Will we ever colonise other worlds?

Great Debates
101

The universe is very large, but “ever” is a very long time. So, within those constraints, maybe.

Or, maybe not.

But if you look at the history of places from which major emigration has occurred generally, the populations of those places have not gone down. So, even if it was possible, emigration even at the rates possible on earth where folks could just walk if necessary isn’t the answer.

The myth that is the popular perception of Malthusian Disaster cannot be solved by emigration, or even mass murder. Both ends of the population rate dynamic have to change. And they will, of course. Some effects will be decidedly unpleasant for the people involved, and some will be noticed only by statisticians. Some will be deliberate, and some will be unintended consequences of other decisions.

The probability that space exploration will successfully provide a new frontier is an interesting but entirely unrelated point. Space travel is a matter for an extremely elite fraction of the human race, and will be for most of the imaginable future, on the scale of human history. Huddled masses yearning to be free need not apply.

Tris

102

FYI: Robert Bussard (who conceived the Bussard Ramjet) has died.

103

But, as half the people in this thread have pointed out, that won’t solve earth’s population problem either.

In the most fundamental sense, the problem of Earth’s human population is ultimately self-correcting. If we have more people than the planet can support, under whatever conditions the future might bring, there will be some sort of die-back, and for some time afterwards, a smaller number of humans will live on Earth than did at one time.

This includes the prospect of global warming. A substantially hotter Earth would likely lead to a substantial reduction in arable land, and a smaller world population, which would put less carbon in the atmosphere. Systems tend to find equilibria; the only question is where. An equilibrium point that involves the end of human civilization on earth is probably one hell of a long way off, no matter what we do to our planet. The questions involve how many people there will be, and how pleasant or harsh their reality will be.

Trying to establish a colony elsewhere in the solar system, or beyond, will not affect any of that more than trivially, in terms of being a population escape valve. But the resources required for such colonization will, of course, be wildly disproportionate to the number of persons involved in colonization.

In short, the ship ain’t sinking. But those who wish to swim to that uninhabitable rock of an island want the people who stay on the ship to devote considerable resources to enable them to live on that barren rock.

It’s a great analogy, btw - thanks for bringing it into the conversation.

104

No…I haven’t read the rest of the thread. I’ll try and answer your questions anyway, though it’s clear that you didn’t actually read through my own response if you are asking this. C’est la vie.

What ‘resource’ is so outrageously valuable today? Well, there is always H3 I suppose…it’s pretty expensive stuff. I’m sure there are others…but that’s not really the point. Nor is the point that we would be importing them from Mars or the Moon…I seriously doubt that large scale resource extraction is going to be the first thing we do when we land. The point I was making is that as basic materials get scarce on the Earth, as they will eventually unless you think that China, India, and the third world are always going to languish in abject poverty. We will need things like iron, gold, silver, copper (especially copper), zinc, etc etc etc…the list goes on and on. And we will need them in massive quantities if large numbers of people on the Earth ever have even close to the lifestyle of the average European, Japanese or American. Where do you suppose that quantity of resource is going to come from? The Sahara? Antartica? Perhaps. But I doubt it. And when we run out of resources there? What then? Decide this whole civilization thingy is over rated and go back to being hunters and gatherers?

Just because you guys think that space can never be economical based on your own limited forward thinking? Sort of like those guys who said the internal combustion engine would never replace the horse, that it was just a toy. Or the off shore drillers who said oil was so cheap and plentiful that we’d NEVER need to drill for it in the truely deep parts of the ocean. How did those things work out for them?

Here’s the thing. You are trying to project what is and is not economic today into an unknown future. You have no idea what scales of materials the Earth could need in that future…or what may become economically viable in that unknown future. I saw a show the other day talking about Honda’s new hydrogen-fuel cell vehicle and filling station. Today the car costs $1 million, and the fuel station produces essentially 1 tank of fuel a day. Not exactly economically viable, ehe? Should we therefore drop any experimentation on hydrogen-fuel cell technology? It’s not exactly cost effective, right? Who could afford $1 million for a car or a fuel system that produces 1 tank of fuel a day? It will always be like that…right?

