Hasn’t the birth rate declined in areas where vaccines and other advances in standards of living have made it vastly more likely that the offspring they do have will survive to adulthood?
Yes, but that was a cultural change that took time; the initial result was a huge boom in population. and it also depends on the local status of women’s rights; the birth rate doesn’t really drop in places where women are effectively not allowed to say “no” or access birth control. Of course, places like that also tend to have slews of neglected and abandoned children.
But there seems to be an upper limit to how different a culture can be from raw feral human nature. I doubt we could successfully adopt Vulcan culture no matter how much we wanted to.
And there’s definitely a maximum rate a culture can change. And the most conservative slowest most ignorant members of a society have a large role in setting that speed limit.
The pace of technological change, governmental change, population change, and climate change can evidently greatly exceed the pace that culture can adapt.
I also do not find either part of this comforting.
Nor, I suspect, will any of the members of other species who we’ll be taking with us.
And it seems an odd sort of objection to somebody saying that suicide might be useful to say that it doesn’t matter if the whole species commits suicide. I don’t think that either individuals or the species should; but to say that it’s not a problem if the species does but it is a problem if an individual does doesn’t make any sense at all to me.
Yeah. The question is whether the population drop will come too late.
Especially when abetted by fools trying to remove access to birth control methods.
It is not a question at this point. Barring a miracle, It will come too late. It is my understanding that models predict that If all humans, and their factories were teleported to Mars today (cessation of all human activities), the world would still keep warming for the foreseeable future.