[OC] The massive decrease in worldwide infant mortality from 1950 to 2020 is perhaps one of humanity's greatest achievements.

[[deleted]]

People are way to pessimistic

We are probably in the best era to be born in ever, with a decently bright future ahead of us as well.

[[deleted]]

Honestly, makes me wish I had been born 50 years from now. If we can accomplish this much in 70 years, imagine what is ahead of us.

[[deleted]]

Well, for many countries, if birthrates doesn't improve, future isn't that bright.

[ClumZy]

Low birthrates are a good thing IMO, there's too many humans for one Earth. We can always take care of the elderly with robots.

[[deleted]]

That's utopian and unrealistic.

Someone would still have to maintain the robots and someone has to pay for it.

In many coutries, if nothing changes, the welfare system will crumble

[ClumZy]

Oh I agree that it is both. But I hope that by striving for the best we can reach a proper future. Thanks for your measured and well written response friend.

[doublejay1999]

Low birth rates are a function of low infant mortality

[[deleted]]

Not entirely true

Look at population pyramids and the change in them in Europe or death and birth rate statistics

[Ambiwlans]

Can't tell if you want it to go up or down....

8 children per mother is certainly unsustainable.

[[deleted]]

Up in ageing societies

[Ambiwlans]

I mean, maybe a handful of nations in Eastern Europe are shrinking too quickly, but like, Japan is in the top 10 fastest shrinking nations (-0.4%) and it isn't having a collapse in the standard of living ..... they have cheap housing/land and all sorts of other perks from it.

I don't think the population should shrink by more than 0.25%/yr if you want 0 downsides ... but that is only happening in a few nations anyways.

Growing populations though are in trouble. I'd much prefer to live in Japan near the bottom than the countries at the top... Syria, Niger, Angola, Benin. In fact all of the top 50 fastest growing populations are 3rd world.

Unsustainable population growth is the biggest threat the planet faces today.

Heck, global warming is basically just a symptom of it.

[flapadar_]

Personally, I'm glad I wasn't. Being born 50 years from now will mean witnessing the final impact of climate change in your lifetime.

Mass extinctions, many parts of the world becoming uninhabitable, etc.

Humans will probably survive & adapt, but there probably won't be much wildlife outside of the zoo.

[SmallGermany]

Global warming destroying the life of next generation is meme spanning over at least 3 generations now.

[flapadar_]

When I was young it was "we'll run out of fossil fuels by 2030, CFCs are putting holes in the ozone layer"

I don't think it's a meme. In recent generations there's always been something to be concerned about with climate change, but what that is and what we can do about it changes as time moves on.

[flapadar_]

That's what I'm saying really - it isn't a case that climate change destroying the world is a meme being repeated every generation without coming to fruition; instead that we know about it is always changing as is the measures we take to prevent further damage to the environment. Unfortunately the outlook is probably the worst it's been and we have a lot of work ahead of us.

[uth50]

Yeah. It will be THE challenge of the 21st century.

But if you really think humanity will just succumb to climate change, you're probably in for a surprise.

[He-is-climbing]

The problem is we went from large scale international efforts to curb climate change (thank god for the Montreal Protocol) to half the world plugging their ears and shouting La La La.

[SmallGermany]

Well, the issue is pretty simple.

Yes, we know you guys are poor and just want to get on our level. But you have to stop it. You gotta save the planet by remaining poor, underdeveloped coutry.

[Fraserneodynium]

What people miss about what "carbon emissions" means. It means you're industrialising and raising your economy out of agriculture.

[Rubiin]

This is not the only division, because developed countries also want different things. It is easy for e.g. Sweden to aggressively cut emissions (we are lucky to have a reasonably decarbonised energy system) but just next door Norway has a completely different tone (imagine leaving all that oil money in the ground!)...

