On The Net
Impending Dooms
by James Patrick Kelly
doomed
In 45 bce, the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero wrote a parable now known as the Sword of Damocles. In the tale a fatuous courtier named Damocles continually flatters Dionysius, an unhappy king who rules over the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Dionysius is rich and powerful and enjoys all the best in life—at least as Damocles sees it. Annoyed, the king challenges Damocles to sit on his throne and experience all the pleasures of kingship. Damocles gladly accepts only to discover to his chagrin that a sword with a killing blade dangles over the seat of power, suspended only by a single strand of horsehair. Yes, this is where the saying “hanging by a thread” comes from. Cicero’s point back then was that those in power, despite all the adulation and perks, must constantly live in fear of losing everything. Over the last two thousand years, the moral of the story has shifted to a more generalized fear of impending doom. The Sword of Damocles symbolizes a situation where something really, really bad could happen pretty much at any time.
We find ourselves in an age of multiple impending dooms. The alarming litany of apocalypses we face includes several where the thread is very thin indeed. I’ve been worried about nuclear war since I was old enough to read science fiction. Fools who still challenge the impacts of climate change are either scientifically illiterate or self-deluding. COVID-19 has taught us how ill-equipped we are to deal with a pandemic in the era of globalization. After all, the most recent pandemic was relatively mild compared to HIV/AIDS and the two bubonic plagues (the Black Death and the Plague of Justinian. Possibly less imminent dooms, but nonetheless scary, are environmental degradation and resource depletion. Let’s not overlook those classic threats that SF writers love to spin into stories: asteroid impact and superintelligent AI.
Good luck sleeping tonight!
the first apocalypse
Your great-great-great-great grandparents (whoever they were) were lucky. They did not live in fear of such global catastrophic risks, because in their time any apocalypse was necessarily localized. A country might get invaded, a plague might ravage a region, an earthquake might level a city, but people on the other side of the world would be just fine. In fact, they might never know what had happened. But in 1798 an English economist wrote a treatise in which he postulated an apocalypse that might affect everyone in the world. Thomas Malthus was thinking hard about population growth when he wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population. He came to the conclusion that people were reproducing way too fast and that someday there would be too many to feed. He did the math—or what he thought was the math—and concluded that population growth would become geometric, while the increase in food production could only be arithmetic. While he advocated for what he called preventive checks on the birth rate, like delaying marriage and having fewer children, he doubted they would solve the problem. Instead he predicted that, at some future time, there would be crueler positive checks on population growth, disasters like war, famine, and disease. Any balance that might be established after a cataclysmic die-off would only start another cycle of overpopulation.
For the next hundred and fifty years, the future Malthus prophesied remained hypothetical. If you check population growth from prehistory to now, you’ll see the centuries of slow growth until the curve swoops up suddenly and alarmingly in our lifetimes. When Malthus published, the world population was just under a billion. A hundred years later in 1900 it was 1.6 billion, while in 2000 it had soared to 6.1 billion! Twenty-five years later? Don’t ask! But the middle of the last century saw multiple breakthroughs in agriculture, collectively known as the Green Revolution. Improvements in plant genetics and irrigation systems and the introduction of chemical fertilizers and pesticides created huge food surpluses. Some of these innovations had problematic side effects, particularly fertilizers and pesticides. Meanwhile, current irrigation practices are putting a strain on our lakes and rivers, threatening depletion of our water resources. However, despite the devastating famines we have witnessed, there is plenty to eat worldwide. Localized shortages can happen when economic and political interests interfere with the distribution of surplus food, but we have yet to suffer global distress.
Malthus’s ideas have influenced the course of politics, economics, and environmental science for the past two centuries. Charles Darwin cited him as an influence on his theories about the impact of competition on the processes of natural selection and evolution. John Maynard Keynes adapted some of Mathus’s thinking on populations and resource scarcity to form his own theories about economic stability. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 alarmist bestseller The Population Bomb sparked environmental activism and changed government policies on birth control and sterilization.
It should come as no surprise that Malthus’s work also struck a chord with science fiction writers, given our genre’s obsession with dystopias. A flood of reactions to his dark future began in the 1950s, ironically at the same time that the Green Revolution was starting to undercut his dire predictions. One of the first was C.M. Kornbluth’s ruthless 1951 satire “The Marching Morons”, in which the problem is not only that there are too many people, but also that the overwhelming majority of them are the eponymous morons. The theme of overpopulation quickly made the leap to novel length, with classics like Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress, and our own Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside. For a handy checklist of overpopulation fiction, click over to Science Fiction Novels/Short Stories about Overpopulation, one of many excellent entries on the Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog. Hollywood’s take on Malthus has been much less inspired, with mostly middling efforts like the campy Logan’s Run, adapted from the novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson; Soylent Green, loosely based on Make Room! Make Room!; and Elysium.
However, the peak of the overpopulation stories in science fiction may already have passed. As the irreplaceable Science Fiction Encyclopedia points out, “. . . the fashionability of overpopulation stories in SF has waned dramatically since 1980, partly in accordance with a general tendency to skip over the most frightening problems of the Near Future. . . .” Yes, we’ve got scarier apocalypses to fuel our nightmares, as we saw above. But there is a demographic change on the horizon that will also lead to an unexpected conclusion of the overpopulation problem—and the start of a new crisis in its mirror image.
reversal
As I type this, the population of the world is 8,200,000,000. (I told you not to ask, but I knew you would!) That it has soared 150 percent in the last sixty years would not have surprised Malthus. However, consider that back in 1965 women were having 5.3 children in their lifetime, while by 2025, that number sank to 2.2. The continued increase in population while the birth rate has plummeted is due to increased life expectancy and decreased infant mortality. However, there are limits to those welcome advances in medicine and social policy. This is why the United Nations Population Fund predicts that global fertility will drop to the minimum replacement level of 2.1 by the middle of the century. Two-thirds of us live right now in a country that has sub-replacement fertility with Japan and Korea well below. As older generations die, Europe and Southeast Asia be the first to experience an actual population decline, certainly before 2050. Other regions like South and North America will keep growing the near term, but peak before 2100.
What is going on here? According to Our World In Data, there are many trends coinciding here. The most important is that women have been able to win increased access both to education and the labor market. Having autonomy over their life choices means they can delay marriage and childbirth. Widespread access to contraception and family planning makes these kinds of decisions possible. Also, as they assert their right to be full participants in the economies of their countries, women have more financial incentives to keep working. In the U.S., 47 percent of adults under fifty without kids say they’re unlikely to have them. Another factor in the decreasing birth rate is the decrease in child mortality rates. Parents no longer feel the need to have many children to ensure that some will survive to adulthood. For those parents living in developed economies, the costs of raising children has continued to increase, while in less prosperous parts of the world, policies that restrict child labor and promote public education mean that children may no longer contribute to household income. And then, returning again to our fears of impending apocalypse, a 2025 study about future anxiety found “feelings of fear and uncertainty about the consequences of having a child or concerns about the child’s future are strongly linked to the common motives behind the decision to postpone parenthood.”
exit
We can hardly call Malthus to account for his failure to foresee the Green Revolution, since he formed his ideas well before many advances in science like cell theory or genetics. And he was most certainly a man of his time when it came to the status of women. In his ideal society, men made the decisions and provided for their families. Women were defined by their relationship to men and their responsibilities within the household. He could not have imagined the decline of the patriarchy that would contribute to a population decline he was so confident would never happen.
But if a resolution to his overpopulation conundrum is in prospect before the end of this century, how is humankind to cope with what could be an underpopulation apocalypse in the next? Thinking readers want to know! Science fiction writers, get busy!