True, and I do know all that, but honestly, something is going to happen anyway; either we have a long, drawn-out recession as we slowly (probably deliberately) decrease population, or a shorter but more extreme crash. Something's happening either way; personally it doesn't matter too much to me which one it is.martinmiggs wrote:A human population drop wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for the planet, but for individual societies it could be catastrophic. Most economic systems depend on continued population growth to function, so if birthrate decreases, then those nations go into recession. I don't know if I've heard anyone claiming that the global human population should decrease per say, but I have read arguments concerning setting limits on it's further growth due to the fact that we don't know how to calculate the earth's carrying capacity for life and at what point we'll reach it. When populations reach their habitat's carrying capacity, their growth doesn't just stall or cut back a little to match the amount of available resources, they go through what's called a crash where the number of individuals plummets dangerously.
Yeah, my point was that I don't think the scale will be as large as it first seems like it will be.martinmiggs wrote:I guess whether gender-skewing due to "designer babies" in certain cultures is good or bad depends on the scale of effect you're looking at. Though it can't be too good for a good portion of individuals in that culture either. Poor, lonely heteros.
True. Well, or someone will start spreading around the idea that it's the duty of anyone bisexual and in the larger gender group to just pretend they're exclusively gay so as to not take the attention of anyone in the smaller gender group, and the duty of anyone bisexual and in the smaller gender group to pretend they're exclusively straight, again so they don't take the attention of anyone in the smaller gender group who might pay attention to the larger. Humanity has done much more absurd things for much smaller reasons.... (Or polygamy will be accepted, but that one's not as absurd/as much fun to laugh at humanity for.)