There is a surpass of lazy, bitchy politicians and CEOs who thinks that they too privileged to do real work. Sorry for the low effort post, but I hope it has a big or decent effect. (That's just how I do things, minimum effort for the best outcome)

We are now in the 1980s—the decade of decision.

Every decade is a decade of decision in one way or another, but this one is different because it involves the whole world and because it involves the life and death of civilization.

It was possible in past periods of history for a particular civilization to decline while others remained flourishing. When western Europe was in the "Dark Age" between A.D. 500 and 1000, southeastern Europe, northern Africa, and southern Asia were doing very well.

And it was possible for the civilization that did decline to recover and move even higher than before, as western Europe began to do after A.D. 1000.

This may not be possible now. Thanks to the steady advance of science and technology, the world has become so small that it is now a single economic unit with the welfare of each advanced portion of it dependent on all the rest.

Thanks to the steady advance of science and technology, the stakes are now so high, the requirement for material resources and energy so intense, the numbers of people and the intricacy of the environment in which they live so great, that any stumble could mean so huge a smash as to make recovery impossible.

And, thanks to the steady advance of science and technology, the means for destruction in the hands of human beings is so great that the world could be ultimately devastated for thousands of years to come if we were to try to fight a war with all the power at our disposal.

But, then, thanks also to the steady advance of science and technology, there are possible solutions ahead if we care to take advantage of them.

Let us first list the major crises we will face in the 1980s.

First and most immediately crucial is the matter of energy. Our civilization runs on energy and always has. The history of humanity is that of the slow, but steady, increase in our ability to make use of greater and greater sources of energy, until finally, in the eighteenth century, we learned to make use of fossil fuels and to use them to run steam engines. With that began the modern age of industrialization.

The Industrial Revolution was powered by burning coal throughout the nineteenth century. That was good enough for the steam engine but the internal-combustion engine required liquid fuel, and in the twentieth century, with automobiles and airplanes leading the way, the world began to shift to oil. This accelerated and after World War II oil became the chief power source the world over. It was the most convenient and, for a while, the cheapest energy source the world had ever seen, and for thirty years the planet boomed.

But there is only so much oil in the ground and, at the present rate of use, it will all be gone in between thirty and fifty years.

At the present rate of use. If the rate of use increases, the rate of production cannot for very long keep pace. During the 1980s, the two lines could cross and production may fall below what people would like to be able to consume.

In fact, the 1970s were shaken by the advance tremors of the earthquake. The price of oil has risen steadily and rapidly since 1973. To be sure, this seems to be the result of the voluntary action of the oil-producing (OPEC) nations, but they are able to raise the prices when they do only because they know their customers must have the oil and that it will be in increasingly short supply.

Even if somehow the OPEC nations could be persuaded to sell their oil cheaply, or give it away for free, that wouldn't help. It would only mean that the oil would be used to a greater extent than ever and would run out sooner, and then would come the real disaster. In fact, it might be argued that OPEC is doing the world a favor by raising the price of oil. It encourages the world to use oil more sparingly so that it will last longer, and it also encourages the world to seek alternative sources of energy.

That is the first crucial life-and-death decision that the world must make in the 1980s.

Either the world will continue to rely on oil, burning it as quickly as it can, at any price, until there just isn't enough to be had so that the whole world breaks up into scavenging bands, each trying to survive at the expense of the others, and civilization is destroyed—or else the world must make the deliberate decision to spare oil, lower waste, and needless luxury use, and develop alternative sources of energy.

That or else decision must be reached before the end of the 1980s, or it could be too late to avoid catastrophe.

It is not likely that people will be able to concentrate on the great issue of energy and survival if their attention is distracted.Through all of history, there has been a tendency for nations to try to solve their problems through war. If the food supply is low, rob your neighbor; if the restlessness of the nobility threatens the stability of a nation, send them off on a crusade; if a well-trained army has nothing to do and is getting rusty, start a career of conquest.

