The Population Bomb: the view from 2026
The Population Bomb
Fifty years before Disney decided to make a movie promulgating overpopulation as a major concern, a book called The Population Bomb came out. I’ll let Wikipedia explain:
The Population Bomb is a 1968 book co-authored by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and former Stanford senior researcher in conservation biology Anne H. Ehrlich.[1][2] From the opening page, it predicted worldwide famines due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a “population explosion” existed in the mid-20th century baby boom years, but the book and its authors brought the idea to an even wider audience.[3][4][5]
I think the general view is that even as early as 1968 it should have been clear that this was all fearmongering. Nearly sixty years later, I think a book called The Population Bomb’s subject would be underpopulation rather than overpopulation. So, let’s think about that for a bit. Not The Population Bomb that exists and has done so since 1968 but what a 2026!population bomb would mean.
The Bomb
Let’s imagine a movie for a second:
“The Bomb”
Gloria Rose, 33, is getting married in a week to her long term boyfriend Hector Kirk (35). They’re both childfree and have been happily together for 7 years. There’s just one problem: Gloria’s having second thoughts about the wedding.
It’s not that Hector is a bad man or even that she doesn’t love him. It’s that Gloria Rose has been trying to learn about her dead investigative journalist father Bruno (1958–2003) in the lead up to the wedding because, well, he can’t be there and the liminal event has made her think about him more. She’s found his journals from 2002/3 where he was working on a book he was going to call “The New Population Bomb”, interviewing economists, demographers, government statisticians and planners about something called the demographic transition.
It turns out that the fertility grift that she and Hector and all their friends (whether childfree or not) have been scorning for years is less Covid misinformation and more PharmaBro… the (social) science is, in fact, very clear. It’s just for some weird reason the only people talking about it are all the worst people in the world.
Gloria has never thought her own choices stood against humanity before and now she’s hearing a ticking noise. It’s not just her biological clock.
But it’s unfair to marry Hector when she’s become a different person, right?
What is going on here?
Two things. One is an idea for a film that has to work as a film. Something from Gloria’s past is detonating her future and the question that such a movie woudld be about is: what does Gloria and her world look like after the metaphorical bomb goes off? Pretty classic drama idea. Practically cliche, really, right? The original (?) part is the bomb metaphor within the premise of the story, where a ticking bomb is going to go off and change everything we know about human population. Let’s talk about that.
The New Population Bomb
A while ago I gave up watching a Philosophy Tube video called “You’re Wrong About Birth Rates & Ag[e]ing Populations” because it is completely ignorant of the fact that this very dry technical conversation is not some discourse created by Elon Musk and his cronies.
It’s not even a new conversation, either. The Bomb’s 2002’s is early for it but the theory was all there for someone like Bruno to put together and go to the experts and ask them “Have I understood this right?” and they, in 2002, would have said yes. You can think of The Bomb’s basic concept as: a Philosophy Tube viewer learns that video’s research was deeply flawed and it causes her to change as a person. But mainly it’s a movie about relationships. The real bomb is not the fact total human population growth will start to decline in 2050 or 2080 or whenever. Like I said, it’s a dry technical conversation. You can make a lecture series about it, not a movie. The Bomb just uses human population projections as a premise. It’s like how Die Hard isn’t a movie about global capitalism, it just uses global capitalism to create a heist that performs the same function as Dickens’ ghosts.
That being said, The Bomb isn’t excused from the question of “but is that true, though?”. However much people want to stick their heads in the sand, movies do shape peoples’ understandings of what is and isn’t true. What’s a good example of that… uh… well, let’s say you believe NCIS is copaganda. Copaganda is this argument. And maybe you don’t believe copaganda exists and think Hollywood is pushing a woke elite coastal agenda. That is also this argument that movies are neither politically nor factually neutral. And if you don’t believe in either copaganda or the woke elite coastal agenda of Hollywood? Hmm… um… uh… a-ha! Cigarettes! Movies helped make smoking cool. Totally uncontroversial take but less directly connected to ideas about true and false claims, so it’s not a perfect example. Just use your imagination a bit. So, we do need to talk about whether The Bomb’s premises are true. It is definitely true that human population is projected to decline. That’s a fact, that’s settled. What that fact means is a different matter. The ghost of Malthus hides behind everything here.
If you don’t know Malthus he was this dude living during the first industrial revolution (there are multiple and it’s kind of important to know that) who looked at the numbers and thought “Oh my God, we’re going to eat ourselves into extinction”. Well, it’s more than 200 years later and we’ve blown way past the carrying capacity that Malthus imagined. That was able to happen because of technological change. That is, the meaning of the ‘new bomb’ cannot be assessed independently of technology. The implications in a world where I, Robot happens — i.e. generalised robot labour fulfilling basic economic functions becomes commonplace — are totally different to one where WALL-E happens — i.e. robot labour is specialised and actually quite limited. Obviously both of these are directly connected to everyone’s favourite 2026 talking point: AI. This is why you need to know about multiple industrial revolutions because we’re living in one. Just like Malthus. We can be wrong for literally the same reason Malthus was even if our numbers are correct because what they mean is totally separate to our calculations.
