07-06-2016, 08:00 AM
quote:
Originally posted by imagtek
Visit old cemeteries on the mainland and you will be struck at the number of young people who died. The dead young outnumbered the old. Even children of the very wealthy died in droves of infectious disease.
Then they discovered antibiotics, and young people sick with killer diseases took medicine and survived.
But people kept having large families. Not because they needed to ensure progeny, but because they always had. Everyone wanted the advantages of technology, but no one wanted to consider that those advantages came at a cost.
So now the world is becoming a place of grossly overpopulated failed states spewing young people who did not die of infectious disease as international migrants.
We love cruising the sky in jet airplanes, but don't want anyone to effectively deal with the consequences of transcontinental air travel in the global spread of vermin and plant diseases. No one has an ideological problem with air travel, we just do not want to be bothered with 'ideologically unacceptable' approaches to addressing the problems that arise from air travel.
Homo Sapiens. Man the Wise. So it goes.
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You can't fix Samsara.
You left out some very important factors in your scenario, just a few off the top of my head:
Education:
The single greatest factor for reducing family size is education levels of women. The more education women receive, the smaller the families end up being. As the United States' and Europe's populations became more educated families got smaller, this has been repeated all over the world and is well documented.
Industrialization and urbanization:
As people move from rural agrarian lifestyles to cities and towns large families become a burden that has to be fed and housed instead of an important economic resource and source of labor for the family farm, particularly in places that limit child labor outside the home or farm.
Wars:
Since World War II more civilians die in wars than soldiers, so now wars displace hundreds of thousands of civilians globally, instead of people just hunkering down and waiting for the battles to pass and picking up the pieces in their home communities.
Birth control:
For the last 60-70 years people have actually had effective ways of limiting the size of their families. If birth control is easily available people tend to limit family size, as opposed to just "spewing young people" as you put it.
If humans want to reduce our population growth and impact on the planet, educating girls, reducing wars, and allowing effective forms of birth control to be easily available globally are all a really good start. Overuse of antibiotics, especially in agriculture, is creating resistant superbugs which may push us back into the dark ages where a minor scratch or infection can be lethal too, that will be a real game changer.