Vanishing People: the Population Crisis - by Ryan McEntush
Back in the 90s, my elementary school teachers all agreed on the topic of people: there were way too many of us. If the problem of global overpopulation wasn’t soon addressed, they calmly explained to nine-year-olds, we would starve to death. Decades later, all evidence indicates our teachers were right to warn us of an impending population crisis, they just got the details exactly backwards. Today, all evidence indicates the real problem is not that there are too many of us, but that we appear to be vanishing.
There’s been a lot of recent talk about the looming population crash across the developed world, but it’s a fairly counterintuitive topic, and there’s still no real primer on the issue. So I hit up Ryan McEntush, and asked for a deep dive.
When asked about the source of his inspiration, Elon Musk appeals to a refreshingly simple philosophy: we must protect and spread the rare spark of human consciousness. In this light, his titanic ventures make sense. He pursues complex problems few would dare go up against, and for this reason what worries him should utterly terrify the rest of us.
