News first. World media again - for the first time in fifty years - are actively discussing fertility and mortality, arguing about how long humanity is left to live.
All debaters agree on one thing: the world's population is about to die out soon. The only question is the scale and whether it is bad or, on the contrary, good.
… The previous surge in global interest in demography occurred in the late 1960s. Then a whole series of popular science books ("Famine-1975", "Population Bomb") was published, dedicated to the idea of overpopulation of the Earth. Using the eerie statistics of the baby boom, scientists showed that already in the 1970s, humanity would multiply so strongly that it would begin to die of hunger by hundreds of millions. Population growth (to about 24 billion in the 21st century) will eat up the economy and destroy the environment. In this connection, it is urgent to develop methods of reducing the birth rate.
Fiction and cinema were drawn to science pop. In the 1970s, about every second film about the future began with the words "a terrible catastrophe has broken out on Earth due to overpopulation."
Many countries then, in the early seventies, took the threat more than seriously. Many states have adopted birth control programs. Many have begun to promote small children.
And now we have 2019 in the yard, and the situation has changed somewhat.
Yes, the world's population as a whole continues to grow. However, fertility is falling rapidly almost everywhere on the planet. In more than half of the countries - including China, Russia, the USA, Japan, Brazil - fertility is below replacement level. That is, roughly speaking, fewer children are born than there were parents. Now the effect of increased life expectancy is still in effect - however, soon, when the “big” generations begin to die of old age, giving way to the “small” ones, the overall population figures will also go down.
According to the recently published book of Canadian researchers Bricker and Ibbitson "The Empty Planet", the population of the Earth will reach an arithmetic peak (with a little over nine billion inhabitants) in the next 30 years, after which it will begin to fall. And then this fall may not be able to be stopped - because it will have a domino effect.
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In recent years, we have seen attempts across the planet - from cautious to convulsive - to combat the threat of extinction. In 2016, the People's Republic of China officially abolished the one-family-one-child policy. In South Korea, they began to promote fertility. In Italy, a "Fertility Day" was introduced, in Hungary mothers with many children are exempted from income tax, giving families wishing to reproduce with interest-free loans for houses and cars.
And yes: none of this works yet. In China, after a small spike in the birth rate in 2016 (from 16.55 million to 17.85), it fell again to an anti-record in 2018 (15.23 million). In Italy, which is dying out despite immigration, the birth rate has also renewed its minimum. There are no signs of an increase in fertility in Hungary yet. And South Korea has set a new world anti-record among large nations: the birth rate there dropped to below one (!) Child per woman. The nations that are not supposed to expect anything like that are rapidly approaching the line of "postponed extinction". In India, fertility has already fallen below the "2.0 level" in virtually all cities and twelve states. Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia and Myanmar ceased to multiply. Fertility rates are falling in Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Argentina and Indonesia. And even Africa - now the main source of population growth on the planet - is showing a landslide and a gradual decline in reproduction. The question is what will happen next and how to understand it. And here two irreconcilable views of the future collide. The thing is that "half a century of horror of overpopulation" managed to create their own service industry. These are numerous international institutes for birth control with hundreds of thousands of employees. These are scientists who have been looking for ways to reduce the birth rate for decades. These are directors who, in their youth, took the ideas of neo-Malthusianism to heart and carried them through life (for example, the famous James Cameron, in his 2009 Avatar, still frightened the viewer with a terrible overpopulated future on an ecologically destroyed Earth). So that's it. According to representatives of this "old school",for example, Oxford gerontologist Sarah Harper, the impending extinction of the Earthlings should not be mourned, but celebrated. For "in a knowledge economy, a small number of educated people outweigh a growing population, since automation will take over most of the tasks" and "we don't need many people for modern armies." Again, not having children is very beneficial for the environment, because the child consumes so much. Of course, some distortions in the economy are possible - well, that's why there is a "global movement of labor". Lack of hands in Germany? We buy a million workers in Pakistan or Africa. Etc.because automation will take over most of the tasks "and" for modern armies we don't need many people. " Again, not having children is very beneficial for the environment, because the child consumes so much. Of course, some distortions in the economy are possible - well, that's why there is a "global movement of labor". Lack of hands in Germany? We buy a million workers in Pakistan or Africa. Etc.because automation will take over most of the tasks "and" for modern armies we don't need many people. " Again, not having children is very beneficial for the environment, because the child consumes so much. Of course, some distortions in the economy are possible - well, that's why there is a "global movement of labor". Lack of hands in Germany? We buy a million workers in Pakistan or Africa. Etc.
The “new school” has a different vision. Not only will the “civilization of extinction” be a “civilization of caregivers,” that is, an increasingly significant part of the economy and labor will be diverted to caring for the elderly. There will be another effect. Just as the explosion of scientific and technological progress in the 19th and 20th centuries was associated with a sharp increase in the number of educated people, a decrease in the number of new earthlings will entail a decrease in the number of educated people. There will be fewer specialists, fewer geniuses, fewer inventors, innovators, and so on. This means that the new challenges to humanity will have to cope with less and less human resources. You can, of course, dream of “robotic geniuses who will do everything for us,” but so far the cybernetic Mendeleevs and Landau are unscientific fiction. In reality, the US country,in which its population is a third of a billion, for some reason they are not enough, and it buys up specialists wherever it can.
This means that instead of smooth, not interfering with the progress of reducing the number of earthlings to comfortable numbers under the supervision of caring cyborgs, we will get desolation and a lack of specialists in many areas. That is, economic slowdown, scientific, technical and infrastructural degradation and, by the way, a cultural peak.
… There are different versions of who will inherit the planet. According to the first, the Earth in a hundred years will be inhabited by the descendants of today's millionaires. Those who already now understand that the "Empty Land" of the future is a chance to flood the liberating world with their selfish genes. And already out of a kind of egocentrism, he is already beginning to have as many offspring as possible from numerous wives and concubines (sounds crazy, but I know such people).
According to the second version, the Earth will be inherited by ultra-religious, now closed communities that deny all the achievements of modernity and multiply in the old fashioned way.
But that's another story.
All that has been described makes us realize anew the unobvious banality. Despite the fact that modern mankind as a species is hundreds of thousands of years old, it can be interrupted - in theory - in general for the life of one single generation. That is, we are very ancient and tenacious - but at the same time, very ephemeral. All our antiquity and vitality is caused by the fact that in each generation people in torment, with screams and dramas, produced and raised the following people.
Stop doing it - and humanity will end in one cycle.
Of course, this is an almost incredible scenario. But even in softened versions, the "extinction civilization" will be strikingly different from the one to which we are accustomed. And, by the way, it is no longer the future - we in Russia (like other Europeans) already live in it.
Victor Marakhovsky