Comment on if the total fertility rate drops and stays below global replacement rate, will humans disappear?
saltesc@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Mathematically? Obviously, yes.
Socially? Would never happen. Imagine our population is just stock. It goes up and down depending on how good things look. At some point, it cannot continue as it’s not financially feasible. But when it drops back down into realistic numbers, balance goes up again.
You can see this behaviour in the generations (Z, Y, X, Boomer, Pre-war, etc.) These generation changes are marked by a tipping point of birthrate increasing or decreasing in a nation—typically globally, which is why we all tend to agree on the start/end of generational eras within 3–5 years.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 months ago
Not to mention that technology is continuing to advance in new and unexpected ways.
We're getting close to artificial womb technology, for example. There are already artificial wombs that are being experimented with as a way to save extremely premature babies that wouldn't survive in a conventional incubator, for example.
Commodity humanoid robots are also in development, and AI has taken surprisingly rapid leaps in development over the past two years.
I could see a possibility where in a couple of decades a human baby could be born from an artificial womb and raised to adulthood entirely by machines, if we really really needed to for some reason. Embryo space colonization is the usual example given, but it could also potentially work as a way to counter population decline due to people simply not wanting to do their own birthing and child-rearing.