[naasking]

> Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) [...] Stop having kids

This already happens. The more affluent a country becomes, with its better healthcare, better education, and greater career opportunity, the lower its birthrate. The big crisis in 50 years will be population decline.

[kpil]

Let's hope so.

I'm a bit reluctant to write this, but it made me worried, so here we go :

I had a chat with a taxi driver in Stockholm the other day, and we talked about the situation in Somalia and that he planned to move back there as it's getting better there.

He had 8 kids, but wanted another wife and 10 more kids when he became my age - 40.

I mentioned that I have been married before so I have 3 kids with 2 mothers and was quite happy with that number...

He actually laughed and looked at me and said - "man, you Swedish guys will disappear."

I don't know how representative this was but looking at some societies in Sweden, I'm guessing it's not unique. It would be nice with some research.

Anyway.I'm hoping that the Somalian women will get some say in the matter, because if they don't, looking at the demography and the socio-economic mechanisms, both Sweden and eastern Africa might end up in a spot of bother.

[Pica_soO]

Its all about having a lot of lottery tickets in the game theory device that is civil war. And religion is pro lottery-tickets, and infinite lottery cycles.

The horror, if you would adapt to this hellish circumstances, by speeding up the cycle, creating "specialists" for each cycle stage and survived through the hard times by reducing all that makes up human society. No arts, no compassion, no creation, no school, all of these are calories wasted, instead go full zombie and walk the earth till the cycle of strife ends.

PS: Before somebody yells racism. This behavior could be seen everywhere during world war 2. So one could claim that white racists are actually the pro-zombie equivalent found elsewhere.

[kiba]

Ending aging will reverse this trend. The crisis then won't be population decline but the side effect of population growth.

[naasking]

Ending aging will not reverse this trend. Many people only have kids due to age constraints and its effect on fertility and the health of offspring, ie. much harder to get pregnant over 35, and chance of birth defects or other problematic genetic problems increases dramatically, even for men.

This will no longer be the case, so there would be no rush for either gender to have kids. You can focus on your career for the first hundred years, and then have kids. At worst, there would be a minor uptick in population while people get accustomed to the new reality.

[Qwertious]

There's a really simple solution to this: Have a cultural policy that what's normal/acceptable is to delay having children for quite a while, and then to have only one child per couple.

One child per couple means that the total population caps out at double the current population (a population of 32 would have 16 children, who'd have 8, who'd have 4, who'd 2, then 1 person who's SOL - 32+16+8+4+2+1=63). A single order of magnitude is an acceptable loss, and everyone gets a child of their own.

Note: Not as in "literally force people to have only one child", just make it frowned upon like smoking generally is - most people won't care enough to defy it, and in the long term it should be enough. Although IMO families like the Duggars[1] shouldn't be provided immortality unless they start using birth control.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_Kids_and_Counting

[jacalata]

Ending aging won't stop accidents, homicide, suicide or (probably) even most modern physical failures like diabetes and heart attacks.

[AstralStorm]

It might fix the latter. The mechanisms involved in heart disease and diabetes are related to general aging as well.

Accidents and suicide could be handled too. Former by outlawing machines of murder (cars) and spare or artificial organs, latter by improving our understanding of neuroscience and psychology.

[patall]

yes and no. Aging research wont, but that does not mean other science stops. Traffic accidents are at all time lows (in comparison to the amount of traffic) and will continue to do so (via automated driving, imidiate ambulance dispatching, etc.), homicide as well (maybe not in US but certainly in europe), and depression is under active research like being partly caused by the microbiome etc. Nothing is endless but getting 600 years old would still change a lot.