Fertility Shock

If we can sort out the population size and image size crisis in this thread we'd be doing very well.

professore wrote: »

work wrote: »

Finally why should OAPs sit on their arses it destroys them?

Is that you Mr. Smith?

I guess they should live with their kids then or pay a decreasing number of young people to wipe their arses in their old age?

Ah the usual moron answers, what percentage of older people need young people to wipe their arses, its very condescendibg of you, I am sure most do fine on their own thank you!

professore wrote: »

I agree but we're not facing up to it. We are sleepwalking into it. In 50 years time there will be very few native Irish at this rate - maybe that's OK but we should think about it.

That's merely trying to "solve" the problem of an age imbalance by importing a young population from elsewhere. The unpleasant reality is that the only sustainable solution to the mess we've created as a species is for some generation to decide to have fewer offspring - and to put up with the consequences of that regarding economic and personal support in old age for the greater good of humanity.

In order to solve the population growth problem, some generation will have to suffer through an adjustment which, as you've pointed out, involves not having enough young people to support the old in that particular generation. I'm a bit of a nihilist when it comes to this stuff so personally I'd gladly suffer a reduced quality of life in old age if it's happening for the purpose of dramatically reducing the human population (and thereby having fewer young people around to look after and economically support my generation in its old age as a side effect) - it's the age old saying that old men should plant trees they know they'll never sit under.

Bottom line is, everyone's quality of life will plunge if we continue to expand and never contract the global population of humans. The contraction will most certainly involve one or two generations getting f*cked over by an imbalance. As far as I'm concerned, it should be ours - simply because we have the option to act in a self-sacrificial way and I wouldn't trust future generations to do that. We're already fairly f*cked in a lot of ways as a generation, so maybe our ultimate contribution to humanity will be a dramatic levelling off of the reproduction rate, so that future generations can enjoy a planet which is less overpopulated.

By not doing this, we're just kicking the can down the road for future generations to solve. One day, the planet will run out of one vital resource or another because there are too many of us competing for it, and that will be unimaginably unpleasant for whoever's around to live through it. We can choose to head it off in advance, which will be unpleasant for us, but at least it's something we get to choose for a reason as opposed to having it forced upon us like some future generation will if we don't do it.

One eyed Jack wrote: »

Accurate description of your own post there really. What do you expect human civilisation should do? Regress to living in mud huts giving up all scientific, medical and technological advances we’ve made since the time when we lived in caves? Flintstones style?

Realistically, what do you imagine are the chances of that happening? What would be the point of passing on such a regressive philosophy to the next generation? We’re not destroying the earth, we’re adapting it to suit ourselves. The next generation will do the same thing, as generations of humanity have done long before you were ever even thought of.

How did you get from "we need to stop reproducing so much and allow the human population to massively decline" to "we should regress to the stone age"?

It's precisely so that future generations can continue to enjoy all of those incredible things we as a species have created, that we need to reduce the population going forward. None of them will matter much for quality of life if we reach a point in which there isn't enough space, food, water, etc to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for individuals, or when the environment has become too hostile to enjoy living in. All of these are problems which will arise in the event that we don't arrest the explosion in human population.

The simple maths of this is that the planet isn't getting any bigger, and therefore nor are the various fixed parameters in terms of what it can provide us with. In that scenario, an ever-increasing human population will eventually find itself having to divide those various pies into smaller and smaller pieces in order to survive. Food, water, land, fuel, raw materials, etc - the more these have to be divided up, the less each person gets. That should be obvious. I mean it's the same concept which leads to societies progressing from generally living in houses with private green space to generally living in high density apartment blocks - there stops being enough land for the former option to remain possible, and so the latter option is the only way forward.

Apply the same logic to resources such as food, water, electricity etc - which at the moment are not things we're capable of simply multiplying the way we're capable of multiplying our own population, without seriously f*cking up the environment in the process - and it becomes obvious why, over time, a higher human population must result in a reduced per capita quality of life.

One eyed Jack wrote: »

Accurate description of your own post there really. What do you expect human civilisation should do? Regress to living in mud huts giving up all scientific, medical and technological advances we’ve made since the time when we lived in caves? Flintstones style?

Realistically, what do you imagine are the chances of that happening? What would be the point of passing on such a regressive philosophy to the next generation? We’re not destroying the earth, we’re adapting it to suit ourselves. The next generation will do the same thing, as generations of humanity have done long before you were ever even thought of.

Rubbish. The sooner people let go of the myth of continued progress the better.

If we had a low population and there was enough for everyone then you might well have a point. As it happens we don't, and people with mudhuts or animals who sleep in the trees have a much better life than a lot of poor humans in urban areas today.

professore wrote: »

We are already well on the way to doing that. Problem is we are going to have a huge amount of old people and very few young people supporting them.

It's about time we started eating Soylent Greens.

Would love to have a load of kids but financial realities of paying a mortgage and putting them through school and college mean that it probably won't even be more than two.

buried wrote: »

Just because there is a decrease in abject poverty doesn't mean that there is a total increase in wealth for everyone in the other direction. Our whole way of life is at the whim of the money markets, and nobody trusts it. The market doesn't even trust itself.
The majority of people aren't living in mud huts but at the same time they are not living with any real degree of security for the future due to the chaotic nature of the money markets. There is no balance because there is no security. Everything is boiled down to greasy money, how much we are told there is, how much we are told there isn't, how much you need to have. It bleeds into everything and nobody trusts it, because you can't trust it, like all gambling it could fall on its ar$e at any moment.
This is the system of "control" and its a totally chaotic and alien system for the family based system of community based humanity has more than less always involved itself in. A lot of People these days don't feel secure for themselves, never mind adding a few more people into their immediate circle and have to try to secure those people for the future either.
Money and greed. Its a serious problem.

How do we get back to a resource based system though?