> The issue, fundamentally, is 7 billion humans on the planet. Doing something about that number would no longer make us human.
It's extremely easy to do something about that: Just encourage development, educate women, and provide access to effective birth control.
In every single industrialized nation where women are empowered to make choices about their fertility, they're choosing to have fewer children. Experts disagree [0] about when the world population will peak (as early as 2055 or more like 2100) and how high it will peak (~8 - 10 billion) but everyone agrees that it will peak, and then decline thereafter.
If you want to help that happen faster, we need to support development, education for women, and access to birth control in places like sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asia.
You're not wrong about how to reduce population growth, possibly even reverse it a little over a long enough time period.
However, the current load is straining ecosystem. There's too many of us as-is.
The question I ponder is, would we be where we are today (science, understanding, etc) if it not for the fact there's so many of us.
What's the magic number of sustainable people on the planet and does that mean a collapse in the levels of trade that support the advancement of science?
Fwiw, I think we're doomed. We're about to find out what the 'great filter' looks like. Somewhere down the road, whatever comes after us, and something will, something will get another stab at it. Hopefully they learn from us.
It's extremely easy to do something about that: Just encourage development, educate women, and provide access to effective birth control.
In every single industrialized nation where women are empowered to make choices about their fertility, they're choosing to have fewer children. Experts disagree [0] about when the world population will peak (as early as 2055 or more like 2100) and how high it will peak (~8 - 10 billion) but everyone agrees that it will peak, and then decline thereafter.
If you want to help that happen faster, we need to support development, education for women, and access to birth control in places like sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asia.
[0] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101018722