This is what is known as the fertility rate. It’s the rate at which a population continues to grow and replace itself over time. A population can continue to appear to grow, but the fertility rate determines the speed of said growth over a period of time. And as you can clearly see in the chart provided above, the global population has been going through a steep decline over long periods of time and is predicted to continue declining up to the point of which we no longer replace ourselves.

Why is this happening? There’s actually a really good and simple reason for this: increasing socio-economic conditions. During periods of low economic growth, families tend to increase the number of children they have in order to increase the amount of income going back into said family. Similarly, as we continue increasing socio-economic conditions throughout the world, and thus increase the lifespan of people, the far less likely people will be increasing the population size via sexual reproduction.

In other words, the best solution we have to address overpopulation would be to increase prosperity and living conditions for every single human on this planet — a fact that is directly opposed to the Malthusian “solution” of population control.

Our Bionic Future

Which brings us to a certain vision of the future that could potentially ensure that the general population base doesn't increase it beyond our control.

I believe we can all agree that the human biological substrate requires a lot of resources in order to remain healthy. Not only does it require specific nutrients to keep the organs alive, but it equally requires water, shelter, etc. This fact becomes increasingly worrisome when we take into account natural disasters which leave people without any of these necessary resources for them to benefit from. A great example of this would be the unfortunate circumstance that California currently finds itself in terms of access to clean water and overwhelming wildfires. As a matter of fact, Flint, Michigan currently finds itself in a similar predicament due to greed and governmental bureaucracy.

But what if the human biological substrate were to be replaced for artificial, bionic systems which would no longer require the resources needed to keep the human body alive? Through various technologies, such as bionics, nanobots, gene-editing, etc., we could transform the human biological substrate into something of which is both self-sustainable and increasingly efficient via gradual updates (similar to today’s smartphone).

While adhering to Morphological Freedom — that is, where each individual will be given the right to decide the length of their technologically-enabled enhancements at their own behest — just imagine how much space we’d create in terms of resource access if the entire global population of 7+ billion people were to replace their entire biological substrate for an artificial system? The world of tomorrow would be radically different from the world of today. Issues like poverty, greenhouse gases, water depletion, and, yes, overpopulation would become an irrelevancy — a facet of society of which no longer contains a detrimental grip on its general populace.

So fret not! The world of tomorrow will certainly be strange, but its strangeness won’t be without its benefits — the end to poverty, the end to finite resource-reliance, and the end to overpopulation. Rejoice!