At one point in my new novella The Million, our hero Gavin is crossing Europe by airship. Gazing out the windows, he sees this:
There were no settlements. Elephants, boars, lions, and the ancient bull of legend, the aurochs, wandered at will. Now and then the zeppelin would pass one of the museum cities. Often, nothing remained but the cathedrals, which had been built to last. Some cities had been tended well, and thousands of years of architectural glory were on display, all of it lovingly tended by the bots that walked their plazas and alleys.
Dusk chased the sun into France and Iberia, and the Alps rolled by. Their peaks were the last to catch the light, and the mountaintops blazed like a thousand bonfires for a few minutes before night fell entirely. Now the land below was invisible, cloaked in a blackness it had not seen while the cities had been inhabited. The sky blazed with stars and the Milky Way bannered across them like a conqueror’s flag.
It’s an empty world. But The Million is not a post-apocalyptic dystopia. On the contrary, The Million could be our best hope, and the Earth’s.
There’s a term that futurists use: “the default future.” The default future is what we assume is going to happen, as a matter of obvious fact. Its assumptions are so deeply ingrained that we don’t even know they’re there. For instance, current popular culture typically imagines one of just three possible future Earths: an Orwellian dystopia, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or a space-faring urban hypercivilization. It seems to be really hard for people to think out of this particular box; the default future of the 1960s was exactly what Gene Rodenberry wanted to challenge when he crafted Star Trek’s future as post-scarcity, post-racist and post-war. At the time, many people were shocked and even outraged at his vision.
I’m as prone to thinking in defaults as anyone; I set Lady of Mazes in a settled Solar system that has a population of seventy billion people—a pretty standard “Tomorrowland” scenario. That made for some great worldbuilding, but at some point, while writing the book, I began to wonder what all those seventy trillion were for:
“You’re wallpaper, Ishani,” said Charon. “You can’t have a thought that a million other people aren’t having, you can’t do anything that a million other people aren’t also doing. It doesn’t matter what you say or whether you live or die because a million other you’s are there to take your place. So why should I care what you do to me? You’re wallpaper.”
I began to realize that I was living in a labyrinth without exits. You see that you have a choice: either exist as wallpaper, and accept that there’s nothing you can do that hasn’t been done before, nothing you can say that hasn’t been said, nothing you can think that a million others aren’t thinking right this second… or else, allow inscape to craft some unique, fulfilling, and utterly unreal fantasy world for you to live in. Any attempt to fight the system becomes part of the system. There is no escape.
One day I thought: why should humanity expand limitlessly? Why not go the other way? …And so, I stumbled out of my own default future.
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The Million
In The Million, there are only one million people on Earth; only one million are allowed. This small population has inherited all of humanity’s wealth, history, art and riches. What this means is that the museum cities that Gavin passes over aren’t entirely empty; they are family homes, and the regions he passes—Brittany, Burgundy, Champagne; Fribourg, Lucerne, Bavaria—these are people’s yards.
This might all sound crazy, but I submit that it only seems that way because it’s the opposite of our default future. We assume that prosperity, success, and sustainability are tied directly to growth—of physical wealth, of our mastery of nature, of knowledge and technology—but also growth in population. There was probably a time when this was true: for the struggling empires of the nineteenth century, population was power. At this very moment, it’s probably also true; but is it going to continue to be, even in the near future of our own lifetimes?
Automation is maintaining our quality of life while reducing the need for human labor. Meanwhile, it seems that family sizes naturally decline when women are educated and in control of their own fertility, and people’s nutrition and health care are taken care of. In fact, we’ve got a pretty good idea of the maximum number of humans that will ever simultaneously live on this planet, and it’s not much more than we’ve got now. Walter Greiling projected 9 billion back in the 1950s, and recent projections are similar. Our cities are getting more crowded, but it’s because more people are moving into them, not because there are that many more people. Two billion will join us before the mid-point of the century, and then, we level off.
But should we? Sharing the wealth among nine billion will be hard. In many nations, birth-rates are on the decline. Shouldn’t we encourage that trend?
Here’s a proposal: let’s get smaller. Imagine a future where the economy is increasingly automated and taps into the infinite resources of outer space; and where humanity shares a core of common goods such as Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, and free education. These aren’t fantasies, they’re trends. Now add to this mix a naturally declining population that retains its genetic diversity. The formula for our future becomes: more and more wealth, divided among fewer and fewer people.
In material terms alone, the results are staggering. Imagine if your family owned Paris? Or was responsible for tending the Catskill Mountains? What does wealth mean when robotics, automation and AI mean that each person can have, not money or an income, but his or her own economy? When kids learn history by reenacting the Battle of the Somme with real robot armies? When you don’t watch movies, you have the entire story including sets, car chases and crowd scenes, played out for you by troops of android players?
For some people, whether this is a Utopia or nightmare scenario depends entirely on whether Earth’s remaining million are people they’d approve of. Some cling to the belief that humanity is fighting a titanic struggle, a zero-sum war between civilizations, cultures, races or religions. The Million will be paradise if Our Guys are the only ones left standing, but Hell if it’s the Other Guys.
A funny thing happens, though, when you imagine shrinking our population down like this—to a billion, a million, or even further (though I didn’t call the story The Thousand, that possibility did cross my mind). As our numbers decrease, the value of our diversity increases. The Million is a lens through which we can see ever more clearly, and regret even more, the crimes our ancestors committed in wiping out entire civilizations. The libraries of Alexandria and of the Mayans were burned; thousands of languages have gone extinct, taking with them millennia of wisdom. How much art and music have we expunged over the ages? And if we were to continue? It could all go, save for the bland entertainments of that tiny leftover, a rump human race blinking stupidly in the ruins.
Or, it could go another way.
When you play the game of reducing humanity, the obvious question becomes what quantity do you stop at, and why? What’s the smallest viable future human population? The lower limit isn’t set by population genetics (because we can now bank our DNA to guarantee a pool of diversity), nor by any threat of extinction (because for every credible threat, a rich technological civilization can design a countermeasure). I see two criteria that can help us set the limit; both are interesting, and surprisingly Utopian.
