OT:
I buy useful products all the time from many companies, I have no idea what their CEO's think or who most of them are.
My 16 year old step daughter was telling me the other day that she and her friends discuss that they will not have children as they fear the worst from climate change. Our family has been active in home electrification and EV adoption, both in the public and governmental arenas. She herself has been active, and even has had articles published about her endeavors. But to realize that still, she suffers from "climate depression" breaks my heart. At least, in my case, my children will never say to me, "why didn't you do anything about it when you still could?"
www.theguardian.com
Except it's happening everywhere that was lifted from poor standard of living. Seems to be a hard cap the more technologically advance and higher the standard of living is. This means we will see a huge shift in population when it comes to skilled workers in stable governed countries vs countries with poor infrastructure and failed state governments which is not a positive to the stability of the world.
this is a dangerously stupid thing to pretend to believe, and it's exactly how bigotry and misinformation thrives and survives, when people make the stupid mistake of believing all opinions are valid.
www.teslarati.com
Most people around me in old Europe are not having (more) kids because housing costs too much (among other expenses) or because taking the time to care for their children would force them to work less (i.e less resources to support the family).In the end none of it works. The best predictor for number of kids is still lack of money - the poorer one is, the more kids one has.
Of course the solution can not be to get poor in order to save civilisation
But there seems to be precious few workable solutions.
Personally, on a 50 plus year horizon, I am hoping/counting on revolutions in biomedicine and AI and technology. More concretely, in a combination of longevity progress and growing babies outside the body, cared for by robots. If one read Asimov's Solaria - well something like that. The thing is, it actually seems possible - in a 20 to 50 year time scale:
- cheap, caring, smart, ubiquitous robots - check - Tesla will deliver.
- longevity - there is a HUGE amount of ongoing research addressing the root causes of death, and there is huge progress in achieving significantly longer lifespans for mice. Serious trials for humans are ongoing. In principle, there is no fundamental reason we should die, if we identify properly all the reasons cells age, if we can return old cells to the younger state (Yamanaka factors), if we can eliminate senescent cells, etc - and there is truly impresive progress in these fields.
- growing babies outside of uterus - there is also significant progress towards creating artificial wombs, and I would be surprised if it is not realized within 50 years.
I am not saying this is a GOOD future - frankly, many aspects of it seem completely terrifying. I am saying though that it is a realistic solution to the depopulation catastrophe coming upon us. And actually a likely future.
Oh, stop. Because what you just said was that you expected Elon to be perfect and non-human.
Yes, you did. He gets to believe differently than you as long as he’s consistent in ways you think he should be. Here’s a shocker for you; people are complex and walking conundrums. Even I am sometimes a nice human being.
That's exactly the opposite my man. Dismissing opinions as "not valid" or suppressing opinions by force is exactly what happened to sensible people in nazi Germany. It's our job to change people's mind, not our jobs to suppress voices.
Why does China still have a limit on number of children? Currently it is set at 3.
