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[Loud Whispers]

Within the course of this video, the human population has increased by over 9000.


And if David Attenbro is not enough to enlighten the lights that sit behind your brows, here's Doug Stanhope to condense it all into less than 3 minutes with the help of comedy.

Will you actively encourage and seek to reduce family sizes, including your own? Should governments have the power to reduce populations with methods like China's one child policy, even against public wishes in the pursuit of conservation? Have we already gone beyond the point where we have nothing to live for but prophecies of doom and suffering chiseled into cardboard signs?

Anyways Bay12, discuss.
[And try not to get so grim, it's only the end of the world as we know it].

[Telgin]

I don't ever intend to have kids, so I'm participating already!

In all seriousness, in some ways I don't see any alternative to government intervention eventually.  Some speculate that the birth rate will taper off naturally, but I'm not so sure it'll be enough to help.  If the government does eventually decide to limit childbirths, I would probably be in favor of the law, depending on the specifics.

I don't think it's nearly too late, but it's definitely one of those things that we can't just dally around for another 50 years before doing something.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There are serious, serious, serious issues with most kinds of population control. The biggest problem is that the entire right and most of the left are already in opposition, albeit for different reasons. The right just plain supports natalist policy, while even the members of the left whom are antinatalist aren't going to shun accusations of functional genocide (or worse, the fear that the right might use such policies for genocide).

Even soft policies have this issue. Ignore the one child policy. Let's just say that young childless people are offered a lump sum to undergo permanent sterilization. You'll be halfway through trying to sell it before everyone accuses you of trying to kill off poor ethnicities. I know because India tried this and that's exactly what happened. The only soft policy I can think of that would work would be offering childless people some money every year they don't have any children, until age 50 or so.

Ultimately the only thing that will not result in a collapse of public opinion is more people realizing the urgency of the situation or trying to change society in such a way that people don't have children on their own.

[Jervill]

Overpopulation isn't the problem.  Distribution of resources is.

[WealthyRadish]

Population should begin to stabilize and eventually decline without government intervention, but it'll be at extreme cost to the environment. I would say that government intervention to both regulate family size and restrict the wasteful agricultural practices of the west (mainly the production of absurd amounts of meat) would be hugely beneficial to the planet. As rapidly developing nations like China look to live the same decadent lifestyles of people in the United States, the strain will become too much to bear on the environment and irreversible decline will be inevitable. People won't change unless forced to, and the efforts of environmentalism in the last 50 years haven't made much headway. Unfortunately, the culture of the United States is so backwards and entrenched in short-term gain that I can't imagine the necessary change happening in my lifetime.

[FearfulJesuit]

I would not be surprised if some sort of mid-century Malthusian catastrophe "fixes" the problem for us. Likely the first world would survive, at a huge, huge cost to the third. Since the first world would survive, and first worlders tend not to have many children, that might be the last we hear of overpopulation.

Alas, that may be the only thing to shock humanity into getting its act together; it may well be that in 2500 humanity has spread out across the solar system and is prosperous and happy, because in the mid-21st century its elites let its poorest masses starve.

That's a cheery thought.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That's not really possible. People do not starve in silence. If push comes to shove those without food will try to kill those with it.

[G-Flex]

Will you actively encourage and seek to reduce family sizes, including your own? Should governments have the power to reduce populations with methods like China's one child policy, even against public wishes in the pursuit of conservation?

No, because as nations become more developed and modern, population growth actually shrinks toward the replacement rate without intervention. Overpopulation is not as huge an issue as some would have you believe, or at least doesn't have to be.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Will you actively encourage and seek to reduce family sizes, including your own? Should governments have the power to reduce populations with methods like China's one child policy, even against public wishes in the pursuit of conservation?

No, because as nations become more developed and modern, population growth actually shrinks toward the replacement rate without intervention. Overpopulation is not as huge an issue as some would have you believe, or at least doesn't have to be.

The issue with overpopulation is indeed self-solving, but you have to understand that it is also the base issue with any resource crisis. We can deal with 10 billion people, sure, but it is exponentially more effort and damage to the planet than dealing with 8 billion.

[G-Flex]

I don't think you read what I actually said. I said "as nations become more developed and modern". It is not because people are starving to death, or else population growth would be higher in the US than in less-developed places, and it's not.

[Glowcat]

If anything more access to food seems to kill our population off.

[WealthyRadish]

Starvation isn't really a threat. People in the poorer areas of the planet suffer malnutrition, because economic conditions force them to eat limited diets of easily grown crops. In the west, we feed those crops to livestock at a 80-90% trophic loss and eat vegetables as a chore.

This isn't including the energy and water requirements of the wasteful lifestyle enjoyed here, or the quantities of manufactured crap we burn through.

[Sigulbard]

We need to expand to Mars!

But seriously, I'm pretty positive we're going to go on to other planets, so...eh?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Offworld colonies will not remove any meaningful number of people from Earth.

[10ebbor10]

Will you actively encourage and seek to reduce family sizes, including your own? Should governments have the power to reduce populations with methods like China's one child policy, even against public wishes in the pursuit of conservation?

No, because as nations become more developed and modern, population growth actually shrinks toward the replacement rate without intervention. Overpopulation is not as huge an issue as some would have you believe, or at least doesn't have to be.

Well actually, the problem is a bit more complicated. Simply, there's 3 steps

Step 1:
High birth rate-High (child) mortality= Low popgrowth
Step 2: Conditions improve, modern medicine arrives
High birth rate - Low (Child) mortality= High popgrowth
Step 3: Economical and social network improves
Low birth rate-Low (Child) mortality= Low popgrowth.

Offworld colonies will not remove any meaningful number of people from Earth.

And need to be supported as well. Asteroid mining might help with rare earths, but that's all for extraterrestial resource support.

Overpopulation isn't the problem.  Distribution of resources is.

Are we talking about efficiency, or equality.

Because the first is part of a sollution, while the latter might be part of the problem.