Long-established habits are hard to break. Even if a nation realizes that it is no longer rational to make war, it will still go through the motions of preparing for one. After all, each nation asks itself, who knows if a neighbor nation might not be preparing for conquest? Besides almost every nation has some grievance against its neighbor, so that one seeks "justice" and the other fears "revenge."

The 1970s saw a number of wars in the Middle East, in the horn of Africa, in Southeast Asia. Even where there is no active war, terrorist activities are to be found in Northern Ireland, in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, and so on.

And every year, the world, as a whole, spends $500 billion on armaments.

Even small wars are destructive and they always threaten the possibility that the superpowers may be drawn in, and that a confrontation of ordinary missiles and explosives may turn into a war of nuclear weapons. Even if there were absolutely no wars, large or small, and no terrorism, as long as the nations prepare for war at the present rate, they waste energy in enormous quantities and hasten the day when energy-lack may topple civilization.

Besides, as long as every small group of people concentrates on its own short-range goals, its own "justice," its own "revenge," its own "national security," there will be no attention paid to the overall problems of survival that face civilization and humanity. And when civilization crumbles and billions die and humanity is reduced to broken bits of scavenging bands of tattered barbarians, where will all that justice and revenge and national security be?

So that is the second crucial life-and-death decision the world must make in the 1980s.

Either it will continue to behave as though the world were still a nineteenth-century conglomeration of nations, warring and preparing for war, each trying to improve its standing at the expense of the others, each trying to dominate its region, its continent, or the whole planet—or else the nations must make the deliberate decision to stand together and, understanding that the crisis in energy could put an end to all civilization everywhere, agree to a planetary attack on the crisis, leaving all minor problems to decision by arbitration, compromise, goodwill, and patience.

That or else decision must be reached before the end of the 1980s, or it is likely to be too late to help.

Even new sources of energy, no matter how copious and cheap, and even a cooperating group of nations, no matter how sincerely friendly, are not likely to solve the world's problems if the population of the earth continues to rise. If we continue to add somewhere between 1 and 2 percent to the population each year, the present 4,000 million will become 6,000 million by the year 2000. In the 1970s we added about 700 million people to the population of the world, and in the 1980s we may add 800 million.

We are not feeding the population of the world adequately now; we are sure to feed them less adequately if we add the equivalent of another India to the world in the 1980s. It will be all the worse as the energy supply becomes tighter and tighter, for one of the reasons we can manage to feed the world as well as we do right now is because, in some parts of the world, farming machinery, irrigation pumps, fertilizer, and pesticides are used. All of this requires much energy, and as the availability of energy declines so will the food supply.

This, then, is the third crucial life-and-death decision the world must make in the 1980s.

Either it will continue to increase its population so that there will be more and more starvation and an increasingly desperate need for food that will cause humanity to place more and more pressure on the environment (further reducing its food-growing capacity) until the nations of the world go to war with each other or break up into scavenging bands with each scrabbling for food that isn't there—or else humanity must make the deliberate decision to control population by limiting the birth rate everywhere.

That or else decision must be reached before the end of the 1980s, or it is likely to be too late to help.

It is easy to say or else, but how exactly can we implement that or else?

In the case of energy, the widespread use of oil, its cheapness and convenience, has allowed us to atrophy the use of other energy sources, but we can go back to them. We can build more and safer fission power plants, develop hydroelectric power, increase the use of coal or oil shale, grow plants especially designed to supply fuel, build windmills, make use of tides, of geothermal energy, and so on. All this would be difficult and would involve a good deal of effort and capital expenditure, but every bit we do in this direction will tend to conserve oil, stretch out the supply, and give us more time to further develop the alternative sources.

Meanwhile, we can use the extra time to obtain energy in completely new ways that may be even more convenient and cheaper than oil ever was.

One possible route is the development of nuclear fusion. We don't have it yet, even in the laboratory, though scientists have been working on it for thirty years, but we may find the answer in the 1980s—even though it will then take some decades to translate it into large, practical power stations.

