And prosper?

It’s common to talk (as I sort-of did back here) as if cheap energy solves, if not everything, all the big stuff. But might it just bring more problems in its wake — perhaps by pushing the human population so high that much of the rest of the natural world is pushed out, or perhaps through some other dire and unforeseen consequence? . . .

I don’t think that higher standards of living necessarily correlate with worse environmental outcomes. And I don’t think energy breakthroughs will have the same sort of demographic effect that fossil fuelled modernioty has But I am aware that it is an inductive argument. The history of the past few centuries suggests that the phenomenon of the demographic transition is real: from a situation where birth rates and death rates are both high, you move to a situation where death rates drop (leading to an expansion of the population) that is followed after a lag by a period where birth rates drop, too, and the population thus stabilises. . .

It’s a bit end-of-history to think that humanity goes through millennia of premodernity, a couple of centuries of transition and population growth and then millennia of postindustrial population stasis, end of. This seems to be demographics a la Christopher Robin: “Now we are six we’re as clever as clever, and we think we’ll stay six for ever and ever”.

I too anticipate, but can't predict, unforeseen consequences. Clean, cheap energy can enable solutions to many, many current concerns, but we always find something to worry about.

I have spent some cycles thinking about how very, very long life might affect demographics. Many have written about it. There are some entertaining fictional works that deal with it. Advances in the biological sciences could hugely affect energy scenarios. I once said

We have two pressing problems - the need for energy and the need for food. With energy we can develop nations and with food we can feed growing populations. It's not automatic or simple, but with these two problems conceptually solved the difficult details of owning and operating a civilization can receive our full attention.

I don't expect these difficult details to ever be solved.