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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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I'd like to see those models. I don't think they're anything more than the pessimistic guesses that have been made for millennia.
From what I understand, the models say that a combination of overpopulation and increasing pollution will cause significant food scarcity. Here's an article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
Most articles try to be optimistic, but seeing as we just completely overshot the Paris Climate Accord targets, I have no hope of curbing pollution or climate change.
Food scarcity has been used as an argument before, it lead to WW2 among other things. And yet, technological advances have kept increasing crop yields several-fold, leading to a population increase that wouldn't've been possible otherwise. There is still food scarcity... for some, while in other places populations keep growing.
Technically, "overpopulation" is at worst a self-correcting issue: it just leads to excess deaths.
Pollution and climate change will lead to more of that, and in an ideal world we'd like to fix it all... but unless we get (cheap) fusion energy soon, to enable climate correction on a massive scale (terraforming)... what we should remember is that, once upon a time, all of humanity was made up of about 10,000 individuals, and we seem to all descend from a single female individual (mitochondrial Eve).
I bet with current knowledge and technologies, humanity could afford to lose 99.999% individuals, and the remaining million would still be better off than those primordial 10 thousand. Society is not likely to collapse.
As a likely part of those 99.999%, we can try and fight that fate, but realistically, what can most of us do anyway? I can play the lotto, and if I win donate most of it to research (and hopefully not some scammer), but otherwise, what else?
There's a line of thinking that if we backslide far enough (i.e. lose the Internet, lose electronics, and lose electricity generation), there's no coming back to this point. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without easy-to-extract coal and oil. Today's reserves require a fairly high level of technological advancement to access.
For what it's worth, I don't think that humanity is going to hit that point of no return.