• aeronmelon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    87
    ·
    8 months ago

    Unpopular truth: We don’t need 8 billion humans. We don’t even need 1 billion. Not for a terrestrial species occupying only one planet.

    Ideally, the global population would stay about the same, but slowly rise and fall in seasons like the temperature.

    This is a windfall that we should use to sort out the food distribution problem. But we won’t.

      • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        38
        ·
        8 months ago

        Well, an aptitude test sure wouldn’t hurt.

        The truth is, once we outgrow the religious imperative to just crank out babies like it’s a contest, and make it legal and easy for anyone to have sex without worrying about impregnation, then there would be little need to regulate reproduction.

      • CompostMaterial@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        8 months ago

        It’s not really about who gets to reproduce, it’s about infant mortality.

        Pre-1900 there were just around a billion people, yet it was very common to have 7-10 children. Most didn’t make it to reproductive age, so the population wasn’t growing at that same rate.

        Now infant mortality is low, very low in developed countries, yet it is still common to have 4-6 children. Nearly all of whom will reproduce.

        Realisticly, no one needs more than one children. Two would be generous. More than two is excessive.

          • Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            8 months ago

            It doesn’t need to be forced. All that’s needed is education and easy access to birth control. There’s a reason birthrates are declining in virtually all developed countries. When given a real, educated choice, the vast majority of women choose to have fewer children.

        • deafboy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 months ago

          no one needs more than one children

          So… this is how it ends. Some predicted a virus, a climate change related natural disaster or an asteroid. But what finally got us, was some bad math.

      • PanoptiDon@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        8 months ago

        We must all come to a consensus on how it is decided or overpopulation will diminish the resources needed to survive

      • RatherBeMTB@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        8 months ago

        Capitalism. You need money to feed kids. People are having less kids mainly because today having a kid is too expensive.

        • deafboy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 months ago

          People were popping out 10 kids under the feudal rule, living in a hut made out of mud. Today, we live better than the aristocracy did back then. What changed is the attitude. We no longer want to see half of our kids die of hunger, or a preventable disease. And not only that, we prefer them to have a better life than ourselves. People actively choosing whether to have children based on the circumstances have my fullest respect.

      • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago
        1. Enshrine medical rights for women’s bodies that allows them to abort pregnancy, and allows doctors to make that decision for them in case of early complication leading to emergency (a conscious woman not at risk would never be forced to accept treatment that would endanger a viable fetus, but a nonviable fetus would never lead to undue risks in a more ideal world than what we live in).

        2. We’ll start with a democratic system of laws with a philosophy of marginal satisfaction offset by an aversion to suffering taking priority, a good first step would be to simply incentivize education and remaining childless, perhaps with tax credits or guaranteed income welfare.

        3. Introducing or reintroducing publicly funded community buildings for education on human reproduction and a distributor of contraceptives.

        4. Then, if the majority agrees, we can strip felons of reproduction rights with the outlined and protected by law ability to sue the state in assumption of prejudice based on protected class. Finally, punish people with excessive childbirthing habits, like more than five or six, perhaps with fines and risk of prison time as well as a three strike system for upgrading to felony.

        Or at least that is usually how it works. Definitely cannot skip the order in this, though, the education step needs to come first or second and could probably solve this issue alone single-handedly. If we implemented this in reverse order then it would probably just end up in history books thirty years from now as “that time we almost lost entire demographics to racist eugenics” and that would just be awful.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      8 months ago

      meh. theres no need for any humans to exist.

      i seem to recall that you could fit 8billion people into a single city double the size of texas. you could then feed those humans with an equivalent land mass.

      this notion of overpopulation is more about resource use than existent numbers of humans. as you point out, distribution is the real issue and the fact that humans are greedy fuckers.

      the planet doesnt care if its hit by a meteor, has its surface wiped by an expanding red dwarf or falls into jupiter. it has no agenda or purpose other than what we, humans decide to do with it. we only get that honor because we are the only ones here.

      • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        8 months ago

        I’m speaking from the context of human survival. I support the continued existence of the human race. You’re speaking from a more nihilistic standpoint than I prefer, but i do agree with what you said in general.

        Though, forcing everyone to live in DoubleTexas sounds like hell on Earth.

      • teft@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        8 months ago

        i seem to recall that you could fit 8billion people into a single city double the size of texas

        Do you want Mega-City One? Because that’s how you get Mega-City One.

    • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      8 months ago

      We need around 69 trillion to populate the entire Orion arm. We gotta start multiplying like god commanded rn so we can conquer both hell and heaven!