alt Hacker News>As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive
Sure. Imagine that central Africa (the only place with positive fertility rates) somehow never changes in that regard. What will happen? Will they be able to power the entire world's population replacement, they who made no AIDS medicines of their own. They make no John Deere tractors. No industry at all, really. Will they even be able to feed these people they are creating?
I think once the developed world goes extinct, so too they.
>There's nothing particularly sinister going on either
Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer). Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.
>very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.
That's not even the argument. The argument is, why isn't everyone terrified that we're well below the replacement rate (where population neither grows nor shrinks), and that we could raise it back up to the replacement rate if we wanted to.
> Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer).
I would love to see your basis for claiming this, because I don't believe a word of it.
My personal take is that, as population declines, we eventually won't be able to produce birth control pills (or plastic, if you believe that microplastics are the cause). A couple generations after that, the population decline will halt.
> Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.
This I could at least see. Society requires a certain level of specialization in order to advance, and that requires a certain number of people. More technologically advanced societies may get by with fewer people, but there's still a lower limit, below which technological progress halts (or at least massively slows down).