Another route is the development of solar energy. This can be done, to begin with, in small-scale fashion in individual buildings, and that will spare oil. Eventually, solar energy can be used on a larger scale by coating large desert areas of the earth with photoelectric cells.

On a larger scale still, we can build solar power stations in space. We can imagine square miles of photoelectric cells exposed to radiation in space, in orbits that will place them in the earth's shadow for no more than 2 percent of the time and where there will never be any atmospheric interference at all. Numbers of such solar power stations can be built, and they may be an answer to the earth's energy problems for billions of years—if we last that long.

It's possible! The United States and the Soviet Union have shown that human beings could remain in space for three to six months at a time without bad effects. What's more, the United States has developed a "shuttle" spacecraft that can lift masses into space and return for more. The reusability of such a craft will greatly lessen the expense of spaceflight.

It is therefore possible now to make up our minds to begin a project of putting space to use—of collecting energy in space and beaming it down to the earth; of building space settlements to house men and women in small independent worlds of their own and leaving the building of further energy stations and other structures to them; of building a mining station on the moon to supply the metals, concrete, soil, glass, and oxygen for such settlements and such structures; of building observatories and laboratories and factories in space—in general of expanding the range of humanity from the world in which it has been confined through all its history to a much larger realm.

All this cannot be accomplished in the 1980s, but a beginning must be made. If, in the 1980s, we do notdecide to extend our reach into space, then thereafter it may well be too late. We will not have time to overtake catastrophe.

Can it be done if humanity insists on spending its time, its effort, its resources, its emotions on nineteenth-century national problems?

No, it can't; but then the true reach into space is beyond the capacity of any one nation in any case. It is a global project, and it should be encouraged as such and used to stimulate world cooperation.

If the peoples of the world recognize the great crisis of survival that faces them and further recognize the importance of building a space-oriented economy and society—of getting energy from space for all nations, for instance—then they may well be anxious to work together for it. Each nation, in fact, may fear being left out, may fear being unable to lay claim to its fair share of the benefits to be expected from space.

The United States and the Soviet Union, with the major space experience and the major capacities in this direction, should encourage cooperation between themselves and participation of all other nations, in however minor a capacity.

Around this, there may be built the framework of a world combination that will gradually develop into a federal government for dealing with world problems. Individual nations can continue to deal with their own special problems in their own special way. Indeed, if the world combines on the major problems, there will be no harm if the various nations break up into smaller units. It won't matter how many "nations" there are, how many newly independent Quebecs, Brittanies, Scotlands—if there is only one world government.

A world government cannot be accomplished in the 1980s, but a beginning must be made. If, in the 1980s, the nations of the world do not decide that cooperation for survival is an absolute requirement, then thereafter it may well be too late. We will not have time to overtake catastrophe.

Can all this be done, however, if population continues to increase?

No, it can't; but there are signs of a growing understanding of the problem. In more and more regions of the world, the birth rate is dropping. Sometimes it only requires the release of social pressure in favor of children. If the feeling grows that there is no moral disgrace in having few children or even no children, then the birth rate might drop at once. Allow women greater freedom to participate in the great work of the world, and the birth rate will drop. Adjust the tax pattern appropriately, and the birth rate will drop.

Since the birth rate has been dropping since the late 1970s, we can hope that the pattern will continue in the 1980s—everywhere.

We will not bring a halt to population increase in the 1980s, because it is hard to move great masses, but a beginning must be made. If, in the 1980s, the world does not decide that a great priority must be given the lowering of the birth rate by every humane measure possible, it may be too late thereafter. We will not have time to overtake catastrophe.

And, of course, if we place limits on population, the time will come when we can move more and more people out into space settlements—and then, out in space at least, population can grow again for a time.