First, as E.O. Wilson has pointed out in his powerful book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, our current civilization has wildly overrun our planet’s ecological carrying capacity. We could indulge a post-scarcity fantasy and propose an Earth with billions of people on it who live in a regreened natural world. But we’d have to explain how Earth can be post-scarcity for the trees, grasslands, and animals while we’re still sprawled all over the real estate. Wilson’s solution is to give half the planet back to nature; it’s hard to imagine how to do this without crowding all of us into some kind of planetary ghetto. Reducing our population works better for everybody.
Secondly, there’s that matter of the zero-sum game. The model of civilizational warfare makes no sense if you consider all of our human accomplishments to be treasures. The rope bridges of the Inca and the Egyptian pyramids, the story cycles of the Haida and the paintings of Rembrandt—they’re all part of humanity’s inheritance. The Million could be the inheritors.
How few people does it take to appreciate and keep alive the full splendor of human achievement?—our languages, cultures, artistic and dramatic forms, and knowledge? There’s more than one way to be rich, and while our descendants may inherit increasing material wealth with their declining population, they will risk becoming poor in spirit. That’s the danger.
This is why, in The Million, each citizen is expected to do their part to preserve and celebrate humanity’s history and diversity, even while creating new splendors. Who wants to live in a world where everybody looks and thinks the same, sings the same songs, tells the same stories? The Million are a permanent explosion of creativity, all of them mastering old forms while exploring new ones. From dance to dueling, tea ceremony to architecture, everybody does something. In other words, this is not a future of pointless indulgences and decadent indolence. In this world, the value of the individual skyrockets, because each person is responsible for some part of the very real accomplishments of our ancestors, and has a duty to make their own generation meaningful in turn. The Million work very hard, because they have the heritage of our species resting on their shoulders. They haven’t just inherited our wealth, but have taken on the responsibility for justifying its perpetuation.
This, then, is my answer to the default future. I’ve only just started exploring it; many of the questions I’ve asked above get short-shrift in this first novella. But there’ll be more. Now that I’ve glimpsed it, I’m going to write more stories in this universe, just to see what happens.
Of course, nobody owns the future. I hope you’ll go exploring, too.
Karl Schroeder is an author and futurist whose publications include New York Times Notable Book Ventus as well as the critically acclaimed Virga series. His 2014 novel Lockstep is set in the same universe as The Million. Karl lives in Toronto, Ontario with wife, daughter, and several eccentric animals.
I’d say it would take enough people for each preserved culture, civilization, or other locus of preservation has a full community. Both for redundancy and to replicate the relationships which can for a critical part of culture.
But isn’t the novel’s central story how there’s a bunch of people who can only visit Earth one month every couple of decades? Where do they go? Why don’t they get to decide where they live? Sure, the people on Earth get to be heirs to all the wealth, power and glory of humanity. But unless the rest of the human race is living in similar utopian style worlds/habitats, seems like it’s just a hilariously unbalanced future.
1. A bit selfish, no? “I began to wonder what all those seventy trillion were for:” And is trillion a typo? Earlier you write seventy billion.
2. “One day I thought: why should humanity expand limitlessly?” A false premise, no? As you note, momentum will add another 2 billion or so to Earth’s total population, despite the worldwide convergence of fertility rates. However, in the words of Hans Rosling, we’re at “peak baby.” So population will plateau and if fertility rates drop below 2.1 slowly decline.
So it’s a more sustainable version of Asimov’s Solaria?
The formula for our future becomes: more and more wealth, divided among fewer and fewer people.
I am a big history buff and I remember decades ago reading a book, forgive me the title and author elude me, He was discussing the boom in culture and economics, not to mention the rapid growth of the middle class at the end of what is considered the ‘Dark Ages.’ He speculated that the catalyst for this was none other then the Black Death. The population of Europe dropped drastically in a very short period of time, leaving the infrastructure and wealth behind for those who had survived.Seeming to agree with you.
The problem I see is that yes populations in developed areas are dropping but populations in third world countries are still rising and very rapidly. These are also regions that can not properly support the populations they already have so something has to give.
I like your optimism but personally I think it is unfounded. I think things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better, just as they did in the Middle Ages.
One fundamental flaw I find with your premise here (Of course, I realize this is only my opinion and does not reflect actual reality. Still, because I believe my opinion to be correct [otherwise it would not be my opinion, yes?], I write as if it were so.) is the default that you seem to have toward reverence for the past. You say it’s up to everyone in The Million to both preserve old knowledge and create new. Why is the preservation of dead cultures so necessary? I realize subscribe to the theory that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat its errors and waste time with its successes. However, it seems to me a lasting database of some kind cataloging past cultures would be more helpful to the population of the book. There is a difference between knowing from where you come and reenacting the past as some sort of species-wide kabuki. It seems to me such dedicated devotion to reenacting past cultures would keep the population mired in the past, unable to face the future, even though also contributing to the future to come. To me, this division between past and future leaves no time for the now, indicating a culture locked in stasis, unable to break free of the past, not free to embrace the future.
The Middle ages in Europe were a period of growth and development and rapid technological advancement. Interestingly tied to a rising population. You see people aren’t a burden they are an ADVANTAGE.
The Million sounds like every billionaires’ dream. Interested to see how it goes.
So much for controlling your own body. Being told whether and how many children you can have is the exact opposite of that.
The Million avoids the problem of run-away warming and ecosystem destruction caused by the run-up to the 9 billion + population. We have already lost for good 50 percent of land vertebrate species in the last 50 years. We really are moving towards one of the dystopian futures that Million ties to avoid. In my book ‘Strange Temple’ the final population is low but still tens of millions.
On Asimov’s Aurora, they were able to keep the surface in an aesthetically pleasing balance of structures and natural environs by placing much of their infrastructure underground. Robot labor made it possible to do that, with a world population IIRC around 20 million. Sounds nice, although I thought Asimov made a pretty good case that the price of having Robots was too high a price to pay, in terms of their effect upon society.