Ah…well, you see I didn’t need to read the whole thread then. You’ve happily summarized it for me here so I can respond! Yes…extraterrestrial colonies ARE at the edge of our (current) technological capabilities…and yes, they are (currently) not economically feasible. All true. So what? Currently we have plenty of oil and hydrogen Fuel-Cells are beyond our technological capabilities and they are not economically feasible. Large scale solar is ALSO not economically feasible and is still pretty much beyond our technological capabilities…certainly it was 20-30 years ago when we first started seriously looking into it. And we still aren’t there. So…should we just stop all this screwing around with alternatives like that? Lets just use the oil and coal…that is something we know how to do, and it is economically feasible! After that we can go back to whale oil…we know that too! After that we can cut down tree’s I guess…

I like to point too the dawn of powered air flight myself, but hey, that’s me. I think the above model works as well…since there are vast amounts of natural resources out there in space. They are currently not economically viable to exploit…but they will remain un-exploitable only if we decide not to exploit them. Not all of the colonies you mentioned in your great exploration era of European expansion were immediately economically viable. Many took vast amounts of initial resources to get them up and running, and it took them quite a while before their host countries started to realize a profit. Why should space be different? Why should it immediately become economically viable…or be dropped like a hot potato? Because it’s hard? Because it’s dangerous? You space-nay sayer types need to look back on history a bit better before you simply hand wave this model away. A LOT of European’s died initially. A LOT of money was spent initially to do all that exploration and survey stuff, as well as to outfit and set up those initial colonies. It took time before they became profitable…sometimes it took generations.

Well…first off you are offering a strawman. I didn’t say I want to colonize the galaxy…certainly not as a first step, probably not ever. I said we should do manned exploration of the Moon and Mars and set up permanent research stations on both. Doing that will help teach us a lot of the stuff we need to know about space exploration and setting up habitats in hostile environments. After that I think we would be able to look at exploiting the resources of, say, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Setting up manufacturing facilities in Earth orbit. Stuff like that. Will it be economically viable? Not in my life time…but ever? Sure.

BTW…if you want free health care, social programs or any of the other myriad government programs, please…come up with a viable business model for them first. Eh?

-XT

105

Sure, we can build a space station that’s a closed biosphere. If CO2 goes up, we regulate the CO2 down. Manage everything, control everything. And people live in the space biosphere, grow crops, manufacture everything out of asteroids or what have you, and so on.

What’s stopping you from building a closed biosphere on Earth and living inside it? Even with the worst possible pollution, nuclear winter, melting ice caps, desertification, topsoil eroding into the gulf of mexico, freshwater aquifers used up…guess what, building a domed farm on Earth is still going to be 100 times easier than building a domed farm on Mars.

This is what you don’t seem to understand. I can imagine technology that allows us to create habitats on Mars out of nothing more than rock and ice. But the Earth has plenty of rock and ice. If overcrowding on Earth is so severe that building habitats out of rock and ice on Mars looks attractive, building habitats out of Earth rock and Earth ice is going to look 100 times more attractive. If you’ve got technology such that you shovel rock into one end and can produce anything at all out the other end, well, you’ve solved just about every economic problem on Earth.

Look, I’m not saying we’ll never colonize Mars, or the asteroid belt, or space stations. I’m just saying that those colonies won’t pay for themselves in economic benefits for Earth. The society able to colonize Mars will be richer than our society by orders of magnitude, just like we’re richer than subsistance farmers of the 18th century.

What prevents cheap and easy space colonization isn’t that we lack the political will, or that we’re afraid to take a chance. The problem is the laws of physics are such that it takes a gigantic billion dollar Saturn booster to send a tiny two man lunar lander to the moon. Yeah, we could bring that price down a bit, but as long as we’re talking rocket engines it’s going to cost billions.

So then the question is, what do we get in return for our billions? Species survival…if humans on Earth go extinct, well, those people on the Moon colony, or the Mars colony will go on?

But if we’re really concerned about that, we could much more cheaply and much more easily build a gigantic underground bunker, and send a few thousand people down there permanently. Then when nuclear armageddon, or the next dinosaur-killer comes, they’ll survive.

The Earth after a nuclear holocaust, or after a K-T impact scenario, is still going to be easier to survive on than Mars. If a few thousand colonists with a few high tech manufacturing tools can build a self-sufficient domed city on Mars, they can do the same thing on a nuclear wasteland Earth. And more easily.

