[greygoo222]

I was wondering which pet issue you were a doomer about. Fertility is the most ridiculous of them all. There is no plausible mechanism by which low fertility rates could lead to extinction, and if you think there is you don't understand the issue at all.

Come on, just think about this for a minute. Is your model that we're just going to have fewer children, so that each generation becomes smaller, until we run out of people?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>I was wondering which pet issue you were a doomer about. Fertility is the most ridiculous of them all. There is no plausible mechanism by which low fertility rates could lead to extinction,

Most people who think they are clever say this. I don't even doubt that you are, it's that you're lazy and never bothered to think about it. Yes, sub-replacement fertility inevitably leads to extinction and especially so for a species like humanity (given the root causes). If each generation is inevitably smaller than the last, then at some point the only smaller number is zero. And if the rate of fertility decline continues to accelerate, it isn't thousands of years in the future either. Since each youngest generation is raised by the older generations who had low fertility themselves, that youngest generation internalizes it at norm... so population can't plateau and drop no more (which would require the women in that youngest generation to grow up and all decide to have 2.1 children on average).

>Come on, just think about this for a minute. Is your model that we're just going to have fewer children,

In my model, each generation adopts the anthropological norms of western civilization which includes low fertility, but inevitably sets it as their ceiling. They can have fewer than that norm for any reason (bad luck, economic woes, whatever), but they'll never have more. And if they *do* have fewer, they've just set the norm even lower for the subsequent generation. This and dozens of other factors are quite alarming.

[greygoo222]

I guarantee you I've spent more time thinking about this than you have.

Massive decreases in population change culture. The Western cultural context we have today won't just magically persist, converting new people, until we run out of people. At worst, we'll end up in a world where the majority of the population consists of the descendants of current high-fertility subcultures. Even that is extremely unlikely. Fertility rates only become a population-level problem a few generations down the line, at which point we are almost guaranteed to have artificial wombs and other technology that changes the dynamics of reproduction entirely.

Fertility is worth worrying about because it may cause fewer resources for the elderly, particularly in some acutely affected nations. It is not an extinction risk.