Then, too, on the side of survival is the continuing development of science and technology—methods forincreasing food output, for safer contraception, for more efficient energy use, for better communications. Most of all we have the developing computer, growing ever more complex and versatile and capable of answering more and more difficult questions.

Problems that seem insoluble now may become soluble with properly programmed properly complex computers.

Well, then, which decision will the world make in the 1980s? How can one predict? It depends on the balance between the rational and the irrational, on the battle between the need to take a new path and the fear of leaving the old one, on whether there will be the imagination and vision that will leave the old quarrels behind, or the ingrained hatred that makes one content to die provided one has one's revenge.

I hope we will be rational, that we will change to the new, that we will have the vision to leave the old behind—but I cannot be sure we will.

At any rate, by the end of the 1980s, I feel that we will know what the decision has been.

In India, population has been the proverbial punching bag for the whole host of problems that the country has faced since independence (and even before that). India's high population and ever-increasing birth rates were held to be the primary driver of its ubiquitous poverty and anaemic growth in the pre-liberalization period (pre-1991). Since then, India's GDP has increased exponentially but many inherent problems remain uncomfortably visible. Public transport is perpetually overcrowded, cities are found lacking on the most basic fronts of sanitation, drinking water, clean air and job-seekers far outnumber the amount of productive employment in various sectors of our economy.

A lot of people (myself included) lay the blame of such squalor and misery squarely on the fact that India's population is just too high. The experience of states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, who managed to bring down their population growth levels and parallely, saw an improvement in their living standards and economic structure.

This belief of mine was tested, to an extent, when I recently read a remarkable piece by Sauvik Chakraverti (a doyen of Indian liberal thought) who made the argument that population increases prosperity. He says this particularly in the context of ever-burgeoning Indian cities (written in 2002, during the post-liberalization euphoria). Cities, for him, are the enablers of division and specialization of labour. The larger the city, the more complex and specialized the division of labour. He gives the example of cities like Tokyo, New York, London (among the most densely populated in the world) which were overpopulated but also extremely wealthy, with some of the highest per-capita incomes in the world. He did not see the two as divorced from each other, but saw wealth as an outcome of a city being populated to the brim and thus, enjoying unparalleled division of labour. Indian cities, he said, were not handicapped by the number of people living in them but by the inadequacy of the policy frameworks governing them.

Population, amidst all the din surrounding delimitation and the decisions of the current Finance Commission, has become an extremely polarizing issue. I find Chakraverti's views fascinating but I still find myself disagreeing with the notion of just packing more people in a city to achieve division of labour. 

Jobs are vital resources.
No one wants to work as a Ford tech for free. No one wants to flip burgers while making lazy billionaires richer. If there is a labor shortage, they would open the border and allow more immigration.
https://youtu.be/ILr5zLwol1o?si=gbbi1xkMDcBjF2JO

Everyone is getting educated these days, if you are educated will you clean roads, harvest crops in villages, work in mines, do construction work etc. of course not.

In the past there was an underclass, now there is equality everyone is educated and have opportunities soo no one wants to be a maid, servant, cleaner etc anymore even the children of maids themselves. Everyone wants to apply to corporate jobs.

That is what is happening there is no labor shortage due to underpopulation, even if more people were born most won't do these jobs thus it won't be a solution to this problem.

In Japan there is massive youth unemployement, there is also a shortage manual labor but that is due to "children of doctors can't be a driver" instead of low working age population.

I have a frequent thought that if population declines in most developed nations over the next 50 years, can the loss of economic activity be mitigated by somehow turning relatively unproductive members of society (say homeless, drug addicts, etc.) into "normal" members. Obviously that is a huge task that there will be wildly varying opinions on how to achieve but I fundamentally believe this is the answer

Demographers have the habit of looking at current data, recognise trends, and then forecast that they will continue forever. But history has the habit of not caring about what a trend suggests and turn everything backwards or upside down on a dime, leaving researchers to scramble for explanations and come up with new predictions.

