Talk to any couple who has had difficulty conceiving, and the humanity of this "first world problem" gets brought into perspective.
You "bear" a child because you have love to give and to share. It's not about you, but about giving selflessly. I'm not judging what this is, or why. But this is not that. This is about the parents. The irony is disturbing.
The people thinking what you're thinking must be very young or have some strange sociopathy.
I don’t think this is an issue of the “American“ perspective or something like that.
Who said this was the most important problem anyway?
Are you, personally, working on solving a particularly important problem?
Most people in the world aren't solving problems anyway, other than getting money from other people's wallets into their own.
In fact, today is the best time in history to have children (or in your phrasing, today is the least selfish time in human history to have a child). Humanity is radically more capable of supporting another baby now than at any other time. It isn't even remotely a close contest.
Questions of resources? No it's not. We're drowning in food, take a look at the massive boom in Russian wheat production as one example. Global food potential is far beyond where we're at now, likely by a magnitude. We don't know what to do with it all. And that's before we take it up another level and move to drastically more productive food output methods, including indoor farming, AI + robotics, growing meat, better information management & knowledge globally, etc; and that's while we're still acting very inefficient with our existing food (throwing vast amounts of it away). Merely developing Africa's food potential alone will feed billions more people.
Maybe you're thinking energy? Have you seen the massive boom in solar and wind? That's going to get a lot more massive yet. We're intentionally under-developing nuclear, because right now it doesn't look like we're going to need it. Renewables are making up the majority of all new energy production globally, that tilt is going to get more extreme by the year. If the world had to do it, we could collectively throw trillions of dollars at nuclear immediately, and boost global energy output substantially within a few decades.
To date, humanity is batting a thousand at not going extinct due to challenges. Climate change will be no different.
Pretty sure most people who want to be parents dont really think about those issues when having kids. It might be important for you but its not for those new parents.
Geothermal, wind, solar, heat, tide, etc. currently amount to a staggering 1.5% of the total primary energy supply of the world. Coil is at 28%, oil is at 31%, natural gas at 22% (and climbing), nuclear at 5%, etc. CO2 emissions continue climbing year after year, and we should have started going down more than twenty years ago.
Our agricultural system is completely dependent on fossil fuels (oil). Because of that it is mostly unsustainable, and also because it tends to destroy fertile lands (topsoil loss is kind of a big issue).
You are kind of right that the current system can support a lot of people. Unfortunately, almost none of it is sustainable. So making more people is really not a good idea at the moment, because the situation will change drastically over the next 80 years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-reports-a-maj...
The problem isn't Africa. The problem is billions of people living a middle-class lifestyle - even with growth rates at or slightly below replacement.
Short-sighted people with more money than awareness doesn't feel like a great way to describe a future parent(s).
Not at all. If I'm supposing anything is that the word priorities is a word most people don't know but should.
> Short-sighted people with more money
Turns out people with money (aka developed countries) the birth rate is falling (or already has fallen) below replacement.
Population is not the problem, population with an American lifestyle is a problem.