I have often wondered if Asimov, who had written many nonfiction science books, had reluctantly come to the conclusion that Science and Technology, while good for the individual, are ultimately not good for society as a whole. The Robot Servant being in many ways the expression of the ultimate that science and technology have to offer us.
Reading this, I was reminded of Joanna Russ’ brilliant 1972 story ‘ Nobody’s Home’. It posited a future earth populated by a small number of privileged, intellectually enhanced individuals. Told from the perspective of a family matriarch, it dealt with her unsettling experience of ‘welcoming’ a woman, that by twentieth century standards would be of average or above average intelligence, to her (somewhat fluid) amazingly cool genius family (grouping) . Very relatable to those of us (pretty much everybody) who have felt left out by some cool, smarter than you crowd.
@10/John lilley: “We have already lost for good 50 percent of land vertebrate species in the last 50 years.”
Where did you get this number? The closest I could find is a WWF study according to which we lost 50 percent of our wild vertebrate populations. Populations, not species, and including both land and water. Also terrible, but it means the species are not (yet) lost for good.
“family sizes naturally decline when women are educated and in control of their own fertility”
I know several women who put off having children until they were in their late 30’s when, surprise, their fertility dropped off a cliff. Which is why I know several single child couples. They wanted more, but couldn’t. Men, of course, don’t have that problem. Well, not to that extent. (Ramp that up just a hair and you get The Handmaid’s Tale.)
I’d say you’d need a lot more than a million for a utopia, simply because human interaction is a huge part of what makes life worthwhile. In addition to the economic reasons why people keep moving to cities, that’s one of the non-economic ones.
Paris, or New York, or Shanghai, isn’t a bunch of buildings and dead artefacts. That’s not what culture is – or at least, not all that culture is. Culture is people’s beliefs, lives, likes, dislikes, interactions – and if you remove the population size and density that lets you have all those different people bumping into people, you exchange living culture for a dead one. The creativity that this future requires is normally fostered by the spontaneity of human interaction, the variety of things can that happen during a day, but if you nearest neighbours ate hundreds of miles away and every human interaction is planned, that’s lost. Even more so if the world is functionally segregated – Egyptians in Egypt caring for its artefacts, French people in Paris preserving French artefacts, and so forth.
I’d go with a billion rather than a million – it allows more people to move around and more engagement between different cultures.
Wow, you all pried open the premise like a can and wolfed down the contents. Great comments and questions. A lot of them are addressed in the story, of course; there’s just no space in a blog post like this to look at the idea rom every angle. For instance: how do we get there from here? I started down that path in an early draft and realized it would be a long essay (not to mention a spoiler-laden one) to break that down in detail. I don’t even reveal all the details in the book–but I leave enough of a trail of breadcrumbs for the reader. (I also wanted to incite you to read the book, so no spoilers!) When I read I like to fill in the gaps with my own imagination and logic anyway; there’s a certain amount of that expected of readers of The Million.
There’s an interesting idea about plausibility that I’ve been chasing recently–not as an author, but as a futurist. You’ve probably heard the notion of the “black swan”–events that simply aren’t on people’s radar before they happen, though in hindsight they often seem to have been inevitable. In futures studies, we similarly talk about “wildcard scenarios.” I’ve noticed, though, that people seem to inevitably frame these potential surprises in probabilistic terms. Instead, I’m exploring the idea of possible events whose probability cannot be agreed upon beforehand. I think that calculating probabilities can prevent you from exploring some potentially interesting idea-spaces. In this case, who really cares if this future is likely or not? It makes for a good story! Plus, it’s a mirror to hold up to our other notions of the future; that’s the idea of interrogating default futures.
Anyhow–thanks for the great comments. If you read the book, I hope you enjoy it, and take it in the spirit of fun in which it was intended.
There was probably a time when this was true: for the struggling empires of the nineteenth century, population was power.
No. It would be closer to reality to say that the nineteenth century, with its incredible differentials of technology and military effectiveness, was the only time in history when population wasn’t power.
In the wars between empires that market the 19th century, the smaller empires won on a large number of occasions. The British Empire conquered the immense Mogul Empire. Japan (and many other small empires) defeated the enormous Chinese Empire; Japan also defeated the populous Russian Empire. The nascent French Empire defeated the Ottoman Empire. And so on.
Also, on this book: is this another one of those creepy books that Americans write about how wonderful the world would be if millions of surplus humans (the wrong sort of humans, obviously) just… went away somewhere? It sounds like it. I don’t much care for that sort of thing.
I think you may just have reinvented Isaac Asimov’s Solaria. Reference: The Naked Sun
@19,
Except that he doesn’t mention Robots, and without Robots you’re going to have a very different culture indeed.
“Automation is maintaining our quality of life while reducing the need for human labor. “
That depends on who gets the benefits of automation.
One possibility has the society own the automatons and distribute the benefits to members of the society more or less evenly.
Another possibility has the owners of the automatons reaping most the benefits, a few people whose labor is amplified by automation being paid most of the benefits, and a lot of people who are left with no demand for their labor, no earnings, no way to pay for a share of the benefits of automation.
A third possibility: when it takes 1000 to produce as much as 1000 can consume, lots of different economic philosophies grow up around that. But when it takes only 100 to produce as much as 1000 can consume? Seems like more than one philosophy would say only that 100 deserve anything, and just get rid of the other 900. Then, when there’s 100 left but it takes only 10 to produce as much as these 100 can consume, seems like those same philosophies would say only that 10 deserve anything, and just get rid of the other 90.
A fourth, fifth, sixth possibility…
“The problem with reducing the planet’s population is: who gets to choose which people can have offspring and which people can’t? Who gets to survive the cataclysm that reduces the population and who gets buried?”
Cataclysm isn’t the only way to reduce population. Sometimes who gets to choose is a matter of the people having the offspring or not doing the choosing for themselves.
Like when a girl chooses to only have a kid every 2 years from age 25 to 27, a would-be rapist chooses to get her pregnant at 13 too, and society thwarts the would-be rapist’s choice instead of the girl’s choice (for example, by not allowing the would-be rapist to pay a bride price to rape the girl).
