On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 08:51:23AM +0530, ss wrote: > > It seems to me that, at least for now, overpopulation is a more > > serious threat to sustainability.
Sustainability is a function of the technology available. Unfortunately we're in an unstable regime where we need to push for ridiculously advanced technologies in a very short time frame, orelse we'll experience massive depopulation on about a century time scale. Reducing the footprint can be only a temporary stop-gap measure, and in fact could become a trap. Missing a launch windows could be fatal. > I decided to respond to this separately because this is an interesting > response. > > Overpopulation and sub fertility are two separate issues because sub-fertlity In terms of the ecosystem carrying capacity, there's definitely massive overpopulation. > and falling populations are occurring in different areas of the world from > the areas of high fertility and high population. The time scale is also important. Sudden changes from hyperfertility to sub-replacement fertility will set societies up for massive failure if not compensated for. > What is needed is not sub-fertility in Europe and hyper-fertility in India, > but exactly the opposite. I would have thought that Europe could do with > increased fertlity and India with reduced fertility. No matter how many The actual reasons for subreplacement fertility are high costs. Some subpopulations do have a very high fertility which if sustained in time will break out dramatically through the receding population landscape. > European women fail to have kids for the noble cause of global The less noble cause is you nowadays need two working parents to raise children, and this will bring you on the brink of poverty. The wages stayed flat since 1990, or so. > overpopulation, it makes no difference to the fertility in India. Or Africa. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
