We always say that if you regulate every step, burden a person with a million prohibitions, licenses, and fines for every sneeze, people will simply stop having children. A human is a biological being, and animals in cramped cages do not reproduce. But the response we get is simply, “So be it; there are too many people as it is, and if there are fewer, there will be no traffic jams, nature will cleanse itself, and silence and beauty will prevail.” Usually, we counter with economics: infrastructure will collapse, the solidarity pension system will burst, and markets will shrink to the size of a street stall. That is exactly what will happen. But behind this facade hides something far more terrifying—technological regression and the risk of a slow but certain extinction of humanity as a species.
 
Population reduction enthusiasts stubbornly see a human only as an “extra mouth,” a “source of carbon footprint,” and a walking problem. But a human is not just a mouth, but also a brain. It is the entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity, and labor. So let’s break down in simple terms why the dream of a “small, cozy humanity” is a most dangerous illusion.
 
First, rare talents. Geniuses capable of driving fundamental science do not appear by government decree. They are born statistically rarely—roughly one in a million. If you have a population of 8 billion, you have a pool of eight thousand potential Einsteins, von Neumanns, and Turings. Cut the population in half, and you cut that pool by exactly 50%. Cut it even more, and breakthrough ideas will become many times fewer. And yet, it is these individuals who create the technologies that later feed and heal everyone.
 
Second, the specialization trap. Modern scientific and technological progress relies on an incredibly deep division of labor. In the 18th century, an erudite person could understand mechanics, botany, and philosophy. But today, the low-hanging fruit of science has already been picked. To move the edge of knowledge even a millimeter, thousands of ultra-specialists are needed. One person cannot design a lithographic scanner for chips, synthesize a molecule for a rare cancer, and build a thermonuclear reactor all at once. The larger the society, the more unique, niche professions it can afford. A small society, even if everyone has three higher education degrees, is physically incapable of maintaining millions of complex competencies simultaneously.
 
Thirdly, economies of scale and technological accessibility. Developing a new processor or medication costs billions of dollars. In a global market of billions of people, these colossal costs are spread thin—resulting in penny-priced pills and affordable smartphones. Shrink the market, and the most complex projects will cease to be profitable. Businesses simply will not invest in something they have no one to sell to. First, niche drugs for rare diseases will disappear, then specialized equipment, and eventually entire industries. The state, of course, will attempt to save the situation with “subsidies,” but taking money from a shrinking economy is a path toward an even faster collapse.
 
Fourthly, knowledge does not live in books. Blueprints without a living chain of succession are just dead terabytes of data. Complex technology lives only in the hands of practitioners: when a gray-haired engineer passes on implicit skills to a young graduate student right at the machine tool or in the laboratory. If one generation is replaced by a much smaller one, the chains break. Humanity has lost technologies more than once—from the recipe for Roman concrete to the ability to quickly reproduce the rocket engines of the moon program.
 
And finally, we cannot simply stand still. Nature does not take pauses for a “cozy life.” Bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. The climate presents surprises, infrastructure decays, and space threats have not gone anywhere. For civilization to simply maintain its current level of security, it must run as fast as it can forward—discovering new energy sources, creating new materials, and new medicines. If we slow down the scientific and technological progress due to a shortage of brains, we are not staying in place, but beginning to slowly slide into a new dark age.

Voluntarist, Bitarch