New sex drought threatens SS, Medicare, the GDP, the future (Politico report) and more Autism. Young adults are scared.

[_Themis]

Limiting the number of children per family for variable periods of time is the best way to curb overpopulation. This is something India needs to work on immediately.

Yes, that certainly beats curbing overpopulation by increasing death rates and reducing average life expectancies via mass starvation, pandemics, wars over the world's dwindling resources, culling the aged and sick from the population via forced euthanasia, etc., which is the only and even inevitable alternative if we fail to reduce birthrates.

I think limiting family size should only be a last resort of we have to do it or most of us die. I think other ways of managing population should be used first like education and economic growth. Both have shown a consistent lowing of birth rates.

[_Some Schmo]

Okay, if the world population continues to grow for the next 200 years, what should we do?

Overpopulation should be the least of your worries. It's way harder to get laid these days, isn't it?

[_Gunnar]

I think limiting family size should only be a last resort of we have to do it or most of us die. I think other ways of managing population should be used first like education and economic growth. Both have shown a consistent lowing of birth rates.

If you mean mandatory limiting of family size enforced by punitive sanctions should only be a last resort, I would agree with you, but if voluntary limiting of family size does not soon become the norm (within the next very few decades at the very most) governments will have no viable alternative to mandating family size limitation by force of law and criminal sanctions for non-compliance, if massive increases in tragic deaths due to starvation, war and pestilence are to be prevented or curtailed. Better education is undeniably vital, but the current Trump administration seems quite antipathetic to funding public, non-private school systems or encouraging fact and science based education or critical thought. As for economic growth, that can at best afford temporary relief, as indefinitely sustainable growth of any kind, whether demographic or economic, is inherently, mathematically impossible in a finite universe, especially, and even in the short term, on our single, finite planet.

[_Gunnar]

Besides that, under no conceivable circumstances will it ever be economically or physically possible to transport enough people off the earth to prevent over population on earth without radically reducing birthrates to more closely match death rates.

Ya It would take a technological breakthrough like the Epstein drive to make mass movement of people from one planet to another feasible. Right now it would cost way more to move people to Mars than to just use those resources here to feed and house them. Yet I still think we should work to send people to Mars.

There is no guarantee that something like the Epstein drive is even possible (though some sort of fusion powered drive probably is). In fact, few physicists think it is. It would be foolish to rely on that panning out any time soon, if ever. Then there is the Alcubierre drive which is even more exciting than the Epstein drive, but also even more iffy. How I would love it, though, if this turned to be possible and practical! But, so far as we can tell right now, it seems even more unlikely than the Epstein drive, if for no other reason that even if the concept is valid, it seems that it might require at least the total energy output of numerous whole suns or even whole galaxies to implement!

Eventual colonization of other worlds by humans is the only way to insure the continuation of our species when our world inevitably ends in the far future, when our sun inevitably reaches the end of its life, but that, by itself, can have nearly zero impact on population growth of the earth itself.

That is a lot further down the road then to go back to when humans first walked the earth. We have got a lot of time before we need to leave the earth, but until then we need to fix the problems we have today that threaten our existence.

Agreed!

ETA: Due to the exponential nature of biological population growth in general, it is an inescapable conclusion that the total mass of living organisms on this earth, as a whole, must have reached the maximum that the earth can possibly sustain a very long time ago, in fact, shortly after life itself began. This means that the human population can continue to increase only because there still exist other species of living organisms that we have not yet eliminated or driven towards extinction to make room for more humans.

And that mass is astronomically larger then all of humanity. It of course needs to be in order to meet human needs, but I think the world population is larger then what currently would be ideal, I also think we could sustain 10's of billions of people. I look around and think we do so horribly with using what we have. We take up so much space that takes away green areas. I think of all that roof space we live under, work under, shop under, etc and do little to make it green. I think the hobbits have it right.

Astronomically larger? I think you may have an almost absurdly limited idea of what "astronomically larger" means, plus, perhaps, an insufficient appreciation of the incredible power of exponential growth.
Humankind is pathetically lightweight in comparison to the mass of almost all other living things on Earth, but while our bodies (and thinking) may be tiny, our crushing footprint is not.

The most comprehensive study ever of the weight of all living biomass on the planet has discovered humans account for only about 0.01 percent of life on Earth – but despite our physical insignificance compared to the teeming masses around us, history shows there's no doubt over whose dominion this is.

Only 0.01% they say! But this is actually quite enormous when one consider how many millions of species have been identified, and how many previously unknown ones are discovered every year! It means that human population would only have to grow 10,000 times bigger than it now is to equal the grand total of all currently existing life on earth all by itself. With a population growth rate of only 2% per year, if it could be sustained indefinitely, that would only take 465 years, or 926 years with a population growth rate of 1%. Obviously human population growth must and will be sharply curtailed or entirely halted, one way or another, in much less time than that!

[_Themis]

If you mean mandatory limiting of family size enforced by punitive sanctions should only be a last resort, I would agree with you, but if voluntary limiting of family size does not soon become the norm (within the next very few decades at the very most) governments will have no viable alternative to mandating family size limitation by force of law and criminal sanctions for non-compliance, if massive increases in tragic deaths due to starvation, war and pestilence are to be prevented or curtailed.

