Man and Superman: Rationalizing Populations

In order to give focus to some major changes she sees on the horizon, Sramana Mitra has written several pieces that grew out of her original article, Man and Superman: Human History Bifurcates. The previous articles in this series: Man and Superman: Two Distinct Species, Man and Superman: What CAN Be Controlled? Please share your thoughts and help get the conversation going.

World population has been ballooning for years. As of August 2016, it was 7.4 billion, projected to increase to 8 billion in 2024, and 11.2 billion in 2100.

If the Man and Superman bifurcation happens, and a very small population of very rich, highly enhanced human beings segregate from the mainstream, the world will be in a deep funk.

Providing welfare services – universal basic income, food, healthcare – for 10 billion people will be an impossible task.

Under these circumstances, those countries with declining birth rates stand to gain from their populations rationalizing over a couple of generations. China’s population, for example, because of its earlier one child policy, is declining, such that, by 2090, it may fall below a billion. Other countries like Japan and Germany are also showing population decline projections.

The problem is India. With ballooning population growth, the country may hit 1.7 billion people within the twenty first century.

Add to this the trend of increasing longevity. On socialized healthcare, if 10 billion people’s life spans need to be sustained to a hundred years, the fiscal equation is unlikely to balance.

Hence, governments will need to have policies on who gets treatment, for what ailment, and for how long.

Governments should also have policies around utilizing innovations such as genetic engineering to eliminate identifiable diseases at the embryonic level.

All of the above assumes that the current world order of humanistic, largely democratic political systems, still drive society at that point. Even autocratic societies like China practice humanism. So protecting the human being’s rights and wellbeing remains the guiding principle.

But Evolution doesn’t take humanism into account.

Evolution, traditionally, has been a survival of the fittest phenomenon.

The species level question that looms large is whether the 10 billion people supported by welfare will be fit enough to survive in the long run.

The smaller Superman species WILL survive. In fact, it will dominate the earth, and perhaps beyond.

But in 500 years, Man may die out.

Historians and Anthropologists from the Superman species will look back in 3000 A. D. and pinpoint specific moments as those when Man’s extinction path was paved with certainty.

That moment would be about NOW.

This segment is a part in the series : Man and Superman