle, you cannot support a society without capable workers. No society = no modern life, no food, wars, system collapse etc.

So yes, in theory if you could go from 8bn people to 4bn people, keeping the ratio of old-young the same = a great thing for the planet, and those 4bn would probably be happier and the whole world would be better.

But that isn't happening. You are going to go from a healthy split of 8bn, to a 4bn that is heavily skewed towards the elderly, and cannot sustain itself.

2 - Wouldn't it be better if we all died out. Better for who? For the planet? A ball of molten iron and rock floating aimlessly through space? So what. This idea that its better if we die out is just 100% virtue signaling crap. If you actually believed this, you would do certain things that would be highly immoral and unreasonable.

3 - it is ok because we have immigration. No. Those countries also have falling birth rates. Most of the world is now bellow replacement, and everywhere is trending down. Once those populations fall, where will your migrants come from?

4 - it is natural for animal populations to rise and fall... yes, usually at great suffering and cost. Most falls in animal populations come from starvation, famine, predators, conflict, natural disasters etc. Just because it is natural, doesn't mean that it is desirable to live through the effects of rapid population decline.

5 - But the climate??? Every new child born is a new brain that can potentially help the scientific world invent new technologies and solve the climate crisis. Without the youth we have no chance of getting out of this mess. I would argue that a gradual decline away from the energy and inventive nature of young populations, and towards a smaller, but gradually aging and tired population, is one of the worst outcomes for the environment.

For me, population decline is like climate change was 20 years ago.

Early 2000s, if you said that you were worried about the climate, no one really cared. Global warming was a widely understood idea, but no one actually cared and you were often laughed away for proposing any real change. Today it has penetrated the mainstream and we understand its a big threat.

Population decline will be the same. The numbers, logic, research on it is very very clear. But it hasn't really penetrated the mainstream yet, Give it 20-30 years, when populations are falling in some countries, bigger problems are happening in Korea/Japan, pensions are under a lot more pressure, schools are closing at a faster rate, and migrant flows are being impacted by countries not wanting to loose their young workers - and then it will probably be something most people understand.

@BoldGreenDreameras others have said the alternative is not without collapse. Even more so as resources are fought over. Can you see that issue?

Talk about bad faith arguments. You're begging the question, assuming that putting the planet first means people don't care about suffering or that they even want people to suffer. The point is that suffering is inevitable as the population increases anyway. Resources will become more and more scarce. The planet will heat up at an even greater pace, drying up water sources and leaving farm fields to convert to desert. If you want to talk about suffering, take a look at what drought and starvation do. So anyone could easily point right back at you and ask if you're pleased to see people suffer and die as a result of population growth, but that would be a jerk move, wouldn't it. So why don't you cut the dramatics out and debate honestly.

Suggesting that people who say humans are destroying the planet, therefore the planet would be better off without us (an objective truth) would want a "genocide" of third world people (implying they're racists) is vile.
I don't normally spank people but that post is next level passive aggressive bullshit. You can do better BGD.

There's no ebb and flow, current trends are unprecedented.

And, again, the issue is not raw population numbers but the demographics of an aging population.

E.g. - say there's a country with a total population of 20m, of which 16m are working age and supporting 4m retirees. The total population then halves, to 10m over time.

If that 10m compromises 8m working age and 2m retirees, then you still have 4 working age people supporting every 1 retiree.

If, though, you end up with 5m working age and 5m retirees, then its a 1:1 ratio. Either retirees have to receive dramatically less support, or each individual working age person has to do more to support them.

Actual numbers aside, that's the core issue - not that the population is declining but what it looks like demographically, and what that means for people's economic security.

And we're not talking about a "one off" shift, birth rates are continuing to fall but life expectancy is not seeing such a dramatic change, meaning the demographic shift has become (and is expected to continue to get) worse with each passing generation.

If there are solutions available, nobody seems willing to think about them, so towards the tipping point for societal collapse we go...

There's no ebb and flow, current trends are unprecedented.

And, again, the issue is not raw population numbers but the demographics of an aging population.

E.g. - say there's a country with a total population of 20m, of which 16m are working age and supporting 4m retirees. The total population then halves, to 10m over time.

If that 10m compromises 8m working age and 2m retirees, then you still have 4 working age people supporting every 1 retiree.

If, though, you end up with 5m working age and 5m retirees, then its a 1:1 ratio. Either retirees have to receive dramatically less support, or each individual working age person has to do more to support them.

Actual numbers aside, that's the core issue - not that the population is declining but what it looks like demographically, and what that means for people's economic security.

And we're not talking about a "one off" shift, birth rates are continuing to fall but life expectancy is not seeing such a dramatic change, meaning the demographic shift has become (and is expected to continue to get) worse with each passing generation.

If there are solutions available, nobody seems willing to think about them, so towards the tipping point for societal collapse we go...

But the alternative to avoid what you have said is exponential population growth as there always needs to be more people to pay the older generation. It can’t go on forever. The end result would be the end of humanity because there won’t be enough resources to go around.

But the alternative to avoid what you have said is exponential population growth as there always needs to be more people to pay the older generation. It can’t go on forever. The end result would be the end of humanity because there won’t be enough resources to go around.

Mulling this more:

• lots of posters suggest that humanity dying out would be a good thing (or even an essential one) for the sake of the environment and/or given projections of increasing resource scarcity;

• the human suffering that would likely occur due to population/societal collapse doesn't appear to concern those posters;

• developing countries are (currently) producing new humans at a much higher rate, and are more likely to see increases in emissions (via fossil fuels) as they become more developed,

would the extinction advocates be inclined to think that a swift genocide of the populaces of developing countries might be the way ahead? If you haven't the stomach for mass murders, perhaps through a program of forced sterilization?

Basically, should we play Thanos?

Or does it have to be every human, more gradually over time? (And doesn't that just mean more harm to the planet in the interim?)

Yep there are other concerns such as getting tax or if we’ll be too redundant but due to AI now is a good time to reduce the population.

Who is going to fund all this AI?