Women and Humanity’s Coming Extinction
September 17, 2011
A recent report by the United Nations found that fertility rates are diminishing, a process which has a major impact on humanity and its future. As women give birth to less daughters, human population will continue to decrease substantially. For example, as the Economist mentioned in a recent article, Hong Kong which has a .547 net reproduction rate (basically 547 daughters born out of 1000 women), would take about 25 generations for its female population to shrink from 3.75m to just one with that last woman there being born in 2798. Using the same logic, the population of Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy and even China would not make it to see the end of the next millennium (see chart). In a world with over 7 billion people, we often forget how fragile humanity and human life is and how the extinction of species, including ours, either by choice or nature is never too far way regardless of our delusions of greatness and our faith in gods or the power of science and technology.
