The Baby Bust and Population Chaos
There is a nearly-global baby bust happening right now. The Italians are below replacement! Ditto Japan, South Korea, Eastern Europe. Not so in central Africa, but the rate is falling.
Why is this happening?
I blame the biosphere. Mother Earth has said, “That’s quite enough of you humans!” This command is transmitted to the human population by price signals, for the Market is the most ‘natural’ of our institutions.
I predict, in the long run, population chaos. Population will fall globally until we have re-tooled our entire technosystem for clean affordable sustainability. Then breeding will become popular again, and we’ll boom, until we pass sustainability, and baby-bust again. And so on; booms and busts with sensitive dependence on initial conditions; a.k.a. chaos. Meanwhile, the other critters will bust when we boom, and boom when we bust.
In the longer-run, this will accelerate evolution. Variation in the booms, selection in the busts. We are entering an evolutionary punctuation event. Expect extremely clever raccoons and extremely prolific kudzu.
Our own descendants will be super-powered in intelligence, immunity, resilience, and many other virtues. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ll need all of those superpowers to survive long enough to reproduce.
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