Reddit reviews The Population Bomb

You can't synthesize it but you can recycle it.

Right now it's not worth it because it's cheaper to mine. Once it starts to get more expensive, we'll start recycling it.

The Chicken Littles would have you believe we're screwed but they're just not very creative or they want their "solution" imposed on everyone.

I'm old enough to remember when the "smart crowd" was preaching we wouldn't have enough food for everyone because there would be too many people by now. Instead, we have an obesity epidemic. At the time they were preaching mass sterilization. China riffed on it and imposed the one child policy which now has them saddled with a lot of young men who can't find wives because the girl babies were murdered.

Speaking as a general rule, it should be ignored based on the history of previous social crises that never happened.

To take just one example, in the 70s, the Population Bomb was widely believed to be a reality already here: If you haven't heard about this, the best known popular culture representation of it is 'Soylent Green'- which was completely serious about it's beliefs. Ehrlich was predicting that England would have food riots cease to exist by 1990, and that the world population would crash. There was not just his book, but multiple other scientific models that supported his theory. He was hugely popular, and was giving advice on things like giving aid to Indian and African famines which basically said 'We should not give them food and let them die, to avoid the even worse consequences later'. He was completely, utterly wrong. His advice, if followed, would have lead to the deaths of millions.

You can read about the fight against neo-Malthusianism here in a short popular article. Bottom line, though, people tend to obsess about the next doomsday scenario and not think too much about how many have fizzled out (few people remember how much people bought into the Y2K apocalypse, just as an example).

We have had any number of other apocalypse scenarios come out, acquire passionate adherents, then utterly flame out. The most recent one was the 'peak oil' theory. Try finding someone to defend that one now. Two years ago they were all over Reddit and popular culture.



TL;DR: If it happens, we'll deal with it then. But I see no reason to rush into it. History predicts that something will happen in the next 10 years that will make BI look like just another cultural obsession amongst a small subgroup. Extending a current trend to infinity assumes trends are straight lines rather than curves. Things will need to get a lot, lot worse before it becomes politically possible to cut people's Social Security benefits. And really, there's not much evidence that we're seeing massive job loss beyond the normal amount that happens during healthy economies.