Like when a husband and wife chooses to have a kid every 3 years when he’s age 30 to 36, his mother chooses to search their bedroom in order to steal their contraceptives and have a grandchild when he’s age 24 too, and society thwarts that would-be-grandma’s choice instead of that couple’s choice (for example, by allowing the couple to have their own home instead of just a bedroom in his parents’ home).
Yeah, improving access to birth control (including access to ways to not have sex, for people who now are pressured to have more sex than they want to have) can reduce the pregnancy rate closer to the actually-wants-to-be-pregnant rate.
This interview nice, different aspects, out of the box. As any writer should to keep fresh. And as long you have controversy among other in the community. You have readers, that follow, who encourage or others try persuade the other way. I’m interested in reading where this goes,keep writing!
I have not gone beyond this interview and comments. Yet!
And by the way,
” You can not learn from perfection if it is not flawed!
When flawed you strive for perfection. ”
If you haven’t already read it, I recommend the Robert Silverberg novella “Sailing to Byzantium”, in which a post-scarcity population of perpetual tourists spend their lives visiting highly-mythologized, inaccurate recreations of the great cities of history.
“So much for controlling your own body. Being told whether and how many children you can have is the exact opposite of that. “
Totally, whether it’s wanting to have at least 4 kids and being forced to have at most 1, or wanting to have at most 1 kid and being forced to have at least 4.
Now the thing is that it takes two different people’s bodies to have a child. If for some reason the one who wants at least 4 insists that the body of the one who wants at most 1 is his or her only chance to have 4, forcing the one who wants less to make 3 more babies against his or her will is the bigger violation.
“amplified by automation being paid most of the benefits,” shoukd be “amplified by automation being paid some of the benefits,”. Can’t have 2 not-so-overlapping groups both get most of the same thing.
I am extremely fond of museums and parks. I think that it’s important to remember and understand the past.
Having said that, I think the idea of Earth as a giant museum is wasteful and somewhat ridiculous. I do hope that future generations preserve knowledge of the people who came before them; I don’t think they should turn cities into museums. Cities are living things, and they’re meant to grow and change, just like the people who live there.
I’m also skeptical of the value of having Earth’s population limited to a million. Who gets to set the limit at a million? Who decides how many children each family is allowed to have? It sounds like the government has essentially decreed that everything must remain the same, forever, and that all change is bad. That isn’t a particularly good policy for a museum, and it’s terrible for a living society.
@9 Anthony Pero
I share your skepticism about the idea of fixing a planet’s population size at a million. However, it’s worth noting that when women have more control over their own bodies, most of them choose to have fewer kids. There’s no reason why Earth’s population couldn’t gradually decrease over time until there are far, far fewer people than there are today.
@18 ajay
The world would probably be a better place if we had access to the same resources but had fewer people to share them among. Simple math dictates that it would be easier to provide food, shelter, and medicine to a smaller planetary population, especially if automation meant that we had less need for a large labor supply.
Obviously, there are plenty of horrible dystopian ways to arrive at that outcome, but those aren’t the only ways to end up with fewer people. Instead of reducing the “surplus” population through ethnic cleansing, people can simply decide to have two kids, or one, or none. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Seems like the obvious way to achieve a population of one million is through a religion. Sort of the opposite of Be fruitful and multiply, you could have a religion that makes the birth of a child the holiest of holies, frightening except under specially ritualized circumstances. Have to do the same with the sex act itself, I guess.
“I think that calculating probabilities can prevent you from exploring some potentially interesting idea-spaces. In this case, who really cares if this future is likely or not? It makes for a good story!”
Yes, this is the premise of the whole article that most of the commenters here seem to be ignoring. The whole reason novels of the future have become boring and predictable is that everyone wants to describe the most likely thing to happen (in their minds).
Why not throw in a surprising event that allows a story to move in another direction? Create something new and innovative and figure out how to plausibly bring it about!
The fact that this author is attempting this in is in itself enough to make me buy his book. I’ve been craving writers who are willing to take off the blinders making them race around the same track over and over again.
(I just realized this sounds like I’m a sock for the author. Or his mother. In fact I’ve neither heard of (nor birthed) the guy before.)
@29 Kate
I think a lot of criticism is focused around whether it’s desirable to turn Earth into a museum, not whether it’s realistic.
Realism isn’t important as long as the story has internal consistency. I’m fine with the idea of some implausible turn of events causing Earth to be a museum world with only a million people living on it; I’m skeptical of the idea that this would be a good thing.
Personally I don’t find this a desirable future. The idea of a depopulated Earth with a few curators living lives of isolated luxury and intellectual effort strikes me as elitist and anti Human. Unintentionally I am sure it implies that much of humanity is superfluous.
Great idea! This is the exact future utopia of the future dystopia I created. We knew then that yes we have to grow, but someday we have to stop growing.
Obviously, there are plenty of horrible dystopian ways to arrive at that outcome, but those aren’t the only ways to end up with fewer people. Instead of reducing the “surplus” population through ethnic cleansing, people can simply decide to have two kids, or one, or none. There’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s nothing wrong with it if it happens in reality. There is a lot wrong with it when people write books about how wonderful it would be if all those wasteful unnecessary people were to be somehow made to not be around.
It wasn’t good when someone wrote a book about a world in which prehistoric humans had never settled the Americas; there was no ethnic cleansing involved in the backstory, no slaughter at all, just the chance event that a few hunter-gatherer groups hadn’t wandered across the Bering Straits. And the book didn’t imply that a world with an unsettled Americas would be superior to the actual world; just that it would be interestingly different. It was still a stupid, tone-deaf thing to do.
And it wasn’t good when someone else wrote a book about a world in which the entire population of Europe had died in horrible agony from the Black Death; that one actually implied that such a world would be better off than our current one.
So, no, a book that says to the human race “what would be great is if somehow most of you guys didn’t exist” is never going to go down particularly well.
@32, Kyle Zyrelle C. Zabel, I just love your name
But why do we have to stop growing? Grow in different ways sure, but why stop?
@33 ajay
There is no moral imperative to have a constantly growing population, and writing about a future society with fewer people doesn’t imply that current people are “unnecessary”.
