Terror 28 Years till Doom
It is the 24th of April, 2018.
"Uh, Houston, we've had a problem," as the man said. We have seen numbers that suggest the fertility in Sweden, and by extension the productive middle class worldwide will collapse in 2024. If the youngest person in that class is 50 or over, it is hard to see how our high-tech civilization can survive. We’d expect a calamity around 2074.
And now we have folic acid, pretty much given to women in the middle class worldwide, reducing fertility in fruit flies by maybe 50%. Since the fertility in the middle class is, and has been for about 30 years, below 2, that leaves a fractional baby per woman. That would be zero. Oh, you say that’s an average. Maybe, but you can’t be sure. Folic acid supplementation began in 1986. Women born having babies since then have had babies impacted by the supplement, and just might be infertile anyway. They will reach 38 in 2024.
If the American era began in 1776, and if the rule of the 300 year brick wall holds, our civilization will collapse in 2076 at the latest, with the youngest person reaching 50 at that time born in 2026 or slightly before.
I think one might be forgiven for squirming a bit. Of course, it might be possible to transfer our science and technology to less developed countries, but that would be insufficient. The must be transferred to people not presently in the middle class; there are lots of middle class people in every country, but they may be keeping pace with the global middle class.
All right, we have one more data set that we might draw on. We’ve seen it before. It’s Long House Valley.
Jared M. Diamond, “Life with the Artificial Anasazi,” NATURE, vol. 419 no 6907, October 10, 2002 p 567
Ignoring the blue tree ring line, which I take to be the result of human activity, the red population line dives to zero in the year 1300. That would be when the last person reached 50 years old, assuming any society needs a certain amount of bull work done that only a young man can accomplish. That would mean the last baby was born in 1250.
The number of occupied houses continues to rise for about another 20 years, so the “population” is rising but that may only mean more people are reaching 20 years old and starting their own homes.
After a slump, a building boom starts in about 1150. That would imply a baby boom 20 years earlier or 1130. So the time from the last baby boom to the last baby is 1130 to 1250 or 120 years.
Our own baby boom started in 1946. If we follow the same time course, the last baby will be born 120 years later or 2066.
So there is a ray of hope. Ignoring all the other lines of reasoning, that gives us 48 years. That is long enough so it might be possible to accomplish something.
But we’d need to start working on the pdq.