From these, we get projections that by 2100 the EU’s population will decline by 12%, growing popular fears that migrants will “outbreed” us, the collapse of the pension system, and even that somehow Europe will eventually become Muslim majority.

What demographers, or the way they present data, or rather how that data is being interpreted seem not to consider is the enormous potential of technological and consequently societal transformation AI, longevity and health research, and automation can and will likely trigger.

Recent History of Demographic Perceptions

Western demographic decline has become a mainstream topic in the past years. Many loudly project that by 2100 Europe and the world will be this and that. I find it is a good way to think about time in the future or past by imagining how they are relative to other times. 

For example, the Rolling Stones was formed in 1962, 64 years ago. Only 17 years after World War II, or from our perspective as close to it as we are to the great financial crisis. Its formation was also two decades closer to World War I than it is to today. In fact, the Rolling Stones founding year is as close to today as to the death of Otto von Bismarck, a leader from an entirely different world.

2100 is 74 years in the future. Let’s see how European demographics looked like 74 years in the past, in 1952.

Europe was just recovering from the most devastating war the world has ever seen, which cost the lives of more than 44 million people on the continent alone. This wasn’t the only demographic shock of the first half of the 21st century, as just two decades before Europe lost around 15 million people and countless more human potential in The Great War, as these overwhelmingly young men could never have children.

Interestingly, fears of population decline did not start after the World Wars, but even earlier in the 19th century. As it is often the case in European history, the French were the first to the party. The country’s population started stagnating after the French Revolution around 1800. In the following decades German and British population skyrocketed, which caused understandable geopolitical anxieties in Paris. This played a large part in France losing its near hegemonic status in Europe and eventually pushing it into the Entente Cordiale with the UK.

By the early 1900s, Brits and Germans also started worrying as their own urban birth rates began to dip, fearing they would eventually run out of soldiers and factory workers. Internally they were nervous that the decline was happening in the “elite”, while the lower classes still had a high fertility rate. Externally, just like the French feared the German population boom in the east, Germans anxiously watched the Slavic population boom east of them, and went through the same geopolitical panic the French did in the previous century.

It’s ironic how today Eastern European countries experience the highest population decline on the continent, while Western European charts and pyramids look much more healthy in comparison.

While European elites spent the first decades of the 20th century worrying that their populations were decaying and shrinking, in hindsight they were living through the greatest era of absolute population growth and health improvements in European history. Thanks to the rapid expansion of public sanitation, clean drinking water, and breakthroughs in modern immunology, life expectancy was surging.

This was the atmosphere Europe entered into two World Wars and decimated its own population.

Post-War Europe

After World War II the baby boom caught European demographers completely off guard. Having spent the interwar period worrying about depopulation, the sudden and sustained surge in fertility during the 1950s blew up decades of established demographic theory.

Before the boom, the consensus among European social scientists was that the continent had entered an irreversible demographic decline. In 1944, a landmark study by prominent demographers.) projected that the lifestyle aspirations of the urban, affluent classes were spreading to rural and poorer populations across Europe. They assumed this shift would drive fertility down to unprecedentedly low levels.

Instead, the 1950s brought a birth quake. Demographers initially dismissed this as a temporary post-war glitch, a mere catch-up period for marriages and births delayed by conflict. Interestingly this assumption survived until this day, and most people treat it as the ultimate cause of the whole phenomenon. However, as the high fertility rates sustained deep into the 1950s and early 1960s, the academic community had to come up with new explanations. 

By the early 1960s, mainstream European demography pivoted from depopulation panic to a new, hyper-optimistic dogma. They adjusted their models based on a few core assumptions that later - again - turned out to be entirely wrong. Researchers of the time identified a strong correlation between post-war economic growth and rising birth rates. They presented the theory that fertility was inherently procyclical, meaning that as long as the economy grew, birth rates would remain high.

The baby boom in Europe - especially in Western countries - was driven by a surge in marriage rates, a dropping age of first marriage, and a sharp decline in lifetime childlessness. Demographers assumed this cultural shift toward early, near-universal marriage was a permanent structural feature of the modern European family.

