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Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
Medicine has increased life expectancy, and you can say it is part of industrialization. Could we have gotten as far as we have with medicine without the rest, or most of the rest of industrialization? I don't know, perhaps not.
But as for "billions of people who existed due to fossil fuel exploitation" is completely false. The industrial revolution did not increase population growth and in fact countries that are industrialized tend to have lower birth rates. If we hadn't gone into an industrial revolution there would be more people than there are now. And as more countries become more and more industrialized the worlds population will stop growing and start shrinking. So no, you can't attribute the existence of tens of billions of people to the exploitation of fossil fuels.
But in the end, having fewer people but that live longer isn't necessarily a bad thing either. So yes, in some ways some people live longer due to technology and an industrialized world, and others die younger. I wonder what the total life expectancy would be if you included all the people who have died that can be attributed to industrialization, such as people who died in modern warfare or in third world countries affected by things like pollution.
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What do you assume explains this chart of global population? Do you think a graph of energy consumption per capita would follow the population trend?
Pre-industrialization, life was nasty, brutish, and short. Children were necessary because human/animal labor was all there was, and modern contraception didn't exist. In the months with fairer weather, the young men would go off to war since taking stuff has more profit potential than toiling in the mud. Slaves were taken, because again, a person is a machine that can do work.
Did the civilized world become civilized because they sat around, thought real hard, and came up with the idea that slavery is wrong? There is more slavery in the world now than any other point in history, and it all exists in impoverished places where people don't have affordable, abundant energy and machines to labor for them.
If we massively reduced energy consumption, we'd simply revert back to tribalism and slavery. We're not better behaved because our DNA is superior, we're better behaved because relative wealth has made us docile.
The information age has made us uninterested in sacrificing to pursue and maintain a relationship with the opposite sex because we've all become unappealing not only in our gluttony, but given idealized portrayals of other people in our media. When Adam met Eve, he knew he had the most beautiful woman in the world. Now with 7 billion people, we're pretty confident our mates aren't the best, plus children are expensive hassles. Much easier and less costly ways to get a dopamine hit.
Seems to me both causes are true, that industrialization (abundant energy) made us wealthy and populous, and then made us distracted and unappealing.
The only folks still reproducing like crazy don't have access to distractions. They don't even know man has landed on the moon. Give them Sex and the City and porn, and they'd stop reproducing as well.