[Night_Thastus]

Sort of...

Many people do not want to hear this. Many would point to economic factors as the main problem.

But I think that when people are educated about the risks and responsibilities of parenthood and given the choice of doing so (birth control, abortion, etc.) - the simple fact is that they CHOOSE not have enough kids to meet the replacement rate.

The reason you can see this is because the lowering birth rates aren't limited to one or two countries. It is every industrialized country. Every single one. If the issues were purely economic, those countries with amazing parental leave and better social nets would avoid the problem - but they don't.

I'm not sure what that kind of future for humanity will look like long term. It will be an interesting reckoning in ~100-200 years.

[Anamon]

That's under the assumption of framing it as a problem. Personally, I think naturally declining birth rates are a corrective measure for an already wildly overpopulated planet. And that we can be damn glad that this is the way things seem to be heading, because the alternative would be an ever accelerating freight train heading for one of several much more devastating scenarios of population reduction.

Even with sub-replacement birth rates I don't see humanity at a threat of extinction (from natural population decline!) in the next tens of thousands of years. And even if -- what's the issue? It's only humans who think humanity is this great gift to the universe that needs to be protected and spread.

[Night_Thastus]

It's a problem because there's no evidence the population will ever stabilize. Wild animals form some natural equilibrium based on the available resources, humans do not. If there aren't enough resources we find ways to get more.

If the population dips, it won't add any pressure to have more kids, not on an individual level.

And a lot of humanity only works at scale. Global shipping, for example, only really works at the enormous scales we're doing it at. Same goes for communication networks.

If the population dips low enough, things like that start to break down. If we slowly dipped from our current to say, ~500 million, our chance at being a space-faring race is over. You may think that's a lot of humans - more than enough to accomplish everything. But they'd be spread too thin, with too little demand for industry and innovation to make it work.

Humanity isn't some great gift to the universe now. It's full of selfishness and greed and fear and arrogance and ignorance. But maybe, one day, it could be. I want to believe in that future.

[fuzzfactor]

Good observation. Those could very well be the only considerations for some people.

Maybe a good part of this is the risks and responsibilities without a co-operative village to grow families interactively.

What if the lingering problem is one of scale, that has not yet been solved?

Remember this whole thing is from a 90-year old and the smaller the village, the fewer the population of any one age group.

It's really making people think about all kinds of things all over the ball park.

If it's a small enough village you can't end up with a crowd of 1st graders ever, for instance, so age segregation as we know it for any years at a time has no similarity, and across-the-board people of all ages are part of the same group more so. Which means for one thing, if there is a 90-year old among the village, almost every one would be familiar with interacting with them routinely, as they were all growing up no less. An overwhelmingly more abundant number of adults would effectively be taking care of the children from start to finish, compared to how widespread adult influence is not intentionally minimized today, but ends up that way with same-age peers being more influential and naturally less mature.

Counter-intuitively it may even be that humanity, in the body of each family itself, thrives better when there remains satisfying group support for community focus more so than separate individual cocoons, which today are each more like on their own in rapidly changing times.

The villages humans mainly evolved to thrive in are about the opposite of what we have now in the big city.

It's also a good reminder that those of us who are a lot closer to 90 than we are 20 have still got a lot to learn.

So no quitting or you'll never be as wise as this letter shows.