What would be great is if we lived in a world where people had children because they wanted to, not because they accidentally had kids or needed to have kids to support them in their old age or felt pressured by society to reproduce. That world would probably have fewer children than we do now, which would lead to a smaller future population.
When we think about the future, sometimes it is helpful to challenge the ideal of growth as a good thing in itself. Many authors project a future where humanity has multiplied among the stars and now numbers in the hundreds of billions or even trillions. There’s nothing inherently bad about that future, but we often take it for granted in science fiction. Perhaps we could have a perfectly happy future where the human population doesn’t increase, or decreases, and people live happy, productive lives without needing to populate the entire galaxy.
Your approach places too many limits on what authors can write, and it suggests that anything too different is automatically offensive. There is nothing sacred or perfect about the way things are now, and there’s nothing wrong about suggesting they could be different in the future.
With that said, I’m not convinced of the value of making cities into museums and fixing the human population at an extremely low number. I disagree with some of the ideas presented here, not the idea that a lower future population is inherently bad.
@31/princessroxanna,
I certainly agree that something odd has to be going on for the population to be limited to one million. On the other hand I think a population of about 2 billion would allow for both diversity and a mass economy (I’m not a fan of relying on Robots), while not putting too much of a strain on either resources or biodiversity. On the other hand I don’t see any reasonable way for that to happen. It’s just not human nature.
@35, Personally I had a problem with the idea the world would be Soo much better without white people. However I don’t say such stories can’t be written. I can take being offended.
@36, Definitely need more than a million. Without human contact and society there will be no culture or creativity.
@17 Yes I just finished it yesterday, just before reading this blog :) I enjoyed the read, a little slow in the beginning/world building part. Had you added more “how we got from here to there” it would have been painful for me, I don’t need those details to get to the meat of the story.
However my biggest problem with the basic story is it just kind of ignores human nature, it might have been a much better story if based on an alien world.
If you have never read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano I would highly recommend it. It takes place in a near future society that has automated everything, poverty is gone and people no longer need jobs. It can be a very slow read but the ending blew me away, it made me realize that in any kind of utopian culture you can come up with, if you ignore human nature it will fail miserable.
@25: “It takes two different bodies to have a child” — well, now it does. Or at least, bits of two different bodies; even now, those two bodies don’t necessarily have to be the whole bodies in intimate contact. Sometimes, it’s just cells in a lab dish.
A kind of non-default future which doesn’t get much exploration is the one in which reproduction doesn’t depend on sex and pregnancy. Cloned or donated genetic material, from the standard two parents, or from one or three or more, mixed and matched into nice little blastocysts to be nurtured in “uterine replicators” — that would change women’s lives, and therefore everybody’s lives, way more than the Pill ever did.
Lois McMaster Bujold is the only author I can think of who’s explored some of the possible consequences, good and bad and just different, of the common availability of such technology.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, however.
Brian Stableford’s Emortality sequence has a future where sterility plague coupled with the conveniently timed development of artificial wombs drove the entire human population to shift to artificially produced babies. The backstory is pretty ugly.
In Stableford’s defense, SF generally dislikes masses of people and will cheerfully embrace any excuse to reduce their numbers. That’s why it was possible for Niven and Pournelle to write a major book where the big twist was not committing genocide.
Getting rid of half the population so they don’t overshoot their resources is of course Thanos’ plan. It’s explicitly painted as a bad idea there.
Lije Bailey in The Caves of Steel was fond of the “hum of humanity”. Wonder if they’ll portray that in the coming movie? They’re more likely to take the Spacers’ POV I guess. Earthers! Where did I put my noseplugs?
Rudyard Kipling thought this first (unless people know of an earlier example). in “As Easy as ABC”. That always felt to me to have a sort of libertarian tinge to it. And there are also elements in Forster’s “The Machine Stops”.
Ilium by Dan Simmons contains this very premise, right down to a far-future Earth in which humanity is restricted to exactly one million members. (By robot overlords or faux-Greek gods on Mars or somesuch–it’s been a long time since I read it.)
Anyway, it’s a vision that that, broadly speaking, appeals to me. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit it, lest it mark me as elitist and anti-human. But I do daydream about it, a pristine Earth, teeming with genetically-reincarnated Pleistocene megafauna, dotted with the perfectly-preserved remnants of select ancient cities, and inhabited by, at most, a few tens of millions of human beings. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, I’d only be in favor of this if the population reduction came about gradually, and through voluntary means.
@45, I am a history enthusiast as well as a SF fan but the image of Earth as a depopulated museum to the past horrifies me.
“It is good to renew one’s wonder,” said the philosopher. “Space travel has again made children of us all.” (Ray Bradbury/Martian Chronicles)
I think one of the fundamental challenges in life is to find ways to continue to experience the kind of surprise and delight that one feels in childhood, a response to a world that seems ever new.
I can imagine being able to experience this in the Pleistocene era, where the superabundance of life and the larger than life geography presents a world that is ever new and presents ever new challenges.
A more highly populated world destroys much of the natural world and renders what remains tame. But in compensation, it allows the creation of an intellectual community that produces ever new, surprising, and sometimes delightful (and sometimes horrifying) ways of looking at and experiencing the world. (Art, Music, and Literature are very good things, but ah, if I could only understand Quantum Mechanics! Oh, brave new world that hath such creatures in it!)
Now here’s the thing. Surely the whole point of having a population of only a million is to have access to a vast, wild, untamed wilderness. But museum cities? What else could that mean but that people were longing for the past – the one in which a larger population is able to create Kulture! :)
You have a few billion but keep most of them on ice for 999/1000th of their lives. Earth as a time share.
@46, Fair enough, to each their own. …In my vision, Earth’s human population returns (again, gradually and voluntarily) to something approximating what it had been before the Agricultural Revolution. I imagine an evolved, almost post-human species that has largely outgrown conflict–and, lacking effective scarcity, has little incentive to it. The remaining humans instead devote their long, placid lives to artistic, scientific and contemplative pursuits, and to the maintenance of their Edenic biosphere.
