These sentences in the Times got my attention: “Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth. A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s when demographers at the United Nations expect the size of humanity to peak. And then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.”
My first reaction was this would be mostly a good thing. Less ravaging of the planet, giving Earth something of a slight breather. Less carbon, less climate change, more wilderness. Yet one of the experts quoted bemoaned the “tens of billions of lives not lived in the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them.”
The article produced several published letters to the editor, all somewhat animated in their authors’ reactions. One found the lamenting of un-lived lives to be poppycock, citing Earth’s natural resources already strained to the max. Another, somewhat predictably, noted the thoughts of the writer stuck in bumper-to-bumper on the freeway, dreaming of a less dense population.
Without working out all the possible disadvantages of a declining population, I clearly come down of the side of fewer people, disadvantages be darned. But having said that, I confess that, after spending roughly half my time in Manhattan I/we have become inveterate people watchers, particularly from the vantage point of a street-side table at a restaurant. The families, the couples, the kids, the stooped-over geriatrics, the dogs. They are endlessly fascinating. And with so many of them, you rarely see one twice.
I think my favorite benefit a smaller population would be more wilderness, but I’m not going to be around to see that happen.
And speaking of not being around, another Times article says the clock is ticking on the existence of mammals. About 250 million years ago, reptiles evolved into mammals. Scientists are estimating that mammals have about 250 million more years to go.
A brighter sun, a change in the geography of the continents and increases in carbon dioxide will make the Earth unsurvivable, they say. As for the continents, over the course of the planet’s history, they have glommed together, broken apart and, they say, another glomming together is coming, and that monster will be much hotter. Mammals will have no chance on the monster, which models show will be studded with volcanoes belching gas. These two articles put our tiny normal human lives into perspective. Some time ago, when things would get sketchy in my pedestrian life, I would focus on the Earth spinning around, orbiting the sun, drifting through infinite black space going God knows where, and the Visa bill seemed pretty far down the list of importance. This technique has limited application and can fail if the Visa bill has grown to an outlandish size, but you get the point: We’re all dead in the end and we’ll just have to fake it during some of these Visa bill episodes.
I’m on record for favoring fewer people in the future, but as for mammals, I want as many, like elephants giraffes, as possible to hang around. Except for humans. I think humans have accomplished some great things with our outsize brains. But we’ve done great harm along the way. Of course, 250 million years gives human mammals a heck of a lot of time to atone. I doubt it.
No one can really get one’s brain around the notion of 250 million years. But I wish my next Visa bill were that far away.
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