Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
(
)
Date: June 14, 2018 05:14AM
This article is interesting:
https://unherd.com/2018/06/amish-shakers-can-teach-us-demographics/?=refinnarSomething about the low birth rates of secular people depresses me. It would seem the religious will always out-reproduce us. If this is so, then secular communities don't exist for very long except as they continually siphon off the religious. Which is easy enough, I guess, especially in the digital age.
The population of a nation should probably at least maintain itself so it doesn't shrivel away — it requires a birth rate of 2.1 per female. If we won't do it, then we will shrink and other peoples that take reproduction much more seriously (usually the religious) will move in and outcompete us. It's unlikely that we overcome our tribalism enough to agree to shrivel at the same time. Nations are going to compete with each other throughout the 21st century. We're already seeing that happen.
Earth can only handle so much of us at once though. It would be a damn shame if humanity just stopped and a day came where there was found no man in the earth. No life on earth has ever had brains as big or complex as ours. We are a way for the universe to know itself. There has to be a balance. There has been as few as 10,000 of us at one time, and now we're testing the upper limit of how many earth can sustain. We're stressing it to the breaking point, but we're not quite there yet.