I am also a history enthusiast, but there’s no historical place or time, that I know of, including our own, in which I’d prefer to live over the scenario I sketched above. Is it plausible? Quite possibly not; most science fiction scenarios aren’t. But at least I can dream.
If I may ask, what would your utopia look like?
I don’t believe in Utopias. I don’t like static cultures, which thank God are impossible anyway. And I especially don’t like the value judgement that a pristine Earth is somehow better than a human Earth.
Wow. Things seem to have kicked into high gear. I’ll only say this–without giving anything away: the “museum cities?” They’re not *really* museum cities. The whole “preserving the past” thing? The Million are not really doing that–or at least, they don’t need to. And, a Utopia? Not really. Just, not a *dys*topia.
And the idea that in this future all the inconvenient masses have been just waved away?
Well. You see it’s just that the Million are not, exactly, alone…
John Maynard Keynes, of all people, saw something like this coming. Yes, that Keynes. The Keynesian economics guy, who ruled the economic roost from the great depression, through WWII, and into the 70s.
If I were listing candidates for utopian idealism—it’s not that Keynes would be low on the list. He wouldn’t be on the list at all. They don’t call economics the Dismal Science for nothing.
Then I read his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
My purpose in this essay, however, is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?
His thesis?
From the earliest times of which we have record-back, say, to two thousand years before Christ—down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change. Some periods perhaps 50 per cent better than others; at the utmost 100 per cent better—in the four thousand years which ended (say) in A. D. 1700.
Keynes calls this pre-industrial condition the economic problem. The scientific-agricultural-industrial revolutions were game changers. in the long run, what does the new game mean for us?
I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.
As a political prophet, Keynes makes a good economist.
Set aside current attempts by the 1% to hijack the world. Say the problem of resource distribution is solved. The machines do the work. The resulting wealth is equitably shared. What then? How do we comport ourselves then?
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
How dismal.
By now everybody should have noticed that our modern worship of growth is a problem on a limited planet. Just because our economy doesn’t work without growth doesn’t mean it is impossible to have a future where humans get beyond that problematic system. For most of human history a stable population size lower than the present one was considered normal. Why should it be unrealistic to return to that? Technology and education seem to lead to reduced birth rates. The countries that still have higher birth rates have less access to these things. Once they catch up their populations will likely also shrink to more sustainable levels without any need to kill off undesirable “others”. Stories that look for alternatives to an economy based on growth might encourage people to find a way to return to such a system before the consequences of unlimited growth make earth uninhabitable for humans. Dismissing such ideas as unrealistic just means refusing to look for a way to change a way of life that obviously will lead to a bad end.
@52, As a historian Keynes makes a good economist. In fact the history of the west, which is what I am most familiar, with is marked by visible rises and falls of of the standard of living for ordinary folk. As I mentioned above the Middle Ages were a period of technological growth that lifted the standard of living even for the agricultural workers.
It’s also worth pointing out that the traditional societies being idealized were very hierarchical and emphatic about everybody keeping his place. Is this what we want to go back to?
The basic fallacy is that abundantly supplied needs will eliminate all social friction and competition. Greed and ambituon will magically vanish and so will the lust for power.
@54/Roxana: Not everybody is greedy and power-hungry, and ambition can be directed at different goals. As we keep learning more about human nature, we may learn to change the circumstances that make some people greedy, or stop rewarding greed, or both. People are already less aggressive and more self-controlled than they used to be, without any magic involved.
Ambition can certainly be channeled into constructive acts. The problem is not everybody wants to be an artist or scholar. You have to have lots of choices of occupation. You also have to conceed that not everybody will be constructive and social minded. People aren’t blank slates to be written on as society desires.
Surely one of the things that makes traditional societies hierarchical is that a subset of society has control of limited resources.
I read an article in the BBC news recently that not only are many South Korean women not having children, they’re not even pursuing male relationships. Why? The men are jerks, and the women find them annoying. They are able to support themselves independently, so who needs them?
Only one of the things. The traditional ideal is one of stability by which they mean changelessness. Granted this is an ideal that is never met in reality but is it an ideal we want?
You’re a Tolkien fan, you tell me! :)
Addendum: in a more serious mood, perhaps we can distinguish between wanting to live in a certain kind of society, and wanting to create (or preserve) a certain kind of society – which is more problematic, since it veers toward trying to control others to make them fit into your vision.
I heard an interview with the author of “The End Of White Christian America” that suggested that we are experiencing what is for some the death throes of a treasured way of life – think of going to see your kid in the Christmas play at the local public school. What happens when other people don’t buy into that, when all of a sudden you’re supposed to also celebrate Hannukah, Kwanza, E’id, Harry Potter, … what happened to my world? But of course, it never was your world. We’re all just tourists.
@@@@@ 54 I don’t believe in Utopias either. I don’t believe in magic, gods or faster than light travel, either, but it doesn’t stop me from speculating about them, reading stories about them, discussing them. And at any rate, I suggested several tens of millions of humans, which to me seems enough to qualify as a “human planet.”
Oh yes, by all means speculate! I’m just saying his particular speculation is not my cup of tea.
One of SF’s standby tropes is to ask, “What if this goes on?”
Pick a trend and follow it, as if nothing interferes. Carry it far enough, and what happens? How would things work out?
Then turn that thought experiment into a story.
We are commenting on a post about plotting alternate futures. In his essay Keynes takes one variable, extends it, and asks “What happens if this goes on?”
He doesn’t have to be right to make an interesting story. Any more than FTL drive has to be right to use it in a story.
@61 I’m not sure I fully understand your viewpoint, but then again, I’m a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome, so for me having far fewer people around would not be an entirely unwelcome situation.
And as someone who grew up feeling the pressure to couple up and reproduce, only to realize as an adult that I’m asexual and that’s the last thing I want to do, I think as alternate lifestyles (like mine, just for example) become more mainstream, with more people choosing not to create traditional families, the population will begin to naturally decline, if only by a small amount, until it levels off and theoretically reaches a relatively stable number.
Or, you know, an asteroid could strike the earth five years from now and wipe us all out. Sometimes I can’t help wondering if that wouldn’t make the universe a marginally safer place.
