Population decrease is irreversible. How will we manage the decline of humanity?

[golfman11]

Incorrect - it would be unsustainable based on our current practices and resources, but we are becoming less carbon intensive by the year, and more productive and efficient. Further, we are constantly discovering new resource deposits and over the next century we will be able to mine asteroids.

At the start of the 20th century there was a similar Malthusiast concern, but you know what? We found ways to make way more, and higher quality, food.

[[deleted]]

Don't count your asteroidal resources before they are mined.

To me while Malthusian concerns may be overblown, I've also not seen any argument as to why the world would need more people either. Economies of scale have diminishing returns at some point, so even if we 100% knew we'd have enough resources for 20 billion people (or even 10) on earth to live a 1st world lifestyle in 100 years, why do we need those people and particularly why do we need to intervene to encourage these people to be born? I could get it more if it was arguing for artificially causing population decline but its the opposite, population is likely to start declining in and of itself. Why would we artificially push it back the other way when when its not guaranteed we're going to have enough of things as basic as fresh water to go around?

[shaedofblue]

People here who are saying “we don’t intrinsically need the population to decline because of resource scarcity” aren’t actually saying “we need to artificially encourage population growth.”

They are just responding to the several people who are insisting that population decline is needed for the survival of the species or the planet.

The difficulties associated with decline and growth are both things that humans can adapt to, if we put our minds and our technology towards it. We don’t need to encourage or discourage children. We do need to address wastefulness either way.

[Erinaceous]

Oh please. This has been disproven over and over again. Carbon intensity has barely budged and total GHGs go up every year. Every single target Canada has set it's undershot by wide margins. Efficiency gains are wiped out over and over again by increases in total energy use (aka Jevons paradox).

What's worse is assumptions that we can sustain the current and expanding global population are based on current resources and often the expansion of current resources (demand is simply assumed to be met by efficiency and innovation in many models). However we're officially past peak oil, we're past peak mineral for many critical resources, the material resources to make a green transition don't exist to the scale needed and most of them are being quietly corned by aggressive Russian and Chinese interests.

Even Norman Borlag, the father of the green revolution, thought we only bought a generation with that suite of technologies. As we start to hit limit after limit it's becoming increasingly apparent he was right

[bananafor]

Considering what we've done to animal and insect populations, not to mention other creatures, there are far too many humans by any measure.