An economy depending on population growth is incompatible with physics. If we care about climate change we should want every country to have a population decline until we can live within our carbon means.
What?
Forests get destroyed because of stupidity, not because of population numbers.
And I agree with OP, I don't see what's the big deal about lack of new people. If anything I think it's a good thing.
Supposing current technology level + ecological constraints, what do you think the rough optimal world population level should be?
* less?
* 0.01 billion people
* 0.1 billion people
* 1 billion people
* 10 billion people
* 100 billion people
* 1000 billion people
* more?
i have no idea how to actually reach that state without a lot of planned/unplanned misery.
It is a big assumption that we will be restricted to the 'world'. When we are not, it doesn't make much sense to stop a population explosion.
If you solve this with space travel, i.e. by colonizing habitable planets within our reach, then you will be limited by the speed of light (i.e., how fast people can reach new planets to colonize). Given a time t, the radius of that available region is O(t), and therefore its volume is O(t^3).
As you see, O(t^3) is much smaller growth than O(e^t). (In fact, there's a theorem in analysis that for any exponential function, there exists no polynomial function that it won't eventually outgrow.)
So, if population growth is the problem, you can buy yourself a few more years by colonizing other planets, but the same problem ultimately re-emerges.
Really? Who do you think would have more technological advancements? 100 million Americans, or the projected four billion Africans?
One could argue that having fewer people on earth would still be a good thing because it would give us more time to solve the real problem of reducing CO2 per person; but it would also mean we'd have fewer scientists and engineers working to develop the sustainable technology needed to solve our problems. It's not clear if fewer people would lead to a better or worse end result, or if it would just get us to the same place more slowly.
No it wouldn't. Quality over quantity. Having to support less productive and low-IQ people means less resources available to solve difficult problems.
We may, one day, colonize other planets. But we evolved specifically to exist on this one. Each new environment will likely take centuries, if not millenia, to properly colonize. The fact that it is theoretically possible for a comically tiny fraction of Earth's population to eke out a hardscrabble, miserable life on other planets should not impact policy decisions on terra firma.
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-ca...
But most of the planet is currently uninhabited.
We have at least a couple hundred years before we would really have to worry about overpopulation.
Not that it will get to that point, anyway. Birthrates will be below replacement rate in a couple decades.
We are using energy and releasing carbon at an unsustainable rate. This means that we are overpopulated.
Those predictions never came to pass.
Also, peak oil supply was supposed to hit us in the year 2000.
The peak oil people were correct, in the wrong way though.
We aren't going to hit peak oil supply. We are going to hit peak oil DEMAND. As in, our other technological solutions are going to overtake oil, because it will be cheaper and better before we come even close to running out of our non-renewable resources.
By looking at all of the recent developments in solar energy (which is currently following freaking "solar moores law". Within a decade, at current improvement rates it will be cheaper than coal in most locations. It already IS cheaper in high energy cost places like hawaii), and other technology progress, humans are easily easily on track to solving all of the supposed problems of overpopulation before come close to being an issue.
What the overpopulation people never figured out is that our rate of technological progress is faster than the rate that we use up resources, and it is faster by a long shot.
> What the overpopulation people never figured out is that our rate of technological progress is faster than the rate that we use up resources, and it is faster by a long shot.
What the techno-optimists haven't figured out is that technological progress and the resources aren't unlimited, the only case where your argument makes any sense.
Of course they are not unlimited. In 1 billion years we will have hit that limit of technological progress.
Before we hit that limit, 1 billion years from now, we have a long way to go, and the limit is 'effectively' unlimited, for all intensive purposes.
The only way your argument makes any sense is if you think we will hit that limit within a decade or something. But all evidence points to the contrary, and that we instead will only have to worry about those limits, a long long time from now.
Citation needed.