In fact the history of the west, which is what I am most familiar, with is marked by visible rises and falls of of the standard of living for ordinary folk. As I mentioned above the Middle Ages were a period of technological growth that lifted the standard of living even for the agricultural workers.
Agreed – and also that the standard of living varied a huge amount across space as well as across time. It simply wasn’t the case that a Chinese peasant in 1500 was living at the same level as a French peasant except that one was eating grain and the other rice. “Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction” by Robert Allen is clearly written and highly informative. (And also, as the title suggests, portable.)
Or, you know, an asteroid could strike the earth five years from now and wipe us all out. Sometimes I can’t help wondering if that wouldn’t make the universe a marginally safer place.
I miss the days when Tor had a warning at the top of the comments thread that said “Please do not question the right of other people to exist”.
Or the right of human society to exist. – R. Daneel Olivaw. :)
@56/Roxana:”The problem is not everybody wants to be an artist or scholar. You have to have lots of choices of occupation.”
Sure, but that isn’t a problem. You could have cooks and gardeners and carpenters and computer programmers and all kinds of occupations.
“You also have to conceed that not everybody will be constructive and social minded.”
Perhaps not, but if treated decently right from the start and given enough choices, most people will be, most of the time. Humans are social animals. Most of them want to be liked.
“People aren’t blank slates to be written on as society desires.”
No, of course not. Does anybody still believe that? But they aren’t fixed and immutable automatons either. They are something in between. As for society, we are society, and we all influence each other anyway, whether we desire to or not. So why not study which kind of influence tends to yield which kind of result?
What influences people is a fascinating topic, as it is a way of approaching the question: Who are we? in terms of What will we respond to? When listening to music, I am often astonished by the depth and subtlety and variety of feeling that some people have found their way to (often apart from any particular lyrics). And yet, if I am able to respond to them, those feelings must have been in some sense inside me too.
And beginning in my youth, much of my reading/viewing was guided by the desire not only for adventure and entertainment, but the desire to be positively influenced. Show me how to be noble, Mr. Tolkien! Show me how to stay positive, Mr. Kirk! Show me how to feel compassion for humanity, even when they sometimes behave so stupidly, Daneel!
I’ve been having trouble with that last one lately. But Tor always deletes my comments when I mention contemporary politics. Probably just as well, I guess.
Somewhere I came across the phrase (possibly in John Holt’s writings on education), “If you would seek to influence someone, first make yourself admirable.”
But back to my comparison to music: I think the way certain charismatic people can positively influence us is by showing us that deep down inside we really do want to live in peace and harmony with each other. We just need a little help sometimes believing its possible.
@64 and 65 I was being facetious. I thought that was obvious. And I feel like it should be clear that I wasn’t questioning anyone’s right to exist. An Extinction Level Event is always one possible future for us–whether we have the right to exist or not, nature could make the decision for us–and wondering what effect the extinction of the human race would have on the universe as a whole is a natural offshoot of that. To be perfectly honest, I really think it would cause barely a ripple, because we aren’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. I think it’s human nature to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, when in fact the very opposite is closer to the truth.
Considering I belong to a group whose right to exist is constantly questioned, even by people who think they’re “helping” us, (nobody ever asked us whether we wanted to be “cured”; in fact, people who are supposedly experts on us rarely ever ask our opinion about anything), I will fight for any group’s right to exist, whether I agree with their viewpoints or not.
@68/Denise L,
By saying that you were being facetious, do you mean it was an attempt at humor? Because that’s what I was doing at @65.
(R. Daneel Olivaw was a character in Isaac Asimov’s Robot Novels.)
This conversation seems to be getting off-track and disagreements are getting overly personal; let’s please keep things civil and get back to focusing on the larger discussion.
Getting back on topic, there are two obvious downsides of small populations: limited skill pools and more importantly, increased vulnerability. A planet with seven billion people loses a quarter of a million people to a tsunami; that’s a great tragedy but the system can absorb the losses without much of a bump. A planet of a million loses a quarter million and we’re talking Black Death level impact on society.
@69 Oh, sorry about that, I missed the reference. I haven’t read any of Asimov’s work (I should probably fix that).
One reason I prefer face-to-face contact to text: easier to read body language and tone, even for an Aspie. But, yes, I was expressing my frustration with some people’s poor behavior (not anyone on this site, thankfully) with a little humorously-intended hyperbole. I mean, I may be a pessimist, but I’m not that much of a pessimist! ;)
Getting back on track, the thought did occur to me earlier–ironically when I was considering possible world-ending events–that such a small population might be more vulnerable to potential cataclysms, like @72 mentioned. It seems that if you had a population of only one million people, one really virulent pandemic could wipe everyone out in one go. True, with everyone spread out across the globe and population density much lower than it is now, it might be easier to contain and probably spread much slower, but with some of these Super bugs scientists are talking about, would that be enough?
“Here’s a proposal:… add to this mix a naturally declining population that retains its genetic diversity.”
But why should its genetic diversity be maintained? Surely you would want to select the best while dumping the rest?
In any case, with a million people remaining in the world, in not many generations the differences would all get smoothed out by racial mixing.
“Surely you would want to select the best while dumping the rest?”
Yes, of course. A simple way to do that would be to give everyone an IQ Test. Define 100 as average of course, and invite everyone who scores less than that to step into a disintegration chamber. Then the next day, recalculate everyone’s IQ in terms of being relative to the new average, and invite those with under average IQ’s to step into a disintegration chamber … rinse and repeat.
Some smart person could probably calculate in their head how many days it would take to reduce a population of a million to just one.
Seemingly just what someone living in such a society would want. Except that they have to live with the knowledge that now they are just exactly average. Oops!
@@@@@ 74, I don’t believe race mixing would smooth things out. I think that because my own racially mixed family has dark skinned brunettes and pale blonds.
@75/Keleborn: If “the best” means “the ones who score highest on IQ tests”. If it means “the strongest”, gladiatorial combat could provide both the test and the therapy. And if it means “the ones who question authority the most”, you don’t even need a test – just order everybody into a disintegration chamber and look who’s left.