It is the norm in much of the world. The current problem is in certain areas of the world, but overall trends show that it will peak by the end of the century. That is not written in stone so there are other factors that could change, especially if we push for change.

Better education is undeniably vital, but the current Trump administration seems quite antipathetic to funding public, non-private school systems or encouraging fact and science based education or critical thought. As for economic growth, that can at best afford temporary relief, as indefinitely sustainable growth of any kind, whether demographic or economic, is inherently, mathematically impossible in a finite universe, especially, and even in the short term, on our single, finite planet.

Trump has been a disaster on many levels and I am not sure how to help people to stop being so stupid. It may be our species is not well adapted to the new world we have created.

[_Themis]

There is no guarantee that something like the Epstein drive is even possible (though some sort of fusion powered drive probably is). In fact, few physicists think it is. It would be foolish to rely on that panning out any time soon, if ever. Then there is the Alcubierre drive which is even more exciting than the Epstein drive, but also even more iffy. How I would love it, though, if this turned to be possible and practical! But, so far as we can tell right now, it seems even more unlikely than the Epstein drive, if for no other reason that even if the concept is valid, it seems that it might require at least the total energy output of numerous whole suns or even whole galaxies to implement!

Yes the Epstein drive is completely fictional. The point is that we would need some way to travel to other planets efficiently to make mass movement realistic.

Astronomically larger? I think you may have an almost absurdly limited idea of what "astronomically larger" means, plus, perhaps, an insufficient appreciation of the incredible power of exponential growth.

It's a subjective term.

Only 0.01% they say! But this is actually quite enormous when one consider how many millions of species have been identified, and how many previously unknown ones are discovered every year! It means that human population would only have to grow 10,000 times bigger than it now is to equal the grand total of all currently existing life on earth all by itself. With a population growth rate of only 2% per year, if it could be sustained indefinitely, that would only take 465 years, or 926 years with a population growth rate of 1%. Obviously human population growth must and will be sharply curtailed or entirely halted, one way or another, in much less time than that!

Yes we cannot sustain trillions of people, and while I think current population may be to large, we don't actually know what an ideal population range on earth would be. Like I said we haven't developed what we have very well, and we don't know what changes we may make in the future that can allow us a higher standard of living on less resources.

[_Chap]

If you mean mandatory limiting of family size enforced by punitive sanctions should only be a last resort, I would agree with you, but if voluntary limiting of family size does not soon become the norm (within the next very few decades at the very most) governments will have no viable alternative to mandating family size limitation by force of law and criminal sanctions for non-compliance, if massive increases in tragic deaths due to starvation, war and pestilence are to be prevented or curtailed.

There is a very direct way to impact on population growth. You do it by direct action on the source of babies: young healthy women. And it works. No need to shoot people or lock them up (as if you could do that anyway, at least not on a large enough scale to be effective!)


Climate change, fertility and girls’ education

Homi KharasTuesday, February 16, 2016

The historic agreement reached at Paris on climate change outlined a range of activities, research, and technical cooperation to mitigate climate change. Intended nationally determined commitments to reduce carbon emissions have been submitted by most countries. Financing to developing countries for climate change has been promised with a publicized target of at least $100 billion per year.

Unfortunately, the cheapest, most cost-effective mechanism for reducing emissions does not seem to have been considered by the international community. It is education, or more specifically girls’ education, that is far more likely to result in lower carbon emissions than a shift to renewables, improved agricultural practices, urban public transport, or any other strategy now being contemplated.

But education receives relatively small amounts of aid compared to what has been promised for climate change. Today, aid commitments for education projects are about $13 billion annually. With this level of support there have been some gains in school enrollment especially at the primary level, but secondary schooling improvements have been modest. If one-eighth of climate aid could be devoted to more education, it would double aid for education and could potentially lead to far more rapid scaling up of girls’ education.

The logic behind girls’ education as a climate mitigation investment is straightforward. The United Nations projects that the world’s population will grow from 7.3 billion today to 9.7 billion by 2050. Almost all this growth (2.3 billion people) will be seen in developing countries, where mortality rates have declined more rapidly than fertility rates. Africa’s population is projected to rise by 1.2 billion people, mostly in countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but also in smaller countries like Uganda, Niger, and Mali, where fertility rates remain very high.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna has done the most extensive modeling of the impact of fertility on population growth. In their scenarios, the impact of education is enormous. Better educated women have far fewer children than women with little education. There are huge differences between the fertility rates of women, depending on their education level. Fertility is the main unknown variable in demographic projections (largely ignored by the U.N.’s demographic model) and it depends crucially on the assumptions used for education growth.

The difference between the high population growth assumption and low population assumption is 2 billion people by 2045 and over 5 billion people by 2100. Almost all of this difference depends on the assumption made about fertility. In Africa, IIASA thinks that improved education could result in 1.8 billion people less than the U.N. median variant suggests by 2100. If education could be scaled up faster, the impact would be even more dramatic.

