Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Overpopulation is an outdated concern. Most societies today have birth rates at or near replacement level.
The global population is currently forecast to stabilise at ~11 billion people.
Which is a lot of people to feed, it's possible but will require significant technological
and cultural change to do sustainably without trashing the planet... And preventing
more climate change would really help with that...
But that estimate assumes we continue to die of old age at roughly the same age we do now
~100 [first order appx]
However there is currently a bet on in the relevant fields, not over whether the first
person to live to 1000 years old has been born... But how old they are.
It's possible we might discover that such life extension is impossible, but it's not probable
based on current evidence.
And if it's not just possible, but as I think is likely, it's affordable and economically desirable
for people to use life extending technologies, then that population estimate is WILDLY underestimating
the population growth.
I can't remember off hand the back-of-the-envelope calculations I did as to what the population
would stabilise at if people stopped dying of old age/disease and accidents/murders/ect were
the only causes of death... But the figure was in the low hundreds of billions, an order of mag'
larger than the current forecast.
And if the technology is possible, it will be developed.
At which point, if it's affordable, the only way of stopping people becoming biologically immortal
is to legally mandate that people die when they don't have to... which I don't see going down to well.
So given that it's going to be a challenge to deal with the currently forecast population growth,
and that if we don't stop destroying the planets ecosystem we may well be starting off the next
mass extinction event, and that we currently look to be on the cusp of developing the technology
to allow us to stop dying of old age and disease....
I think it's a tad premature to claim that "Overpopulation is an outdated concern."