Just think about the technological infrastructure to manufacture a tractor. Steel mills, glass makers, rubber makers, cloth seats, silicon chips, gaskets, and on and on. But of course, they aren’t going to use conventional IC engines on Mars, they’ll use battery power, or fuel cells, because there isn’t any O2 in the atmosphere. So why not use those fuel cell tractors on Earth? Because they cost twice as much as conventional tractors. But that same tractor on Mars is going to cost 1000 times as much as a conventional tractor on Earth.

You can get together a couple friends, stock up on your survival gear, and head out to an uninhabited Canadian arctic island TODAY. If you can’t imagine a couple hundred people heading out to Baffin Island and creating a survivable self-sufficient colony, how can you imagine doing the same thing on Mars?

106

No doubt. Of course, if I slam a really big rock into the Earth it might be a good idea if we had some of those guys in a dome on Mars too…just in case. Right? If we were only going to Mars to escape pollution or whatever you might have a point. But that’s not the only reason to go there…or to go into space.

Well, I assume you are responding to another poster with this. I don’t think that extra-terrestrial colonies are going to solve an over crowding problem on Earth. I think what they would solve is a potential resource problem when/if the rest of the world ever catches up to where the 1st world countries are as far as material needs goes. If everyone in China needs a new Ipod…well, we will need to pony up a lot of copper and silica. If everyone in India needs a shinny new car…well, we are going to need a hell of a lot of steel and aluminum. If everyone in Africa ever gets their shit together and wants all those goodies too…or in Central/South America…well, we are going to need resources on a vast scale. Sure, we can dig for them in the Sahara I suppose (no idea what kind of resources are available there), or in Antarctica…but eventually we are going to start running a bit short. When that happens, basic resources are going to start going up in price.

Is all this going to happen tomorrow? Nope. It will probably not happen in my lifetime. So, space travel in MY lifetime is sort of like the exploration travel of the early European explorers. It’s a lot of money spent for no real short term gain as far as I can see…but it’s kind of cool and potentially useful in the future. Learning how to cope with those kinds of environments is a first step to learning how to exploit those resources. Be a good thing if we ever NEED to exploit them, I’d say.

Besides, humans need frontiers IMHO…and what better frontier than the solar system?

-XT

107

But those early European explorers DID turn a profit. Those that survived came home with ships full of gold, spices, slaves, and the riches of the Orient.

And I’m just not worried about running out of “resources”. Thing is, the Earth’s crust is composed of lots of metal oxides, the only problem is that those oxides take a lot of energy to reduce to pure metal. Aluminum oxide is everywhere, what’s expensive is the electrical power to run the aluminum smelter.

But think of the energy costs of bringing back aluminum from the asteroid belt. I can imagine industry in space building things for space…but we’re not going to be bringing back raw metals from space. The cost of metals per ton is just too low.

You envision the demand for metals increasing in the future. And that’s probably going to happen. But that doesn’t mean the spot price for metals is going to increase by 10 or 100 or 1000 fold. Increased demand means that today’s economically marginal mines become economically viable, and the supply increases to meet the demand, and the demand decreases to meet the supply. And sure, an iPod uses silicon and copper and steel and plastic. If the price of silicon and copper and steel and plastic increases, the price of an iPod will increase. But how much of the price of an iPod is due to the cost of the raw materials? A dollar? Two? If your iPod costs $300, and raw materials double in price, your iPod now costs $305.

And then we get to the phenomenon of dematerialization. Check out an aluminum can from the 1970s compared to an aluminum can of today. Today’s cans use 1/3 the aluminum. Today’s cars use a lot less steel than the behemoths of the 50s. A phone today is a flimsy little thing compared to the durable Ma Bell era phones. And so on.

Steel mills all over the United States closed, not because steel was so expensive, but because the price of steel had dropped so low that they couldn’t afford to manufacture steel for such a low price.

And don’t forget that refined metal doesn’t disappear. All the steel and copper in today’s computers is going to be eventually melted down and recycled…assuming the price for metals is high enough. All that crap that goes into our landfills today can be dug up and recycled tomorrow if only the price were high enough.

I just cannot imagine the price for refined metals rising to the point where it is economically feasable to mine the asteroids and ship the metal back to Earth. At that point you can shovel red Australian desert sand into a smelter and make a profit refining the iron. It just becomes a question of the cost of the energy.

108

Have you been reading the thread? We’re talking about colonizing earth’s orbit, maybe the moon, maybe Mars.

