I think one of the greatest lies we tell ourselves is that we care about future generations. It seems to me, and I suppose this ties in with TMT, is that we're really not willing to make sacrifices in our own lifetimes in order to create a sustainable world in future. Consumption is too cathartic, which is further exacerbated by capitalist production and its self-reinforcing dogmas -- encouraging us to consume more, and tying our own identity and self-worth to material possessions and wealth status. I suspect a sub 1 gHA world could hypothetically be created, with a different value system in place that doesn't encourage conspicuous consumption, that doesn't have "bullshit jobs", with widely available contraception and no one attaching so much meaning to having babies and families, with better and more efficient resource management -- and it could all be even generally more pleasant than what we have now. But it won't happen, because there's no longer any viable route to such a world, and not enough time.
Well, if you have only 1 baby, that halves the global population. Having 2 babies keeps it steady. Even having 2 babies will decrease the population, as not everyone gets to live to old age. It's not really having babies that is the problem. It is the poor countries that are having a lot of children, in order to survive. If you don't strike at that imbalance...then the rich can just keep having less babies, but the poor won't. The reason we have such out of control consumption is that we use third world countries for slave labour to produce useless cheap commodities. And also...hard to shift the value system of humans when women are attracted to wealth and resources of men. Therefore men have to strive to do bad things or to build more wealth in order to have access to women. Human beings are just fucked. Let's enjoy the dumpster fire while it lasts.
My advice would be...let's try to lower the global population (not through draconian measures), so that a lower number of people have a greater share of resources instead of a large number of people sharing a small percent of resources. Better that 1 billion people have a greater share of the world's resources than 10 billion having very little share. In the latter example, as we know, only 1% of that population will have like 50% of the resources. I agree, there's too many of us. And if only the Western countries decide to lower their numbers, this will end up being caucasian genocide. Not fair for us to stop breeding when other races continue to breed.
