Bluntly: far fewer people, sustainability built into every process, no more oil, very high cost for transportation unless it is by ship, personal transport will be very costly and you won't do it unless you really have to. Think '1850' but with transistors.
That is a very good question, but it is also the wrong question. The better one would be how are we collectively going to avoid nature doing it for us?
Because I don't know what the solution is but I do know that the alternative is going to be no fun at all. One possibility is that we all end up agreeing that we should at least try to reduce our numbers. My parents brought me up with 'replacement' numbers so that we'd end up with a steady population. I'm not so sure if that was wise. And I'm aware that there are many predictions out there that our numbers will eventually top out (they will, either because we do it ourselves, voluntarily or because our resources will run out, an exponentially expanding population in a fixed environment always ends in collapse).
But unless we manage to massively reduce our impact on the environment I don't see a way for the increased consumption and eventual survival of our societies as we know them today. In another comment someone offhandedly asked whether we should all want leisure yachts or not. The obvious answer to that is 'no'. But we probably also shouldn't all want vehicles and the ability to transport ourselves to the end of the world on a whim. Hard choices are ahead of us, the time for easy answers is long behind us.
This has been my "thing" for some time. Now, carrying capacity for Earth is a function, and one of the arguments is lifestyle, but I believe that we are beyond most values of that function for anything beyond "miserable and half-starved." The population will drop. We can do it or Nature will do it for us.
Nature will be wanton, cruel, perhaps overshoot. It will be ugly and horrific. We will not be left in great shape. The only fairness it will possess is unpredictable randomness.
Or, we can do it. Harsh. Belt-tightening. Unpleasant conversations. Lengthy debates about worth. Whole societies wanting their turn at the trough. Deprivation. Lifeboat politics. The Cold Equations in a hot, hot world.
These “unpleasant conversations” have been universally the powerful talking about how to genocide the powerless. Frankly, I’d rather nature do it than follow the population control proposals we’ve seen.
Everybody who decides that what they need to do is kill extremely large numbers of other people can just off themselves instead.
See, this is what I am talking about. You immediately leap to the problems of the past as a way to misinterpret what was said. This is why people simply cannot agree on a way forward and why Nature will be doing it for us. Some have even codified this into an ethical stance.
And so the scavengers will feast and the plagues will bloom again. And because no-one will agree, we will have little local wars over resources. Maybe someone will grab a warhead or two. Technology still keeps happening, so expect at least one plague to be targeted. And some group will have a "if we can't have it, nobody can," so a self-irradiated country will get to keep a resource out of some other group's hands. You'll get real genocides, then.
Nobody wants to participate in the one way of getting their hands bloody, pretending that they won't get bloody later on, up to the elbows.
You can feel free to detail your proposed way forward. But I don't think I've ever seen anything proposed that isn't active genocide of the less powerful, let along anything resembling justice. Maybe all the mass executions in your plan will be of wealthy and middle class Americans. You might surprise me.
... you really can't seem to figure out a third proposal for changing a population number from N to some number less than N? Have you excluded the middle that hard that only orchestrated murder or Nature's nasty negligence are the only things which appear to you? If you are legitimately that baffled, I am not sure we can manage to communicate at all.
That's the problem right there: by asking the question like that you are essentially saying 'children are for the wealthy'. And that's also not how it should be. This is a super hard problem to resolve in a fair way that works in an international setting because you need everybody on board otherwise it will not work. It's the tragedy of the commons endgame.
This is a problem; with the inertia the system is carrying where there are no "ethical" choices left. That's of course no excuse to pick a horribly fascist and evil one. Yet that seems to be the inference in any conversation where you point out that fact that we're basically fucked. "Oh yeah, well obviously you are a genocidal monster. That must mean we're not fucked."
Uh, no. I'm watching this garbage truck smash into the wall, same as you. We're all in the same boat.
I don't care about what people call me, I'm just pointing out there are too many of us. Historically when there were too many people we ended up with wars or famine. I don't think this time around it will be an exception to that rule, but it's the first time this is happening at this scale. In that sense all bets are off, it is also possible that given such stakes humanity can find it in itself to pull the cart as one but I'm not too hopeful about that.
We could easily be in 'adapt or die' territory somewhere in the next century.
We're well into 'uncomfortable truth' territory on this subject, so you can expect namecalling and downvoting rather than discussion, nothing surprising but people don't like to hear that their life style isn't sustainable.
The majority of people around me would rather invest in holidays and luxury goods than sustainability and aim to increase their footprint rather than that they reduce it. I'm just as guilty because I too live in a wealthy country. And even though I bike when I can and have spent a small fortune on making this house less dependent on outside energy I make myself no illusions: I'm still a net negative on the environment, far in excess of any developing world denizen. All I have to do to have that reinforced is to look at our trash can, food bill and fuel bill for the times when we do drive. Each of those alone is probably well in excess of our 'proper' budget that would be sustainable.
And for the life of me without stopping all activity I have no idea how I can further reduce it, this is just the world I happen to live in. I guess I could not have had kids, I guess I could live in a tiny shack. But overall everybody in the developed world will increase the problem by virtue of being alive. That's not good news, but I don't have anything better.
