# Record Number of Women Childless-What long term impacts on society if this continues? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 25, 2003, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/record-number-of-women-childless-what-long-term-impacts-on-society-if-this-continues/209484 "2003-10-25T14:08:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![adamant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/779978/32.png) [@adamant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adamant)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2003, 11:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/record-number-of-women-childless-what-long-term-impacts-on-society-if-this-continues/209484/61 "2003-11-07T11:49:10Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by WinstonSmith \* > \*\*Naturally there can?t be an infinitive number of people on Earth. Supposedly there is an economical optimal sweet spot (of course that spot would be different if you focus on other aspects than wealth) - but now that we?re talking about decline rather than growth perhaps the relevant discussion would be more about how few people we can be rather than how many. Or at least whether fewer people will make us richer - which I see no reason for at all, quite the contrary. Anyway the future population of the whole Earth is neither bought nor sold in these developed countries that experience population crunch, but in the third world - so the whole point is rather beside the point. Except, perhaps - as I mentioned, in so far as a bit of economic cold in the educated world will lead to a raging pneumonic in the third world. Also, I suppose the most important check on population would be available food. Now we all know that the doomsday preachers of the 70?s led by Erlicht were very wrong - that there is in fact not only enough food - but way too much. But were it not the case, it?d only get worse by the fact that all the countries (European at least) with low fertility are also gross exporters of foodstuffs. > > (truncated) > > - Rune \*\* Rune, We are very close to not having enough food for the whole world. The main reason that the “doomsday” people were wrong in the 70’s was the “green revolution” of modern mechanized farming using high yield crops with lots of fertilizer and pesticides. This produced years of bumper crops. But the gains are getting smaller, and the amount of cropland worldwide is declining (farms turned into homes, land becoming over-used, aquifers running out, etc). But that trend is still pretty slow, things would be fine for a long while. The trend that will hurt food production the most is peak oil. That is the amount of readily available easily producible oil is reaching a peak (at the halfway point of resource use there is a peak in production mostly due to the fact of using the easiest to get to oil first with the harder to reach coming later). In other words, we will soon have to deal with less and less available energy - and oil in particlur (and natural gas) is very important to modern mechanized farming, from the energy to run the tractors/harvestors to the energy for pumping irragation water, to the feedstocks for many pesticides and fertilizers, to the transport of raw food for production, to the transport of finished food products, etc. Energy problems will force the world into food shortages, medicene shortages, etc. The population of the world is still growing, but soon (10 years or so) it will be falling, and not because of lower birth rates, but from higher death rates (war, famine, disease). If we had been more careful as a society with the oil resources, and worked harder to develop the poorer countries (so that we all reached the level of lower birth rates together) we would have done better than this grow grow - grown until we’ve outgrown the carrying capacity of our environment. Check these links for verification : [http://www.oilcrisis.com/](http://www.oilcrisis.com/) > **[Peak Oil - The Future Of Life On Earth](https://www.peakoil.net/)** > > The Future Of Life On Earth [http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/](http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/) [http://hubbert.mines.edu/](http://hubbert.mines.edu/) [http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/index.html](http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/index.html) > **[OVERSHOOT LOOP: Evolution Under The Maximum Power Principle](https://dieoff.com/)** > > Keto Tropfen Note: All contents of this page copyright by Jay Hanson unless stated otherwise. Mr. Hanson sadly passed away in April 2019 (click here for more details and discussion). We restored this page to keep his important writings alive.... > **[Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos](https://www.yahoo.com/)** > > Latest news coverage, email, free stock quotes, live scores and video are just the beginning. Discover more every day at Yahoo! > **[Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos](https://www.yahoo.com/)** > > Latest news coverage, email, free stock quotes, live scores and video are just the beginning. Discover more every day at Yahoo! Best Regards adamant [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/record-number-of-women-childless-what-long-term-impacts-on-society-if-this-continues/209484.md?page=3)