You might even start a program to target poor girls in the US ... You'd find that their consumption of welfare payments as adults would diminish considerably. But of course, it is a lot more fun to punish people for doing things you don't like than to give them something better to do.

[_Gunnar]

Yes the Epstein drive is completely fictional. The point is that we would need some way to travel to other planets efficiently to make mass movement realistic.

Yup! No doubt about that. We must, and I think we will, find better and more efficient means of propulsion. Solar sails and ion drives are promising, and practical nuclear powered propulsion of some kind (preferably fusion) will probably be perfected before too long. But to be really practical, I think, we must eventually be able to mine and utilize the resources and energy to build and power our spacecraft in space, rather than on earth. It would be wonderful, though, if the Alcubierre drive turns about to be realizable after all!

Yes we cannot sustain trillions of people, and while I think current population may be to large, we don't actually know what an ideal population range on earth would be. Like I said we haven't developed what we have very well, and we don't know what changes we may make in the future that can allow us a higher standard of living on less resources.

I agree that our population is probably already considerably larger than ideal. I still fear there will inevitably be a truly disastrous amount of tragedy and sorrow due to mass starvation, pestilence and war before we finally manage to achieve an optimum and sustainable population level.

[_Gunnar]

If you mean mandatory limiting of family size enforced by punitive sanctions should only be a last resort, I would agree with you, but if voluntary limiting of family size does not soon become the norm (within the next very few decades at the very most) governments will have no viable alternative to mandating family size limitation by force of law and criminal sanctions for non-compliance, if massive increases in tragic deaths due to starvation, war and pestilence are to be prevented or curtailed.

There is a very direct way to impact on population growth. You do it by direct action on the source of babies: young healthy women. And it works. No need to shoot people or lock them up (as if you could do that anyway, at least not on a large enough scale to be effective!)


Climate change, fertility and girls’ education

Homi KharasTuesday, February 16, 2016

The historic agreement reached at Paris on climate change outlined a range of activities, research, and technical cooperation to mitigate climate change. Intended nationally determined commitments to reduce carbon emissions have been submitted by most countries. Financing to developing countries for climate change has been promised with a publicized target of at least $100 billion per year.

Unfortunately, the cheapest, most cost-effective mechanism for reducing emissions does not seem to have been considered by the international community. It is education, or more specifically girls’ education, that is far more likely to result in lower carbon emissions than a shift to renewables, improved agricultural practices, urban public transport, or any other strategy now being contemplated.

But education receives relatively small amounts of aid compared to what has been promised for climate change. Today, aid commitments for education projects are about $13 billion annually. With this level of support there have been some gains in school enrollment especially at the primary level, but secondary schooling improvements have been modest. If one-eighth of climate aid could be devoted to more education, it would double aid for education and could potentially lead to far more rapid scaling up of girls’ education.

The logic behind girls’ education as a climate mitigation investment is straightforward. The United Nations projects that the world’s population will grow from 7.3 billion today to 9.7 billion by 2050. Almost all this growth (2.3 billion people) will be seen in developing countries, where mortality rates have declined more rapidly than fertility rates. Africa’s population is projected to rise by 1.2 billion people, mostly in countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but also in smaller countries like Uganda, Niger, and Mali, where fertility rates remain very high.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna has done the most extensive modeling of the impact of fertility on population growth. In their scenarios, the impact of education is enormous. Better educated women have far fewer children than women with little education. There are huge differences between the fertility rates of women, depending on their education level. Fertility is the main unknown variable in demographic projections (largely ignored by the U.N.’s demographic model) and it depends crucially on the assumptions used for education growth.

The difference between the high population growth assumption and low population assumption is 2 billion people by 2045 and over 5 billion people by 2100. Almost all of this difference depends on the assumption made about fertility. In Africa, IIASA thinks that improved education could result in 1.8 billion people less than the U.N. median variant suggests by 2100. If education could be scaled up faster, the impact would be even more dramatic.

You might even start a program to target poor girls in the US ... You'd find that their consumption of welfare payments as adults would diminish considerably. But of course, it is a lot more fun to punish people for doing things you don't like than to give them something better to do.

Yup! Everything you pointed out in this post is vitally needed, and presents our best hopes of avoiding or minimizing absolute disaster. If only we could replace Trump and his ilk with national and international leaders with the real compassion for others than themselves and the practical scientific understanding, leadership skills and competence necessary to lead us into that future.

[_DoubtingThomas]

It would have to be a truly large asteroid, but the point is we are not likely to have an independent population Mars in the next few decades or longer that could survive if Earth is annihilated by an large asteroid. Even then it is probably way cheaper to build large underground areas on earth to live in and grow food, and you still have more resources available on earth.

Okay, you have a point there.

Now the odds are so low of a large asteroid hitting earth anytime soon that it is not reasonable to worry to much about it

It's 0.000001% chance per year, but that is only for known "Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)." It doesn't take into account interstellar objects, or solar system asteroids that haven't been discovered. There is a 1/10,000 chance that a lot of comets are heading towards the inner solar system. https://www.space.com/28611-star-flew-t ... ystem.html

So the chance of something big (comets, an asteroid,gamma radiation) ending human life on Earth in the next 200 years isn't really that low.