Japan has done a pretty good job of reducing the population. Japan is not perfect as they still pave over just about everything they can and perform many other ecological abuses, but the population is declining without any draconian methods. Our best hope is that we become multi-planetary and move some of the population off.
Japan's economy has been in the doldrums since the early 90s because the younger generation is much smaller than the aging population. They are pouring all their GDP into supporting a large retiree population.
In a discussion about population on another chat board I said that if I could magically sterilize people without doing them any other harm, I would do so, to reduce population. Pretty much everybody in the discussion jumped on me and said I was a horrible person for wanting to deprive people of their right to reproduce without limit. The unanimous opinion was that people have the right to have as many babies as they want. And that merely for wanting to deprive people of that, I was a bad person.
We're told that the world population will stabilize at around 10 or 11 billion. The problem is that as the developing countries develop they will demand more and more resources. A world of ten billion people all living at the standard of living of the average American would require as much energy and natural resources as something like 20 billion people of today's average consumption level. And that is not sustainable. It's not just population growth, it's the rise in the standard of living. For humanity to survive, the industrialized nations will have to accept a much lower standard of living so that the rest of the world can have a decent standard of living. And this is something the wealthy nations will not accept.
Hans Rosling made a very good case for that. He pointed out that when a country's child mortality went down, the birthrate dropped to about 2 children per women. It didn't matter about the economic conditions, it all hinged on life expectancy. When child mortality is down, parents can trust there is a good chance their kids will reach adulthood, so 2 is enough.
The problem is that many countries reached that point when the population was already dangerously high and it will continue to go up for a while as the cohorts fill in. He had a TED talk where he demonstrated with some boxes. If I remember right, the world at about 7 billion people, it's divided into about 2 billion young children, about 2 billion between puberty and 25, about 1 billion 25-40, 1 billion 40-55, and about 1 billion over 55. I may have the divisions off, but that's the general idea.
As people age, the cohorts will fill in with 2 billion. In another 15 years there will still be 2 billion under 12, but the 25-40 group will have 2 billion people. It stabilizes around 10 billion people.
However, the rate of environmental destruction we're doing today with 7 billion people it's obvious that the world can't sustain even 7 billion long term. The world's wild areas are disappearing, the oceans are badly over fished, the pollution in the oceans is getting worse. People in developed countries feel guilt about all the plastic in the environment, but a study of where the plastic in the oceans comes from found 90% of it comes from a handful of rivers, all in Asia and Africa.
Developed countries have ways to deal with waste without severe environmental damage, but that isn't the case in the developing world and I don't see where anybody is even trying to solve the problem.
Food insecurity is also a major problem for the developing world. There are only a few major food exporters: Russia, Australia, the US, and I believe Canada. The Arab Spring started because we had a few bad years of grain growing in the major exporting countries. Russia had some major fires that wiped out the wheat crop, Australia had a bad drought, and the US had two springs in a row with severe flooding in the Midwest at crop planting time. All that resulted in a worldwide shortage of grain. The developed world didn't notice because even the poor in developed countries aren't really going to notice is flour goes up $0.10 a pound. But in the developing world grain imports declined dramatically and costs for grain shot up. People who were already near starvation couldn't afford food.
We're barely able to feed everyone now and we're burning out are farmland to do it. More disruptions in the food chain, for whatever reason could lead to mass starvation in the developing world. I expected a grain shortage this year. China had major crop failures last year and there were stories their grain stores were poor. I guess they managed to hold on without having to buy up the world's grain supply.
Colonizing other planets is not science fiction. It is fantasy. "Terraforming" planets is so much a part of space fantasy shows that people have begun to think of it as possible. It is not. Mars, for example, has virtually no atmosphere because of its lower gravity and its lack of a magnetosphere. The solar wind blows away the atmosphere as quickly as it can bubble up from the regolith. Further, it's simply idiotic to think that we could terraform another planet when we cannot even terra-maintain Earth.
We've got one planet. It was ideal for us. And we're ruining it as fast as we can.
Once upon a time the Earth had no free oxygen. Cyanobacteria thrived, and the oxygen that was their own waste product drove them nearly to extinction and now they can live only where there's no oxygen. What cyanobacteria did in a billion (?) years, we are doing in a century or two: Poisoning ourselves with our own waste. The Earth will survive. We won't.
Unless, of course, the next pandemic is a lot more deadly and kills off nine-tenths of the Earth's people. Which is possible, given how many people refuse vaccines.
Terraforming other planets is beyond our abilities now, but it might be possible someday. However it is not going to be a viable option any time soon.
It is possible that we're going to poison ourselves to a point where human civilization collapses and humans may survive, but in much smaller numbers and back to hunter-gatherer societies. The damage we're doing is not quite as severe as you say though. As little as 2 million years ago the Earth was significantly hotter with more CO2 than we have now.
It appears Earth got hit by a supernova about 2 million years ago and it triggered an ice age. There is also speculation that our solar system was part of a cluster of stars that was blown apart by the supernova. The movement of the nearby stars with respect to one another suggests that could be the case.
The ice age works with about 90,000 years of glaciation with about 10,000 years of interglacial. All of human history has taken place in an interglacial period. During this ice age an explosion of trees around the world sucked CO2 levels to the lowest they have ever been in the history of the Earth. We have raised the CO2 levels quite a bit, and we don't know what sort of long term impact that may have.
We are due for the interglacial period to end soon (sometime in the next 2000 years, the timing of these things is not precise). We may be seeing the pattern for the end of an interglacial happening now and the extra CO2 may end up supercharging the next glacial period. It's hard to know for sure.
If the world actually does warm, that's a better scenario than if it cools. A warming world would be bad for coastal cities, but as the world warms vast tracts of land that can't be farmed in Canada and Siberia would open up. The transition would be chaos, but in the long term we would have more land to farm.
If the world cools, that's a worse scenario. In the tropics more land would open up as the oceans recede, but that would leave coastal ports high and dry, and large amounts of farmland in use today would be lost. As well as many of the world's northern cities would have to be abandoned. We're talking New York, London, all of Scandinavia, Seattle, all of Canada, etc. Overall we would have less land to farm, which would cause a lot of the world to starve.
Postacute COVID-19 Syndrome May Affect Physical, Cognitive Function
The researchers found that fatigue, brain fog, and headache were the most common persistent symptoms (82, 67, and 60 percent, respectively). Physical exertion, stress, and dehydration were the most common triggers of symptom exacerbation (86, 69, and 49 percent, respectively). Levels of fatigue and dyspnea were increased, and there was a decrease in regularly completed physical activity. Sixty-three percent of patients scored for at least mild cognitive impairment; Self-care, Anxiety/Depression, and Usual Activities was the domain of the EQ-5D-5L that was most impacted.
My partner has been through this. Fatigue and brain fog being her symptoms.
She's been doing neurofeedback for a few years and is now gotten trained to be a provider. Her therapist said he's been seeing the effect on the brain from COVID is the equivalent of a TBI. Many people who were making progress with neurofeedback saw all the gains erased when they got COVID. He's been treating some people with long COVID and having some success.
sdg.iisd.org