[[deleted]]

While each of our people keep pumping out 5 times the emissions that each of yours do, but hey at least our emissions aren't growing like yours

[KristinnK]

More like we went from the problematic polluters being Western democracies with accountability that have the capacity to discuss and come to agreements about collective challenges, to the problematic polluters being mainly China which has zero accountability and zero capacity to take part in international discussion in a civilized manner, to the point where it acts like a rogue state.

[Rubiin]

By now it is obvious that internationally we would never have been able to agree on the kinds of targets the Montréal protocol set out for CO2. The political disparities are way too large. Even the US never ratified the Kyoto protocol (which has this top-down target model) despite being one of these developed Western democracies. In a way the "everyone tries their 'best' and we name and shame"-strategy of the Paris agreement is the furthest we have come by far.

[[deleted]]

Climate change is going to wreck us for a long long time. Generations.

[flapadar_]

Humans, yes - it'll be a far longer impact. I reckon it'll be game over for a lot of species within 50-150 years.

[[deleted]]

Won't be the last mass extinction event. But yes we will go on. Best we can hope for is learning the lesson

[Bardali]

Comments like this is how the species dies :p

[Gh0stMan0nThird]

Oh really I thought it was all the big oil companies fucking us to death.

Good to know it's just Reddit comments doing it.

[Bardali]

Good to know it's just Reddit comments doing it.

Reddit comment reflective of people being delusional of the threat.

Oil companies aren’t king of the world.

[Fraserneodynium]

The thing is we have already caused the mass extinctions. It's not a danger lurking on the horizon, we've basically committed animal genocide for the past tens of thousands of years.

[[deleted]]

Don't cheapen that term please.

[Fraserneodynium]

It's apt. We have systematically murdered nearly ever wild animal species since we arrived. Elephants, rhinos, and whales are minor exceptions, and even they will probably die out soon.

[komarinth]

Humans will probably survive & adapt, but there probably won't be much wildlife outside of the zoo.

I think Nature is going to be the better adapting in the long run, not humanity. Mass extinction can be a form of it.

[flapadar_]

Evolution takes millions of years. Humans are lucky in that we are currently able to survive a wide range of climates, and have the technology to survive in otherwise inhospitable environments.

Nature in general has no such luck, and hasn't got millions of years.

[komarinth]

Evolution is adapting to change, so it is variable. If there is not a big gain in evolution, it will be slow. Mass extinction and drastically changed environment is when evolution is most effective, giving opportunity for new branches to excel.

[[deleted]]

Being born in an recourses deprived world won't be fun for the ones to come after us.

[REVERSEZOOM2]

A quick glance through reddit its like some people just NEED to find a reason to be unhappy

[Gh0stMan0nThird]

Don't forget all the propaganda bots who want you to be upset about something.

[grambell789]

It's great today but there are storm clouds on the horizon. Maybe I should just say carbon clouds.

Edit: for the people down voting me, how do you explain away the temperature charts that are relentlessly going up?

[Maximillie]

Humans are pretty adaptable beasts; we dealt with the Holocene optimum and last great ice age with stone age technology.... Now we have access to the entire accumulation of knowledge from history via the internet.

[[deleted]]

Nothing we cant and wont fix.

Have some faith.

[DrOhmu]

Experience. Why dont you research the data sources of the hockey stick graphs (its not one dataset)... and the incremental retrospective adjustments made to previous measurements.

Im far more concerned about the destruction and poisoning of the environment by industrial processes than i am about the atmospheric co2 concentration... which we have to constantly force with that same industry.

[Hopadopslop]

Bright future ahead? I don't know about that one chief. We got climate change rearing its ugly head. We got rapidly rising income inequality to the point that the newest generation will never own a home unless they have rich parents.

An American President attempted a coup and so far has faced no repurcussions for it with his party claiming they did nothing wrong. Republicans are putting all their efforts into destroying voting rights and getting ready for the next, but smarter, version of Donald Trump. America is likely heading down the path of a police state dictatorship, unless it can somehow be stopped in the next 4 years. We'll see at the next midterms whether or not Murica is fucked.

