But nobody's saying they have to die early. A fertility rate under replacement will lead to degrowth. Yes, it's going to be difficult during the degrowth phase (less young people to support the aged), but eventually the population will stabilize at a lower level and that will be better from both a sustainability and resources standpoint.
Billions of old people, dying alone.
I do not want to live in that world. Let alone encourage it!
What you're saying is like saying "Let's not play the World Series, let's just go home and settle for 2nd. We'll still be a playoff team!"
Less people is bad. All of us matter but only as long as humanity continues.
Degrowth is stagnation. We must survive tho - even at the expenses of the Earth if that is what it takes.
We are the highest evolutionary life this planet has produced - the only life able to exploit all other life. The entire purpose of evolution could be to create life as we are.
If it's all just random and we ended up as we are solely due to genetic mistakes over time - our existence is even more unfathomable, a seemingly infinite number of things had to occur exactly as they did so that we exist as we do now.
We are the most important thing on Earth - potentially far, far more so.
The Webb telescope has viewed into the past and didn't see so many things it would have if the universe was full of advanced intelligent life - with all the data we possess now, we cannot say that we are not the first to "wake up"and only "if" indeed the universe will ultimately create an infinite number of species with our capabilities.
That's a real big if.
We can't take that chance on something as stupid sounding as "degrowth"
Remember, adapt or die.
That's what we do
If Earth is going to heat up than it
There are currently about 8 billion of us. At some point in the past there were 4 billion of us (Bard tells me the population reached 4Billion on April 11, 1974). We're we somehow worse off when there were 1/2 as many of us on earth? Would we somehow be worse off if we slowly (like over the course of 100 years) returned back to that number? I fail to see how it would be problematic. Somehow we survived and got what we needed to get done in 1974 with only 4B people. If we were to settle back down to that number and stabilize there why would that be a problem? Or, how about stabilizing at 6B?