Comments by "Peter Jacobsen" (@pjacobsen1000) on "South Korea has world’s lowest birth rate" video.

  1. We don't actually know what will happen when a country's population sinks to half or less than what it currently is. The only times this has happened before is during particularly bad wars and during particularly bad epidemics. The Black Plague almost halved Europe's population over a 10 year period in the 14th century. Some people claim this generated the beginnings of modern values like human rights and democratic rule, but that's hard to prove. In the case of the slow decline we now see in East Asia, will there come a time when people suddenly start to have more children again? Perhaps when there are so few people that everyone can own a large piece of land for very little money. That might make food very abundant and almost free, so people no longer need to work, and they'll want to have lots of babies again. It's impossible to predict.
    5
  2.  @rollinghippo2940  Oil will never run out, for the following reason: As the amount of oil we can extract begins to decrease, the price will go up, because demand is still there. The price goes up, it becomes too expensive for many countries, who will seek other forms of energy. By then, solar, wind and nuclear power suddenly look very low priced, so countries will invest more in that. That causes the demand for oil to decrease, then increase again as demand goes up, and the cycle repeats. Every single natural resource works like this, including labor, if we consider ourselves to be natural. Fewer workers mean higher salaries, means higher prices, means lower consumption, means higher unemployment, etc., etc.
    3
  3.  @spectrumboy5992  "serious pressure on the limited resources we have". Actually, we have almost limitless resources. Some types of resources are being depleted, like timber, but others are completely unexploited because we haven't yet found a way to use them. Think of Lithium: Just a few decades ago lithium was an obscure element with little use, but now it looks like it will be crucial for future development. Same with Silicon: Once useless, now very important. Same with Uranium: Once useless, now very important. We have only just begun to discover all the uses for rare earths, and we have hardly started discovering so-called meta-materials, materials that don't really exist in nature, but can be made in a lab. At the other end of the spectrum, trees used to be important for building almost everything and for energy. In the 16th to 19th centuries, many European countries almost ran out of trees and forests for building their navies. But now we use other resources, like steel and cement, and forest coverage in many parts of the world are growing. We used to be short on guano for fertilizer, but now we make it from other things. One day, oil may become a marginal resource, because we have found better and cheaper ways to make energy.
    1