If some people wish to have lots of children and are willing to endure having an otherwise lower standard of living because of that, that's fine by me. So far birth rates haven't been going down because of top-down control, but because of people adapting to changed economic conditions.
This strikes me as very naive. Birthrates have been declining for a few decades (in some countries) and you're trying to extrapolate this trend out into the distant future. Meanwhile there are already developed countries that buck this trend. Qatar is richer than any European country, and Qataris have 4 kids per woman. Imagine you had a petri dish of bacteria, and introduce a chemical that stops reproduction of 98% of the types of bacteria inside it, 2% of the bacteria have resistance to this chemical. What you would see is a period of slowing growth, as m...
I might need a better title (It has now been updated), but here goes, anyway:
I've been considering this for a while now. Suppose we reach a point where we can live for centuries, maybe even millenia, then how do we balance? Even assuming we're as efficient as possible, there's a limit for how much resources we can have, meaning an artificial limit at the amount of people that could exist at any given moment even if we explore what we can of the galaxy and use any avaliable resource. There would have to be roughly the same rate of births and deaths in a stable population.
How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it's available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal elite that the poor, unaugmented ones would have no chance of measuring up to? I'm sorry if this has already been considered, I'm very uneducated on the topic. If it has, could someone maybe link an analysis of the topic of lifespans and the like?