BewaConsensus Science

> By the time there are space colonies and the means of
> getting there worked out the population of the world
> may be shrinking not expanding. This is because the
> educated do not have enough children to replace
> themselves and the poor are wiped out by diseases,
> natural disasters, etc.

Well, that is not true (except in extreme cases), because as technology
progresses it becomes cheap enough to be acquired/assimilated even by
the poor. As a result, the vast majority of the population growth along
the later half of the 20th Century happened in poor countries, because
they were not-so-poor that they could not take sanitary and agricultural
measurements to promote the death of less children and the production of
more food.

Also, if it is true that, as a general pattern, educated people tend to
under-reproduce, then civilizations of educated people are simply doomed
to go extinct (and replaced by "uneducated people") in a couple of
centuries.

However, I think that "educated people" may not be an accurate label for
the members of the kind of society that under-reproduce. I think that
the kind of society with under-reproduction is simply the one that gives
equal rights and opportunities to men and women and where it is not
considered a moral duty to the society to have children. The fact that
the West fits that definition *and* has an average level of education
higher than other civilizations may be a coincidence; I think that we
have just too few examples of civilizations to make bold generalizations.

Even though, maybe the West will escape extinction because there are
some very small Western populational groups that would not fit the
definition above - Fundamentalist Catholics, for instance. Or perhaps
the West will shift to baby factories a la "Brave New World". :-)