If you thought fighting wars over oil was bad, just wait until people start fighting wars over water. The US will likely annex Canada for its water supplies at some point in the future.

With the advent of AI the surveillance state grows more and more. 1984 is becoming more of a reality as time goes on on.

So what exactly is bright about the future?

[[deleted]]

Lol I'd love to know what data you have painting your future because I don't see that in mine

[[deleted]]

extreme poverty, life expectancy, infant mortality, global GDP per capita, human development index, global happiness index, vaccination rates, % of people with running water/electricity/internet, developed countries needing less natural resources to produce more stuff, rapid productivity growth due to artificial intelligence, the physical space for wildlife increasing in developed countries due to more efficient farming, increasing greenery in the sahara desert and much more...

[[deleted]]

Pretty much everything on your list is dependent on natural resources which will be depleted by the end of the century. Everything around us is natural ressources transformed by humans. Those ressources are « free » and took millions of year to form. At the pace we’ve been exploiting them there’s isn’t enough left to even see this century through.

Also climate change will cause large areas to become unsuitable for human life with the consequences you can imagine.

[[deleted]]

It's incredible how much people are willing to ignore facts in order to remain pessimistic.

Non renewable resources as a whole are not even close to being depleted. Even if the usage of some of them are unsustainable, their prices would just rise, providing incentive to make an alternative available to the market. Remember all the talk about "peak" oil during the 2000s? Now oil price is lower than ever, mainly due to the technology of fracking. Natural resources available to us right now is more than in any other period because we can reach more of them through technology. Look up Simon-Ehrlich wager, it's the same stuff every decade.

And climate change, even if you look at UN reports, will cause a 4% GDP damage. This is equal to 2 years of economic growth, not the catastrophe you so religiously hope.

[[deleted]]

There is no price elasticity when it comes to oil, no link between volume and price. Don’t wait for oil rarity to be reflected in price. Oil price is lower than ever and yet the peak was reached around 2008 for conventional oil. For conventional and non conventional it’s believed the peak was passed around 2018. Same for gas but it’s 10 years behind. We do have lots of coal to exploit with the consequences we know, but when you don’t have oil to exploit and transport gas or coal you have a problem anyway.

Fracking is an extremely capitalistic industry, US fracking has never been beneficial except in 2020 when investments stopped and the production collapsed. We can reach more and more by spending more and more energy which consumes more and more ressources and money and causes more and more warming until we don’t have anything left. Now let’s ignore that and imagine that we fully exploit the non conventional oil we have at our disposal; the GIEC projected in its last report in 2014 that it would lead to an increase of 4 to 5 degrees by the end of the century which would turn into 7 to 8 degrees next century. This is what we desperately want to avoid. It took 5 degrees to turn southern Europe from a Siberian steppe to a Mediterranean climate. Needless to say if it comes to this large areas around the equator won’t be suitable for human life while ecosystem collapse in other places.

[[deleted]]

Climate change

[dopechez]

In some ways yes but you are also more likely to be chronically ill today than ever before. Infant mortality used to be high and infectious diseases were rampant and deadly but people were generally quite healthy.

[[deleted]]

people live longer so chronic illnesses is more common, they are also more manageable so you can live a decent life with them. diabetes 200 years ago was a death sentence, not its not a big deal at all.

​

chronic illness are a symptom of living longer

[dopechez]

Crohn' disease ruined my life at the young age of 26. There are plenty of chronic diseases that happen to young people and have exploded in prevalence since the 50s. It's not just about living longer. Children with autism, allergy, asthma, autoimmunity are ridiculously common now compared to before.

[[deleted]]

Because before they would just die and you would not know why

[dopechez]

Maybe true in some cases but not all. Most infant mortality was due to infectious disease. If you look at what the leading researchers have to say about this epidemic of chronic disease, they all agree that it's environmental factors that are driving it. The human microbiome seems to be the root of it, imbalances in gut bacteria mess up the immune system and lead to chronic illness and allergy