Okay first, the OP is asking about this century, which gives us another 92 years to play with, minimum. Second, as of today, we’ve got the Russians sending up tourists to the ISS, and we’ve got private aerospace companies building and testing space planes and inflatable space hotels. They’re doing this now. It’s not sci-fi. So somebody has to get there first, is being taken care of. Remember, we’ve got a minimum of 92 years to play with. !00 years ago almost no one flew in planes. Today, 100 years later one billion ( 1,000,000,000) passengers fly per year. Please tell me a hell of a lot can’t change in 100 years, and absolutely amazing advances can’t be made in things like transportation and computers. Tell me there are not going to be any further advances in nanotechnology, robotics, AI, rapid prototyping etc. Several have mentioned the Space Elevator. Well, I don’t know if it’s really possible but if it’s ever possible I’m dead certain it will be real and working within the next 100 years, and if it does get up and working, transportation to and from earth will become much more cheap and routine. I’ve never read any plans about colonizing space that required us to ship everything up from earth. The goal is to develop the ability to exploit the resources that are already there, and only transport the most sophisticated or complicated equipment up from earth, and even that only as long as we have to.

OTOH, I mentioned two of the world’s tallest buildings earlier in the thread and these buildings were built by people with money and motivation and just the fact they’re being built means 1,000’s of people are going to move there, work there, and live there. They’re banking billions of dollars on it.

That makes no sense to me. Why would I build a hotel or a cruise ship and make it only big enough to house my employees? There already is a space tourism industry, you simply can’t say we have to wait until earth is considerably more inhospitable and costly. As for “spreading out” most space habitat designs I’ve seen are modular in nature. Of course they’re designed to grow.

We’ve discussed decreasing fertility which comes with serious problems, and over population which comes with serious problems. What is this “stabilizing?” No, there is not a lot of hospitable land for us to fill up. We’re increasingly concerned about not filling up more land.

No, the red herring is insisting space colonization MUST solve earth’s problems or we shouldn’t do it. That’s not why we always do things. We don’t build Disney Lands to solve problems, we build them to make money. People want to go.

Yeah, Greenhouse gas emissions aren’t fatal, but if they get even close to being fatal, we’ll start doing something about them. Like ship them off into space. Somehow. Hey, have you heard anything about that lately?

Ah, so your solution to global warming is to let the mobs of poor people die off. Well, at least I’ve gotten one person to answer my questions.

109

They did…eventually. Look at how long it took for them to make a profit in India, say…or in North America. It wasn’t like they rolled in and money started pouring out. One of the reasons the Brits were trying to put a tax on us poor American sods was BECAUSE it was so costly and they wanted us to shoulder our fair share like the folks back home.

And you are telling me that it’s more cost effective to go that deep than to seek resources in space? I’m not seeing it, but ok. I bet that deep core drilling technology is going to be pretty expensive initially to develop, test, deploy and use though. I’m guessing it’s not going to be instantly profitable.

I didn’t say they were going to bring the raw materials down to Earth either…it would be more cost effective to manufacture the end products in space and then simply drop them into the gravity well. As for the cost in energy of bringing stuff back…well, no one said it had to get back fast. I can think of a few ways you could get the raw materials from, say, the asteroid belt to Earth/Mars/Moon orbit slowly but fairly cheaply. And I’ve been out of the aero business for decades.

It’s one of those things that are hard to know. Will going deeper or to more in hospitable portions of the planet as we grope for more and more difficult to reach resources here on Earth ever make space based mining/manufacturing viable? I think that eventually it will…but only if we do the baby steps to actually explore and figure out how to live in that environment. To me a lot of you no-space guys are setting up a self-fulfilling prophesy…if we never explore space, if we ignore space completely, if we drop the whole manned space exploration part of our research then yeah…we will probably never be able to do much in space. Hope in that case we never need too…would suck if we did.

That’s true, but has little impact on what I was saying. If every nation on Earth used the same level of resources that the US does that wouldn’t necessarily mean that suddenly US manufacturing would revive. Why would it? It has nothing to do with the quantity of iron that US steel manufacturing has pretty much faded out…and a sudden scarcity of iron wouldn’t magically make steel production viable in the US. I think that if the vast majority of people on the Earth (6 billion) ever have the same kind of lifestyle potential as the US we will be scrambling for resources. Recycling and new, harder to access resources will only get us so far.

