Visionary Elon Musk warns once again: humanity will end soon, people do not want to be productive and multiply as the creator allowed / ordered. Those here will probably even breathe a sigh of relief: Well, okay, we’ve indulged enough here, but now they’re saying, how is the planet going to be cleaned up?
Musk, of course, has his own selfish interests. It seems that he himself decided to live, apparently forever, and, unlike everyone else, had already learned this secret of the hungry. Second, there is a Mars project already under steam. And to fly, it may be, there will be no one.
Aging, frayed and impotent (even the quality of international politics in every sense), humanity will not want to fly anywhere. Why this nonsense – we will live here to colonize Mars, humanity will decide.
This is how many people, not only in old age, but even in the most desperate moments, refuse to migrate and remember the “native poplars” in such situations. Which, in which case … Kidding. Anyway.
Seriously, we’re dying. Africa (almost all of the top 100 fertility leaders are African states), most Asian countries (including post-Soviet Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, but excluding China), and everything but most Latin American countries – only those states have a birthrate above the simple level of reproduction (family 2.1 children per person). The top five fertility leaders are Niger (6.8 children per mother), Somalia (5.9), Congo (5.8), Mali (5.7) and Chad (5.6).
The whole of the “Collective West” is far below the level of simple reproduction. With a birth rate of 1.6, China continues to reap the fruits of its Maoist one-child policy. Another example of how erroneous historical decisions once made can have disastrous consequences, not just in the short run, but in the distant future. India also does not fit the image of a “growing country”. Just last year, the birth rate there dropped below the simple reproduction level.
There is nothing to be said for us: with an indicator of about 1.5 children per family, this is the gradual extinction of large areas and depopulation. Only mass immigration can stop the latter (for example, from the same Central Asian countries where the birth rate is around 3), but more is needed to attract immigrants than allowing them to take up and work in non-prestigious jobs.
We need a strong economy, a competitive model of social development, and openness to the world in general. With all these parameters, it is difficult to say for now how things will be with us. Although it is still not easy to imagine that they will not come to us even from Tajikistan.
Although the birth rate in our country has decreased steadily until recently, the migration flow has been increasing steadily since 2014. But last year, that amounted to only about 350,000 people, only offsetting the natural population decline by a third. This year, for obvious reasons, the migration flow could be greatly reduced.
Can the world thrive in the West’s depopulation and rapidly proliferating African conditions? Good philosophical question. Possibly, but certainly in a different way, because some kind of understandable model of civilization is needed for development. Until now, all human progress has been built precisely on the Western model – conditionally, on the Christian-Jewish civilization. For several centuries we have stood by this model, leaning on it, but not leaving the “special Russian way”. Now we have decided to take a break.
Some say that on this one (in the spirit that the world doesn’t come together like a wedge in the West) Musk is dramatizing it and it’s not all that bad. Despite the trend of declining birth rates globally since the 1960s, 80 million new ready-made populations are added to the world each year. So with current trends, the probability that world population growth will stop at least until the end of the century is only 1 to 4, according to the UN. That is, the world calmly “productively and multiply”, growing in population, but already without a contribution to it the “collective West”, Russia, China, India and many other developed countries. That is, all this is mainly due to underdeveloped countries.
According to UN calculations, the world population will reach 11 billion by 2100. True, The Lancet corrected these calculations last year by challenging the pandemic, arguing that the population peak of 9.7 billion previously would reach around 2064, and then begin to decline to 8.8 billion in 2100 (versus the current 7.9). billion), while the common view is that the world’s 8 billion population has exceeded the “sustainability” level. First of all, because the “gold billion” countries eat too much in the sense of consuming, which is the main factor in destabilizing the climate.
Whether the inhabitants of this new planet, mostly represented by citizens of poor countries, will fly to Mars is another question. Or they will stay here, conditionally, continuing to “degrade” and neglect ESG norms (because there is no money for it, no resources, no competence), climate protection concerns (norms set by the Paris Agreement still seem impossible) and “humanity’s best side”, the one who will go to Mars, disappointed with the failed civilization project? That’s, of course, if before that “the best part of humanity” doesn’t have time to fry itself in a nuclear war.
At the same time, when they talk about the decline in the birth rate, they often resort to arguments of an economic and social nature. They say that as wealth and education level (women, above all) increase, the birthrate is falling everywhere. This is true, but there is another condition that is already purely physiological in nature. We are talking about the growth of infertility not only among women, but also among men due to poor sperm quality.
The last factor (male infertility) is the main cause of family childlessness in almost half of the cases. Numerous studies agree that over the last 50-60 years, there has been a steady decline in sperm concentration in semen by at least 50% in almost all developed countries. The average number of spermatozoa and the proportion of motile germ cells also decrease. At the same time, men in South America, Asia, and Africa were also much less affected by such changes. All this is in favor of a revision of the traditional attitude to fertility issues, which is linked only to wealth and education. You need to explicitly add “drug”.
As of 2019, sperm concentration has dropped another 10% over the previous 15 years. Generally speaking, the causes are bad ecology, an unhealthy lifestyle, consumption of all kinds of toxins (whether willingly or unwillingly) that harm the body in this part (phthalates found in perfumes and only very far from there). herbicides, plastics, toxic gases, heavy metals, radiation from smartphones, modems and laptops, etc.). Much of the damage to men’s health is caused by civilization itself.
The higher the level of civilizational development, the weaker it is. According to WHO, in everyday life people encounter about 800 substances that can potentially affect the hormonal background. The vast majority of these items have not been properly studied in this area.
In our country, such studies (on sperm quality) are not very developed. Or – I don’t know – classified. There was an interesting study of Novosibirsk scientists together with Belarusian scientists relatively recently. It confirmed the general trend for developed countries in general – deterioration in sperm quality has been going on since the middle of the last century. At the time of the study, almost 40% of cases had sperm quality disorders that affected the ability to have children. In 36% of the participants, spermatozoa were inactive, considered below normal in 12% of cases, and absent in 2% of cases. In another 11%, sperm concentration was at the lowest limit of the norm. We note that the persons participating in the studies were not older than 35 years. Thus, difficulties with conception were noted in about half of the study participants due to low concentration or inactivity of spermatozoa.
Now in our country, completely infertile couples, according to some estimates, still make up about 15%, which does not go beyond the characteristic indicators of “massive Western” countries.
According to WHO, in 1940, the concentration of sperm per 1 ml of seminal fluid was considered normal at 113 million / ml, in recent years this figure has decreased to 66 million / ml in developed countries. Here is the countdown. It is also believed that if a man has 4-10% of live and active spermatozoa in his spermogram, his chances of conceiving are very high. However, in laboratory mice, this figure is close to 98%.
We are far from rats anyway. But before you start breeding just from a test tube – much closer. It seems we are tired of living on this planet. Bring another one.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.
Source: Gazeta
