Overpopulation

Overpopulation has been a question of fundamental interest to scholars for centuries, ever since the industrial revolution, when improvements in food production and hygiene began to dramatically increase human population.  However, it really wasn't a new problem.  Essentially, civilization itself was a direct product of overpopulation, some 5000 years ago, as progressive refinements in early agriculture necessitated more social organization in large communities to maintain survivability, and social stability for larger groups of people.  And, in an even broader sense, overpopulation can just be seen as an extension of the concept of competition for resources, which always put constraints on the size of human population, well before the development of agriculture, possibly accounting for homosapiens absorbing the remaining neanderthal population and leading to their extinction. Overpopulation is obviously a massive problem currently, being the cause of global warming, escalating military conflicts worldwide, hunger, disease, mass wildlife extinctions, global pollution of all types, depletion of resources, etc.  However, it is much less common for governments to openly discuss the "human time bomb" of overpopulation than it was half a century ago. There are a number of reasons for this.   First of all, fertility rates in most parts of the world have actually dropped dramatically. Japan's population has been dropping sharply for some time, and population decreases in China are expected to bring total population there by the end of the century to a level comparable to a couple of centuries previously.  China might be a rather nice place to live in 75 years, actually.  Massive population growth is largely limited to sub-Saharan Africa at this point in time, the rest of the world has slowed down, or has stopped growing completely. Secondly, since the issue now is not fertility, but existing human population, there is the moral issue of what exactly can be done about it.  It's no longer simply a matter of not having children, which is quite common now.  The issue is, how to eliminate the masses of people already here, without committing genocide.  And, that is a very difficult issue indeed!  The Israelis are coming to terms with this issue quite explicitly now, in an effort to control their own destiny without wiping out huge populations of neighbors surrounding them.  To what extent does Israel's "right to exist" actually necessitate real genocide under these circumstances, and, how can that possibly be justified? Thirdly, there are quite legitimate fears of underpopulation, not so much in terms of the human species ceasing to exist, as in terms of their being an insufficiency of young workers to maintain the older population, from an economic point of view.   Once again, the Chinese are taking the lead here, making spectacular advances in robotics in an effort to replace younger workers with highly efficient machine technology.  From a more capitalist perspective, Elon Musk simply advocates having more children, regardless of overpopulation, to feed his insatiable capitalist machine. Finally, again from a capitalist perspective, overpopulation creates opportunities to make money.  Global warming isn't just a problem, it is also a very big business now, arguably the one that really got Elon Musk going, in a big way.  Rather than focusing on reducing overpopulation to reduce global warming, these entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists focus instead on using the "scientific method" to develop "solutions" to the consequences of overpopulation, like the needs for new sources of energy,  food production, pollution of various types and, of course, global warming. Of course, it may be that people should just stop having children.  Or, more than one, anyway, like they did in China.  But, where's the money in that? #overpopulation #demographics #sociology #economics #archaeology #civilization #neanderthals #homosapiens #anthropology #israel #genocide #china #capitalism #elonmusk #economics #money #engineering #technology #science #globalwarming #philosophyofscience #scientificmethod #communism #ccp #ai #robotics #philosophyofhistory #pollution