-XT

110

I have to think it must be easier and cheeper to drill deeper into the Earth than to go mine on Mars.

The biggest resource we need is energy. Unfortunately it takes a lot of energy to move an object from the Earth to Mars and I believe that energy would be better spent here on Earth.

I have a sense that most of the pro-space people in this thread don’t understand what “economical” means. I think you think it means “oh it will be expensive and hard so we shouldn’t do it”. That is not what it means. Economics is about choices. When I say it is not economical to build a copper mine on Mars, I am saying that for the same amount of energy and resources, I can extract a lot more copper here on Earth. The Earth is really big and our mining technology has only allowed us to dig a few miles into it.

No matter what environmental problems we cause here on Earth, they CANNOT be as bad as Mars or any other planet because the atmosphere on those planets is lethal to humans. Even if we somehow change our own atmosphere so that it no longer supports life, it will still be better to build domed cities HERE than to ship the people and supplies a million miles away to build them there.

Early European explorers were looking for people to trade with or conquer and for new trade routes.

Space exploration is currently like the explorations of early island natives with dugout canoes but where the ocean contains no fish, all the other islands within rowing distance are lifeless rocks and only the fittest, best marinars can reach them.

111

Again, I’m confused. Don’t they die off in your scenario too? How do your space colonies prevent the die off (assuming there will be one)?

112

That’s just because the English were late to the game and had to settle for the shitty pickings. The Spanish and Portuguese, on the other hand, got so much gold & silver out of the New World it caused runaway inflation in Europe. With a what, 30 year time period between Columbus and the Conquest of Mexico, and another ten years to the Incan conquest? That’s not long at all.

113

Well, you are guessing here same as me, but ok. Let’s assume that is the case. In 1900, was flight economical? If you were evaluating it at the time would you say that commercial passenger flight would ever be a viable transport method? How about that new internal combustion engine thingy?

Well, I think energy is certainly something we need…but I think you are underestimating our access to other key resources. As well as the environmental impact of our power generation and manufacturing. But ok. I disagree that the energy could be better spent here on Earth than in exploring Mars, but ok…it’s a matter of opinion. Personally I think that your way leads to stagnation while mine leads to a further expansion of humanities horizons. The cool thing though is that it will happen or not happen all on it’s own if we want to do it…and if it is viable. 100 or 200 years from now someone might be laughing at your sides position in the same way we do about the buggy whip manufacturers…or they may be laughing at my sides starry eyed but hopelessly naive position. I know which I think will happen though it will suck not being around to see.

Thanks…I think I have a pretty good handle on what ‘economical’ means. But I appreciate the 101 lesson there. It was quite helpful.

Lets say I build a copper mining facility in the asteroid belt. And lets say that I build Earth orbital manufacturing facilities. I basically put the ore on a ballistic trajectory using slingshot orbitals and minimal energy to get the stuff started. Lets say you, Earth miner are having to go further and further afield to find copper. Also, due to greater and greater government restrictions on manufacturing and environmental concerns, as well as shortages of power (should have built those nuke plants!), your costs are going up steeply. On the other hand my orbital manufacturing plants are using direct sunlight and my cost per ton of copper, even considering what it takes to mine it and get it too Earth are lower than your costs to mine it ON Earth and then manufacture it. My initial capital outlay is very steep however. Which one will be more ‘economical’? In the short term? Medium term? Long term?

Ok…let’s say that is true. If those early island natives decided to take your course and not continue to explore and learn HOW to travel in that environment then they would essentially stay stuck where they were, with resources getting more and more limited as time goes on (look up Easter Island sometime to see how this worked out). Instead they learned how to travel and explore and eventually found stuff that WAS worth going too.

-XT

114

Dude, you’re the one who brought it up in the first place! Go back and read post #50. Most of us keep saying, over and over again, that space colonization will have absolutely zero effect on solving Earth’s problems. It’s not an argument in favor, it’s not an argument against … it’s just immaterial to the discussion. And yet you keep coming back to it!

The crux of the anti-colonization argument is that space colonies are not economically viable right now. And not just in the sense of “well they won’t turn a profit for a while so we have to subsidize them for now” sense. But in the sense of “they will never ever be even remotely self-sufficient unless half a dozen different speculative technologies become reality and until then we must pour trillions of dollars down a bottomless pit for no return”.

