The pollution problem can be addressed through cleaner technology

The natural trend in terms of population growth is that rates of childbirth slow down significantly once a country is fully industrialized

The places where overpopulation is an actual serious problem are not yet at this stage. But IIRC the prediction is that global population will plateau around 9 billion or so, which in itself isn't an unsustainable number, assuming we can get the cleaner technology required to cut down in pollution and improve our farming methods to make them less damaging

It's not hard to be misled by a statistic - it's happened to me enough times and may even be happening to me now.

A reducing birthrate sounds quite comforting, but the net number of births worldwide keeps going up, which kind of negates the good news. This isn't the precise maths, but I hope it shows the paradox behind a dwindling birthrate statistic:-

If Adam and Eve had 2 kids, they doubled the world pop in a generation. (Adam + Eve + 2= 4). Now we have 7 billion, so even if every married couple has only 1 kid (= "reducing birthrate"), that's still another 3.5 billion in one generation, which takes us way off the scale of this graph:-

http://www.worldpopulationbalance.or...line-large.gif

I'm afraid I'm not convinced that this exponential growth is going to plateau any time soon.

Food production methods aren't just limited to farming though. They could build dozens of those greenhouse skyscrapers out in the middle of all that empty space in Montana and grow enough food for hundreds of millions of people just there.

no offense but that's not only not precise math, it's completely misguided. If every breeding couple in the world only had 1 kid the population would drop notably after few generations (because in addition to being born, people also tend to die).

And that graph is stretched over a vast period of time, most of which is pre industrial. The industrial revolution is what caused the population boom because we became able to feed and provide for a lot more people.

But paradoxically, the more industrialized and rich a country becomes the more likely they are to experience a significant reduction in birth rates. To the point where countries like Germany are turning to mass immigration to try to supply the next generation of workers as their native population ages.

The trend is very clear. Here's the list of countries fertility rate.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/cou...ertility-rate/

It's also worth noting that most of the troubling and somewhat doomsday type predictions of the past regarding overpopulation have been consistently wrong. From Malthus onward. We have a long history of over estimating the threat it poses.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/fut...tion-explained

Just as predicting population explosion by old birth rates isn't necessarily accurate, predicting that innovations will solve problems of pollution and food is likewise counting your eggs before they hatch. We already have pollution and global climate devastation on a catastrophic level and while birth rates may be declining consumption is still sky high and societies all over the globe have shown themselves to be unwilling or unable do anything intelligent to stop it. Predicting that we'll magically save ourselves and the world with bacteria or whatever is like people from the 60s assuming we'd have jetpacks and flying cars.

I'm not saying we necessarily will I'm saying it's our best hope

I think trying to convince people not to breed is a much more pie in the sky hope. That is, assuming you don't go full on NWO and start introducing FEMA death camps and a global one child policy.

Also the jetpacks and flying cars analogy is silly

There's no real pragmatic incentive for those things compared to cleaner and more efficient technology

I agree, but unfortunately China and eugenics in general have rather made it taboo to even talk about overpopulation as a problem at all.

The incentive doesn't seem to mean much so I stand by my analogy.