The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.

"natural self-regulation"... of human population, in the best case. But before we will extinguish all the biodiversity left. Future generations will see us as the stupid ones, killing the richness of the planet created after eons of evolution.

You're never going to look smart to the people of the future. Look how people crap all over various historical figures because despite some great achievement they did some other thing or had some other views that were not out of line for their time but are not ok anymore.

I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage.

This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.

Not GP but I do say the same, and yes it will be uglier than the first half of the 20th century. The fight for food will be very real and it takes away confidence from my family planning.

If every woman gives birth to less than ~2.1 children, we're shrinking. Is having <= 2 children painful and ugly?

Humans live for decades. Catastrophic climate change is less than a generation away. It would take hundreds of years for the population to shrink enough to stop it.

That's not how "natural self-regulation" works. People aren't PID regulators and don't suddenly adjust their fertility to not exceed the carrying capacity of the environment.

Natural self-regulation means hitting resource limits, followed by sudden and drastic mass dying off, through wars and starvation.

Yes, a decreasing tax base is terrible for societies.

We've already hit peak child and longer lifespans is the only thing keeping the population growing. Assuming this trend continues then human population will start dropping within a lifetime.

(It's just a shame that renewables and other tech (plus the required behaviour changes) are coming in to maturity a couple of decades too late. Surely we just need to bridge the gap between demographic changes and adoption of cleaner tech. I might be overly optimistic on this front)

This depends if we've already overshot maximum sustainable population. You can run many different machines at over 100% capacity. The issue is they break down much more quickly. Water would be a good example of a resource that has stores we can use at a speed much faster than 100% of replacement rate.

The problem is that when it comes to emissions and the resulting climate change, it won't be a smooth self-correction but rather sharp and catastrophic. I believe we've already reached the point of no return and the greenhouse effect is out of control (north pole ice not recovering, permafrost melting, etc).

We'll see drastic climate change happening everywhere. It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west; probably limited to local tragedies because of extreme weather and a price increase in food. But elsewhere it'll cause famine, mass death, and mass migration.

Sure if you zoom out enough, humanity will manage and survive just fine. But at what cost? You can try to be utilitarian about it, but you shouldn't shrug at the prospect of millions dying and getting displaced.

> It'll probably have little effect on "us" in the west

I believe this is a very dangerous misconception. In our globalized interconnected world nobody will be spared. "We" might suffer a little less then other parts of the world, but effect on "us" will still be huge.

"Natural self-regulation" - that's a nice euphemism for mass starvation. Pity wars tend to cause a spike in population growth.