I doubt it is, but if so, and education just "exposes" natural talent, I wouldn't be worried. We already have a lot of natural talent in the developed world that's untapped. India alone should have 4x more geniuses than the USA.
> A smaller population leaves us poorer and less capable.
I'd like to discuss this with HN. Less capable to do what? We won. Nature won't kill us any more, we have no predators, we know how to produce more food than we need [1], transportation is so easy we get access to things from all over the world and communication so seamless we can stay in touch with anyone.
What do we need more people for?
Our largest existential enemy right now is unsustainability.
> There's no reason our current (or a larger) population isn't sustainable by changing how we generate energy or dispose of waste.
I don't think anyone really knows this to be true, and in fact I suspect it might apply to small communities, but not to the world at large.
Even if we could continue growing for now, eventually we'll reach a limit. But in any case, why do we want to keep growing?
When has 'unsustainabilty' ever caused the destruction of a large portion of a human population? Seriously. Can you think of any?
The two existential threats -- the two things that can, have, and will -- wipe out millions are War and Disease.
Everything else -- asteroids, climate change, sustainability -- are speculative. But, evidence-based analysis clearly points to War and Disease.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
I wouldn't be so sure about that ;) Everything seems to suggest that we're about to have a bad time.
you can have less people but everyone educated.
If we keep the planet sustainable, we also have time on our side, and that beethoven will still be born, just later.
I'll believe that when I see it. Organizing disparate groups of people is quite difficult.
What methods are you using to know this is true?
The raising of such children in stable family units or non-dysfunctional academies would probably be a bigger challenge than the birthing program.
Yes, this seems counter to everything we're told about the population explosion. It's not the 1960s anymore, but our education hasn't caught up to that yet. Hans Rosling writes about this extensively in Factfulness.
Without a growing population safety nets collapse because there aren’t enough young people to support the older people. Government debt spirals out of control as revenues can only decline in the future.
Capitalism itself, at least the way it functions today, starts to fall apart at the seems.
No modern western country has any system to deal with this. Stocks values, social security, government spending, staffing (military and private) all rely on more people with more productivity and more money on the bottom end.
True, but the structures we have are mathematically unsustainable. Eventually, it has to become something else. When that shift happens, it's going to hurt.
I think it's better if that change is more gradual rather than a sudden collapse. A gradual reduction of population would be an excellent way to accomplish that.
We'll have to deal with it in some way. UBI, extending production, shifting focus from competition to cooperation can all be done gradually.
Population growth at this point is a result of extended lifespans, due to far fewer people dying of disease, infection, famine, and war. In all but a handful of nations (like Afghanistan and South Sudan), birth rates are down to replacement levels or below, or will be there within a generation.
And declines in birth rates are a consequence of poverty reduction. In the late 1990s, the global extreme poverty rate (less than $1.80/day in today's dollars) was 29%. Twenty years later, it's less than 9%. Astounding!
Get people out of poverty, and the birth rate problem fixes itself in a generation. Which is exactly what happened to the "first world" nations, if you think about it. In the 19th century, Sweden had a 90% illiteracy rate, and was so poor and hungry that fully 20% of the population emigrated to North America. Today, they're... Sweden. The gold standard of modern civilization. Why can't, say, Yemen accomplish the same thing?
Capitalism is the bootloader for a Star Trek society.
Life may compete with the elements as it has for so long and so many times on Earth, or become completely obliterated as it may have been on a planet such as Mars.
Then again, without a long enough window of time for observance, we really have very little way to determine if life on Mars is already well on its way to a huge resurgence.
A lot of change happens in a little as 100,000 years...
I'm a big Musk/Bezos fan too and share their dreams of colonizing the solar system but let's be fair, our amoeba ancestors had billions of years in which to adapt to the planet. Homo-sapiens have barely been around for 400 000 years and there's little evidence our current societal structures will be sustainable for a fraction of that time.