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Humanity will shrink in the future: 97% of countries will experience negative growth by 2100
(english.elpais.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Lol space will NOT make any difference at all. That technology is not progressing at a rate where we could have millions, let alone billions of people inhabiting space in the near future. We'd also pretty much be completely limited to our solar system, meaning planet-wise we have maybe Mars and Europa and Titan at best... but there's absolutely no chance of any meaningful colonial activity on those planets, Mars would probably have something similar to Antarctic research facilities on it but that's about it.
One of the reasons setting up a base on the moon is critical. Microgravity is not conducive to long term health, so what is? Do we need planetary levels of gravity? Are we ok with moon levels or higher? We don’t even know how many solar system bodies even can conceivably support longer term living
This article is projecting 76 years forward, that's not the near future any more.
Near enough to be relatively confident in how much we won't progress in terms of colonizing space. The general public severely underestimates the limits to space travel & survival. It's not like I can tell you exactly what or when technology will be like in some exact point in the future, but it'd probably be a few hundred years until we could actually make nation-sized space colonies, and there's pretty much no future where space habitation replaces or becomes greater than Earth habitation, unless we go ahead thousands if years. There were a few interesting astrophysics papers estimating that near-lightspeed and FTL travel tech is like 8000 years away lol.
"Future technology" can't solve all of our problems. It's not magic.
76 years ago was 13 years before Yuri Gagarin would become the first human in space. It was 4 years after the V2 rocket became the first artificial object to enter space. This is plenty of time for multiple technological revolutions to happen. We're already on the verge of one with fully reusable superheavy lift rockets, most people don't grasp just how big a change will come from having that sort of cheap bulk cargo access to space.
There's no need to make nation-sized space colonies, just make lots of smaller ones.
I would like to see those papers. Making technological estimates on that scale, especially for something like FTL that has no physics backing it at all, is highly dubious.
There's no need for magic, this is really just a question of economics.
I disagree.
Technology is the only option besides euthanasia or actually killing people in a regular basis - and I doubt very much we'd like any of the latter options.
Technology doesn't have to progress at any rate - we already have the technology to build self sufficient stations. It's just very expensive.
Being limited to the solar system isn't an issue, because the issue is fundamentally that the planet can't sustain this many people without a lot of help. Meaning, a few 100k is enough to use the technology on planet earth as well.
Why do you think the planet can't sustain some amount of people? It's not because we don't have enough space, we have plenty of space – especially if we prioritize car-free or low-car dense urban infrastructure design. The problem is we don't have enough resources. Even if we could send a bunch of people into space, that doesn't do anything for our problem at all. In fact, it just increases the strain on our resources.
Space stations require a lot of maintanence and monitoring, we can't just make a few billion of them and then hope it'll work out. It's far too complicated and unsustainable without very hard-to-find professionals. And a few easy mistakes by this completely untrained and unprofessional crew of an unimaginable amount of people can put everyone in danger. Whatever habitat could fit hundreds of thousands to millions of people has a TON of failure points, with our current technology it is in a sense too big to not catastrophically fail in a short time period. Space is dangerous, death is easy, sabatoging the entire vessel carrying everyone is easy, and maintaining one is extremely difficult and it would have many easy-to-miss potential problems. It's not as nice as video games make it out to be, especially considering those are usually hundreds of years in the future or in a totally different universe.
We're all going to die of worldwide war before we find any use in sending a million people into space, and we're going to die before we can even feasibly do it at all, probably. I would like to see it, but it's just a massive waste of resources if we're being realistic – there is nothing to achieve with it.