by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-19 05:08:24+00:00
> High fertility is the rule, not the exception, of human behavior. Human population has, give or take, consistently increased since the invention of agriculture. Modern trends of society-wide low fertility are an unusual phenomenon specific to a cultural context enabled by advanced technology and high global populations.

That is an interesting theory that will be falsified eventually. Here is an alternative: low fertility is a contagious mental illness. Much the same way teenage suicide clusters are contagious.

High fertility was always the rule, but the rules have changed. If low fertility was contagious in earlier eras, then there simply wasn't enough population density for it to become a pandemic.

>Imagine your prediction pans out until there are 10 million people worldwide, the size of a large city.

Imagine that properly. For you, to imagine it as just one large city, with similar demographics as a city today... but it wouldn't have the same demographics. With 10 million left, 9.something million of those people are geriatric. The (very) few not-geriatric are in horrible conditions, because the other 9 million people aren't even young enough or healthy enough to work in factories to... well, to build John Deere tractors. And because no one can build tractors, even more people would need to work the fields by hand. But 80 yr olds can't really stoop and harvest wheat with a sickle.

Those 10 million are, at that point dead. But it's not just at 10 million. Long before when the population was plummeting, each bracket of decline was not just a decline of population, but a decline in technology.

So, imagine it as it would really work, rather than making half-assed comparisons because it's too uncomfortable to consider that our species may in fact be on the precipice of extinction.

>How is this society going to maintain the same culture we have now?

Engineers and the engineering-adjacent have never understood culture. They imagine this computer that has a program, and you can reprogram computers and so it must be true that cultures are easily changed. Culture is holographic. Even the tiniest remnant contains the whole of culture (though at a lower resolution). This culture will change only in the tiny inconsequential ways that culture continuously evolves. And none of those tiny changes will affect fertility except to lower it further still. And at the very end when you propose it will magically change drastically, it will still only be capable of tiny changes even though it would need to change more completely than ever before, and in the opposite direction of the trend. Just... because.

>How long do you think people will even have the capacity to keep producing and distributing birth control?

Canada's busy normalizing infanticide as we speak. I'm told 25% of zoomers are of "alternative sexual orientations". A larger fraction still are incels, whether or not they admit the label. This is growing beyond the point where a lack of contraceptives will matter.

You will come to agree that I was correct all along, someday. Supposing you live long enough. But by the time you do, no one will care about your opinion and it will be much too late for it to matter.