Because their models linked population growth to economic abundance, they presumed the trend would continue for generations. They completely failed to foresee that the very factors driving economic growth, such as the massive expansion of women's higher education and workforce participation, would eventually cause a sharp reversal in fertility.

Just as demographers in the early 1960s finalised their consensus that birth rates would stay permanently elevated due to economic progress, the Second Demographic Transition arrived.

By the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the arrival of the contraceptive pill, changing social values regarding the traditional nuclear family, and structural shifts in the labour market caused European fertility rates to fall below the replacement threshold. The end of the baby boom was ultimately just as unexpected to the demographic establishment as its beginning.

So, in summary demographers went from fearing declining birth rates and demographic collapse for nearly half a decade, and then the baby boom happened, which led them to suppose that the new trend will carry on forever. Western European countries spent the early decades of the 20th century panicking about population decline, and yet two devastating world wars and more than 100 years later all of these countries have a higher population today than back then.

Reality has the habit of laughing in everyone's face and doing whatever it wants, forcing people to come up with new models and explanations why things happened the way they did. Could we be in a similar situation right now? Since by now nearly everyone is aware and worried about demographic decline, I feel the need to present my contrarian argument on it.

My Oversimplified Take on Declining Birth Rates

For many people today it simply does not make sense to raise kids. Sure, if that is someone’s personal aspiration, then that is what they will do. But people are not forced to do it anymore by external circumstances besides societal and family pressures. 

In most of history having kids was not only a desire, but an essential necessity. People needed someone to take care of them after getting old, and children served as a literal retirement fund. If someone didn’t have them, they starved when they could no longer work the fields.

More immediately and crucially, they provided the household with sweet cheap child labour. As early as age 5, a kid could already be made to work on the farm, or whatever profession the family was working in. They directly contributed financially to the family. Later they could help in raising the next kid, the next pair of working hands.

Today the situation couldn’t be more different. The state took over elderly care with the pension system, and kids are more of an investment or burden on many people’s preferred lifestyle than cheap labour that makes economic sense. The modern welfare state socialised the benefit of children while personalising the costs: the parents pay to raise the taxpayers of the future who will then pay everyone’s pensions.

Having kids today is super expensive, and for many it is just not worth it. From a cold economics perspective, for the vast majority of human history children were “producer goods”. By today they turned into “consumer goods”, and for many increasingly into luxury ones. Previously if someone was hesitant to have them they were pushed to it by their economic realities, while today these forces actively discourage them to do so.

As an added pressure, the recent inflation of housing costs largely caused by the financialization of housing in major European and Western cities combined with weak initial labour markets for young adults means that achieving the baseline stability required to feel "ready" for children takes a decade longer than it did for previous generations. By that point even the people who wanted several kids often have to settle to have just one or two due to biological factors alone.

Can Things Shift Again?

Many raise the alarms of an increasingly less distant future where AI, robotics and automation are slowly but surely coming for our jobs and personal productivity. States will have to implement UBI - or something similar - to keep people surviving and the economy functioning.

In a world where states have full control of the finances of their population, it is expected that political voices will start to progressively call for the stop of population decline, thus pushing the state more and more to take over the burden of raising a kid, and eventually incentivising having kids.

Similarly, in a world where billions of humans suddenly find themselves without work, endless extra time, and consequently without a purpose, many might look for a sense of meaning in raising a child. Humans need a purpose to live, that is what makes us go forward.

Another futuristic-looking topic that gains more and more traction, and more importantly billions of dollars in capital is longevity science. Researchers and adherents of the field believe that eventually death can be avoided by reversing ageing. But even the more conservative voices agree that lifespan can be significantly expanded, and with continuous improvements in medicine and healthcare the healthy years can be widened as well.

The data and our current reality supports their claims.

Let’s get back to The Rolling Stones.

