Our technology is keeping up with our “hard limits”. If we were politically willing to build more nuclear reactors, we’d have zero problems with energy or water (desalination). Mineral scarcity turned out not to be. Land scarcity isn’t a thing (the entire world population could live in single family homes in roughly the same land area as Texas or Ukraine). And at our current tech level and rate of innovation, we could start have undersea domes or O’Neill cylinders by the time we ran into any of those limits.
I can’t think of any sentiment that I commonly hear that’s as ghoulish as that. As if the moral value of a human life is somehow less than her lifetime net carbon emissions. My only solace is the hope that people who believe that sort of thing will go extinct and be replaced by people whose values are closer to mine.
We're up against massive loss of biodiversity, loss of habitable space on the planet, and an enormous amount of human suffering and loss of human life due to the current and future effects of climate change. A smaller population will not solve these problems alone, but it will buy us more time to solve them.
FWIW, I'm not trying to promote anything extreme like population control policies, just pointing out that the current trend of population leveling off is generally a good thing.
That seems to be the trend. It makes sense, people who choose a laziness born of pessimism are probably not virile enough to raise children.
Surprised to see this kind of thinking here though; if you are an engineer who is good at solving problems, you should raise children that are also good at solving problems. Point them at our climate/sustainability/energy issues.
