Power Line's Steve Hayward posts a chart showing data from the UN and World Bank, here it is.
The stunner is in the headline, "Global fertility, set to fall below the replacement rate." Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb couldn't have been more wrong about population growth.
That's the problem with projecting current trends out into the future. Sometimes a thing you believe is an immutable part of human nature turns out - given technological help and social change - to be a variable.
Human sex drive is powerful; however birth control disconnected it from reproduction. Religions complain, but birth rates are also dropping in places where the dominant faith or political ideology would have it otherwise.
Can you imagine writing the following sentence? "It is possible that the last South Korean will be born some time late in this century."
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Humans have wondered why our Earth hasn't been visited by space-faring extraterrestrials who had a couple of thousand years head start on us. Leave aside that perhaps we've been visited but they chose to be discreet and not mess with our heads by creating culture or tech shock.
Perhaps there is a point - one we humans are just reaching - when most or all intelligent species get control over whether they choose to be burdened with child-raising. Maybe liking the freedom, they basically quit. It might coincide with when the species gets substantial control over aging, enabling Methuselah-like lives for some.