How would a planet of a million lose a quarter million to a tsunami?
@79/Janajansen,
A Taste of Armageddon!
(That’s Star Trek TOS everyone)
Exactly a hundred years ago this year, 50 million people, or 2.5% of the world population, died in the Spanish Flu, with another 2.5% the following year. It’s not being commemorated this year like WWI; many people have never even heard of it. And of course the population was back to its former level and beyond within less than the time between two censuses.
For 250,000 in one year, or 500,000 in two years, to be a similarly minor global population reduction, the world population needs to be at least 10,000,000. The population was last at this level around the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BC). Rent on a house in London, a city approaching 10 million, is about £2,000 a month. By Ricardo’s Law of Rent, the 10 millionth resident of London would be by definition at the margin of cultivation in a world of 10 million, and landlords would be practically paying you to live there.
If 1% of the population dies each year of old age (corresponding to an age equal to 100 in the steady state, younger in a growing population, older in a shrinking population) and 0.9% of the population is born (70m a year in a population of 7.8 billion, against the present figure of 130m a year), then at the net of -0.1% per year, we can reach 10,000,000 in 6,630 years if we start now.
Ever hear of the voluntary human extinction movement? They’re a group that proposes that humankind, being obviously a hazard to the ecosystem, voluntarily extinguish itself. Not through mass murder, but through attrition. (Credit where it’s due.)
I tried to find out how many of them there are, but I suspect they’re not around anymore. :)
Point of Information: the Singapore government, in order to head off overpopulation, introduced in the 1970’s a “Two is Enough” campaign. Not religious, but cultural. Their projections suggested they’d have a stable population, the idea being that each two people would create their replacements, and there would be enough dissenters to make up any shortfall (from unexpected deaths, parents stopping at one, homosexuals, asexuals, etc).
Unfortunately the campaign was super-effective. The number of dissenters was much lower than predicted. The birthrate fell from an average of 6 in 1960 to a low of 1.29 in 2012.
As a result, the government invested in fertility research to help childless couples, and as a consequence Sigapore is the world leader in IVF.
So you can have a dramatic cultural shift that affects population growth in a generation. It doesn’t require a cataclysm, real or artificial. And Real Life can throw up some weird plot twists.
It seems to me exactly steady state is a hard target to hit. Even small deviations on either side, if unchecked, can have dramatic effects.
Singapore’s falling population
Singapore’s falling population rate
This is all just Gish gallops and special pleading.
How would a planet of a million lose a quarter million to a tsunami?
I think the problem I am having with this concept is the labelling of the majority of humans as redundant at best, damaging at worst.
It’s not these humans are redundant and these aren’t. That’s a hostile reading. I propose a perfectly socialist equitable arrangement, where no one dies except of old age, everyone gets children and no one is denied children, and you have nothing concrete to complain about, so you complain vaguely, without a fair proposition anyone can engage with.
Notice the objections keep shifting from one Chewbacca defence to another. Skills shortage, predictions of mass population wipeouts that never happen in the records, predictions of runaway population collapse that never happen in the records, false accusations of denying people’s right to exist. No backup for any argument, just move on to the next. This is what’s known as a Gish Gallop, and it’s a sign of a weak position.
How would a planet of a million lose a quarter million to a tsunami?
@87 “This is what’s known as a Gish Gallop, and it’s a sign of a weak position. “
What a fantastic definition. Thanks for the vocabulary expander.
Wow, lots of criticism! (and more than usual for a Tor.com article)
Everyone likes the idea of changing the game, shaking up tropes, etc, and I FULLY RESPECT THE AUTHOR FOR THIS and I may even look out for the book – but I also I can’t say I disagree with some of the points raised in objection to the premise.
To add my own, I would reason that sure, these million people would, for a time, uphold the preservation of history, art, and culture, but that seems a bit naive. Look at us today; even the best of us have maybe a passing concern and sadness when alerted to the demise of some obscure culture. Ok the very best of us go out on missions to save said culture, but they represent a vanishing square foot of humanity’s moral landscape.
Most of us who create or otherwise direct our energies to “fulfilling” occupations and hobbies are wont to forge our own way whilst holding the backdrop of our cultural history as a guide (or in some cases rejecting it entirely – even if subconsciously it may be impossible to wholly escape one’s heritage), but the best creators do this by deviating from, not hankering after the past.
Yes, a million may on paper be able to preserve humanity, and it may even become (or be made to be) the guiding cultural paradigm such that they feel more than the obligation but the need to engage in this. But they are still human and will reject even a gilded cage.
I speak under correction, but every utopia ever devised has a flaw, often that of imposed social control that chafes until ultimate rebellion, destruction, and a new world order.
@87, I can’t speak for anybody else, Del, but Personally I am trying to figure out why I find this postulated future so depressing. Given my interests I should love the idea of a creative, curating population of any size but I really, really don’t. I wonder why?
“Don’t you understand? It’s the past!” (Leto II, the God Emperor)
I can see two glaring flaws with this whole “go smaller” argumentation.
One is the usual lack a lot of authors have of a sense of scale. If one postulates the level of automation that allows a single family to curate an entire city, or oversee an entire planet’s ecology with just a fraction of the workforce provided by a million people, then one can easily put this robotic workforce to the task of vertical farming, or building better, bigger cities without overcrowding. Even at relatively small population densities – by the standard of today’s large cities – one could easily cram all seven billion people alive today into citiescapes occupying just the coastline of the USA and leave the rest of the planet empty.
Second is how we get there and what the consequences are. Suppose that by some miracle of social engineering large populations like China and India do not overtake the rest in the shrinking process, you would still have to contend with getting the population down by a factor of a thousand. Suppose again, we do this by limiting the birthrate to one kid per couple. In the absence of any indefinite life extension, of course, so we don’t have to kill 99.9 percent of our population.
That still means we half to half the population ten times (2 exp 10 equaling 1024), meaning ten generations would grow up like this. by the end of this 200 to 300 year period, the word “Brotherhood” would have exited the dictionary, maybe along with the concept itself. Congratulations, you just derived your future civilization of several aspects of their humanity, all at the same time…