YOU want to go. Don’t mistake your private enthusiasms for those of the mass market. Most people want to relax on their vacations. They don’t want to spend enormous amounts of money to risk their lives in a cramped, smelly can.

Compare the number of people who visit Disneyland every year to the number of people who go on thrill-seeking holidays like climbing Everest. Sure, I’m sure that space tourism will eventually make a few bucks from the extreme trekking crowd, but it’s not mass market.

The New World wasn’t colonized by rich Europeans off on a lark.

115

From here:

So declining fertility is all rosy, with women enjoying lots of fresh, exciting career opportunities. Look at the chart just below the part I quoted. At least half the countries listed there have “(environmental causalities?)” listed. One country has HIV/AIDS listed. You seem to think declining fertility rates means women are deciding to use their new-found freedoms to pursue that MBA or something. Not always the case.

Okay am I the only one who thinks the un-cited assertion that men jerking off to porn actually leads to declining fertility rates?

Keep reading below the chart. Population decline can be both good and bad, depending on lots of different things, but it doesn’t seem to bode well for industrial economies. Russia, Australia, France, Italy, Poland and Japan have initiated efforts to reverse population decline.

You and a couple other people here seem to think overpopulation won’t be a problem, a declining population won’t be a problem, and a “stable” population will somehow be utopia.

The more I read, the more I think “stable” means “stagnant.” Weren’t the Native Americans more or less a “stable” population? Great, if you like stone age hunter gatherers.

I like technological innovation, I like new stuff, I like progress. I’m not at all convinced a stagnant human population on earth will continue to accomplish that.

I think it’s healthy for humanity to grow, but not healthy for it to grow here on earth. We really don’t have the room or the resources. Species are going extinct at an ever increasing rate. When is that going to stop? How much biodiversity are we going to lose? Earth is all we’ve got. In all the universe, the only place we know life exists is here. We blow it, we blow it.

116

So, in 40 years the Spanish/Portuguese were getting a return back on their initial capital expenditures for exploration? Well…that is kind of a long time to speculate, yes. Paid off for them though (in the short term…kind of fucked them over in the long because they didn’t understand the difference between money and wealth, but hey…these were Spaniards so what can you expect?), right?

I’m guessing that if the US put real resources (say, what it cost us for our stupid invasion of Iraq) into developing a real exploration and exploitation of space program we could probably get some kind of return on our investment in, oh, say 40 years as a nice round number. Hell…we HAVE gotten a fairly nice return on our investment in space just in our communications satellites and such (though the nay sayers of the time felt space was entirely a waste).

-XT

117

The analogy wasn’t meant to sum up the “stay on earthers” vs. the “go to spacers.” It was meant to illustrate my frustration with people continually trying to get me to explain how a space colony built sometime in the next 100 years with a dozen, or a 100, or 10,000, or even 100,000 people on it is going to fix over population, pollution, global warming, cure the common cold, etc. I’m not saying it’s going to do those things. Not soon, not yet.

118

Absolutely. Within a decade of the Wright brother’s flight the airplane was being used profitably for air mail deliveries. Within 15 years it was an important weapon of war. The potential and opportunities were immediately obvious and people seized them. The same is true for the automobile.

If you’re able to run your asteroid belt plants on direct sunlight, then why not put some of the same solar power plants in orbit around Earth and beam the power to the ground? Any transmission losses will be more than offset by the greater intensity of sunlight in Earth orbit.

And you’re concerned about the costs of the Earth miner going “further and further” afield?! When the distances you’re talking about are thousands of times farther? We could ship copper ore in gift-wrapped packages in the first-class seats of jetliners for cheaper than the cost of moving it around the asteroid belt.

119

Missed the edit window.

What I want you dirt-siders to do is explain to me your solutions to earth’s problems, and quit trying to corner me in my little space colony built sometime in the next 100 years. I’m not the solution to your near-term problems and the only solutions you dirt-siders have so far is die-offs and “population stability” whatever that is. I think involves loin clothes.

120

You’re confusing declining population and declining fertility. Of course population decline can be caused by many things including HIV, war, natural disasters, etc, and I agree those are not desirable. But those are factors that reduce population despite high fertility rates.

If instead you look at populations with low fertility rates, they are all rich, developed nations.

…who thinks the assertion is what?

I do think it’s one of the many causes leading to low fertility rates.

Do you think Japan and Germany are stagnant, and lacking in technological innovation?