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This article is adapted from Thomas Moynihan’s book “X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.”
Only after new methods emerged for assessing statistics did the previously invisible entity now called ‘population’ become a target for objective investigation, argues Thomas Moynihan, writer from the U.K., currently working with Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute.
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| The Classification of Humankind, and the Birth of Population Science Photo: MIT Press Reader |
He was talking not about extinction, but the natural paring back of populations. Indeed, Malthus remained unconcerned about outright extermination because he was so convinced of the natural tendency of populations to expand explosively, leading to poverty and starvation. A population tends to overshoot its means of subsistence, he noted, precisely because it grows in a nonlinear or exponential fashion (while growth in the availability of sustenance, he thought, tends to grow in a linear or arithmetic fashion)...
Before the appropriate mathematical tools of abstraction were in place, no one had consistently thought of humanity in this way, at the level of an aggregated population or as a global mass. Only after these first steps in new methods for assessing statistics did the previously invisible entity now called ‘population’ solidify as a target for objective investigation. And this meant, of course, that its dynamics were suddenly capable of being mathematically retrodicted and predicted...
But how many future generations could there be? Remember that Malthus himself acknowledged that it is within the power of population to “fill millions of worlds.” Experts today now think of this (and much more) as achievable. This means there could be unimaginable amounts of future people, leading highly valuable lives. And this gives us some sense of just what’s at stake in our survival.
Recommended Reading
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| X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction |
Source: The MIT Press Reader