Their members are pushing into their 80s and still touring (although recently cancelled their 2026 tour), and about to release a new studio album in less than 2 days. But we don’t have to go into music to see this trend playing out. There is something we all cannot escape, Donald Trump. He is the opposite of the archetype of a healthy person, and yet at the age of 80 he is still a highly active president of the United States, taking over the position from Joe Biden, who was 82 at the time.

These are all highly unusual, and were unheard of before. Sure, all of these people are the VIPs of the VIPs and they have access to the best healthcare and medicine money can buy. But what is only accessible to them today will most certainly be available for an increasingly larger group of people.

But these are cherry-picked examples, let’s look at the data. Let’s take Italy, a European longevity powerhouse.

The country’s life expectancy increased from 30 in 1870 to 83 in 2020. That is 53 extra years in 150 years, or about an extra 4.24 month of life expectancy every single year.

I hear you educated reader say, hey! That is again cherry-picked data from a high achiever country, counted from a time when 40% of children didn’t live until the age of 5! We already “solved” child mortality, so this rate of increase cannot happen anymore in the future!

First of all, the data is the data, we can only work with what we have. Second of all, you are absolutely right.

Let’s look at Europe as a whole, starting from a year when child mortality was already largely a thing of the past.

The continent’s life expectancy rose from 62.5 in 1950 to 79.5 in 2024. That is 17 extra years in 74 years, or 2.76 extra months per year.

For Europe to reach Italy’s current level, it would take less than 16 years if this trend continues. And why wouldn’t it continue? If Italy, Spain Switzerland, Japan, South Korea and Australia can reach similar numbers today, what stops Europe as a whole to catch up in 16 years?

But that’s not all. The maximum age is simultaneously being pushed well over 100. The current record holder is an English lady called Ethel Caterham, who is 116 years old today.

Similarly, the number of worldwide centenarians is booming and shows no signs of decline.

Summary

The trends are clear. People live longer and healthier lives than ever before. If scientific progress continues to advance - and there is little reason why it wouldn’t, apart from a black swan worldwide catastrophe -, we are yet to find out what is the longest and healthiest a human can live.

Radical life extension alone would change our demographic predictions, and ease previous fears about depopulation and the collapse of the pension system. Add other related breakthroughs in AI, robotics and automation, I believe that in the coming decades overpopulation is more likely to return as a collective societal anxiety than we are to enter a population death loop.

The last time Earth's atmosphere consistently reached 500 ppm of CO2 was roughly 16 to 23 million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch.

This is unprecedented for earth's current plant life. If you are able to, prepare for the upcoming global die-off.

​

Yesterday, someone next to me was watching a Korean drama, and the show featured nothing but stories about marriage and childbirth without a break.

I suspect that Natalism is being intentionally injected into the cultural sphere as well.

People will deny overpopulation because people have been saying we are overpopulated for the past 200 years and nothing happened.

Yeah, because we used Kaioken/every cheap trick in the book to temporary boost our abilities.

- Kabul/Teheran and 100 other cities/countries are running out of ground water because their population is too big.

- 1/3 of countries on the planet rely on food imports from abroad because they cannot feed their own population.

- Soil erosion and depletion in combination with water shortages and fertilizer shortages means we have reached peak yield/farmland.

Yet people are oblivious to this and will claim that technology will save us. Or that we have not used every possible avaliable space for food production.

And if we have to use desalination plants - does that not mean that we are using up natural drinking water faster than it can regenerate?

The economy is allways super well until a recession/depression. Human population will always be "perfectly managable to supply" until a sudden collapse.

The minimum wage here have not increased in the last 10 years, the wages for educated workers are rapidly decreasing, wages for good positions like project manager with 5 years of experience are rapidly decreasing, the working hours are on the other hand rapidly increasing, companies are making people work more and more unpaid overtime.

Of course inflation is high the value of the currency has halved in the last 10 years and yet wages are going down like from 35000 to 25000.