How You Learnt to Stop Worrying about the Bomb
If you watched that Philosophy Tube video and actually finished it, you probably don’t think the premise of The Bomb is real. That was basically what that video was trying to argue. Let me try and deprogram you and I don’t choose the word deprogram lightly. It is what needs doing. That is really bad video.
No Extinction, No Problem
Here’s an example of what Philosophy Tube was citing in that video. It’s an argument with Elon Musk’s absurd claim that… see, it doesn’t have a good name so let’s use The Bomb’s term… the new bomb is a bigger threat than climate change. Let me be very clear: something can be a problem without being an extinction level event. Elon Musk is a fucking moron. Don’t listen to him about anything. What the piece is doing, and how Philosophy Tube uses things like it, is to slip from “Musk is wrong” to “there is no problem here”. The article does mention 2080 as the ‘detonation’ — and again detonation is The Bomb’s framing — not 2050, which is the number I pulled off the top of my head in an earlier draft of this post. 2050 versus 2080 looks like a very big difference because it is but 2050 is not completely whack. 2050 is an extremely low growth projection scenario:
That article says “prediction” but these are “projections”. The whole idea of a prediction is to say what you think should happen. The whole idea of projection is to say what will happen under certain assumptions. They are very different things and should not be confused. In some sense projections are made so they don’t come true. You look at a projection to illustrate what kind of policy response is appropriate. Philosophy Tube’s cited article is not alone in the conflation. It’s actually very common. Hell, Wikipedia also conflates the two but then Wikipedia doesn’t have an article for projection at all. Wikipedia is wrong on this matter (e.g. here and here) and it’s really important that you realise this.
Trying is Evil
Another strategy that the case against The Bomb tends to make is what we might call argument from dystopia. It’s also present in that article:
Another motivation relates to gender. As Mussolini demonstrated, engineering fertility is a way of controlling women, getting them out of the labor market and tied to domestic servitude.
The argument from dystopia is the basic idea that any way of fixing X is bad therefore X must be good or at least okay. No, they can both be wrong. And while I recently watched a video about this topic from a technical point of view, which made the case that there are effective policy interventions, that’s the only time I’ve ever seen anyone suggest there’s policy interventions that work. Regardless of whether or not there are possible solutions, you cannot use the responses to a policy issue to characterise that issue. Even from a strict consequentialist framework where the only possible meaning of X is f(X), this argument doesn’t work.
Let’s take the most extreme form of consequentialism where basically you’re going “good – bad > 0, then good, else bad”. Setting aside whether or not anyone actually thinks like this for a moment, you have to compute the amount of harm of X and doing nothing about X in order to compare with the amount of harm of X and doing something about X. If we make the argument that everything that can be done in response to X, let’s call that Y, is bad and X is bad. Then f(X) + f(Y) < 0. And not doing anything about Y should therefore be preferred because f(X) + f(Y) < f(X) < 0 is also true. So, in this framework it’s therefore necessary to establish either:
- f(X) = 0, and
- f(Y) < 0
or
- f(X) > 0
The first situation must seem weird. Why must X be neutral? Because if f(X) < 0, X is bad and there’s a consequentialist duty to do something about it. And therefore if there’s even one non-evil response to X, that thing must be done. Which is where things get tricky because in a strictly consequentialist world you can give someone enough of something they like to compensate for any harms done to them. So, you should actually argue that f(Y) < 0 for all Y is an impossibility in consequentialism because you can compensate for the harm.
The second situation is also kind of weird. Intellectually it’s obvious because if the problem isn’t bad, then there’s no reason to do anything about it and, in fact, trying to get rid of the alleged problem would, itself, be bad. But it’s weird in an empirical sense because very few people are making the case for the collapse of the human population. It’s not even a particularly difficult argument to make, people just don’t make it. The reason why is that you push against the fact people aren’t strict consequentialists. Telling people they can’t have children strikes the vast majority of humanity as wrong, no matter how coherent your consequentialist ethics are.
But why does it break down within consequentialist ethics? For two reasons:
- consequentialism is the one ethical framework where you can’t ignore premises and just work with the logic. You can’t do consequentialism without finding out whether f(X) > 0, f(X) = 0 or f(X) < 0
- the second scenario completely ignore f(Y) which is what this entire critique is based in, so even if you could prove that f(X) > 0, you haven’t demonstrated that you should’ve been talking about f(Y)
It occurs to me now that I kind of just jumped to consequentialism without explaining why. You might be thinkking: why not use some alternative ethical framework where it is possible for Y to always be bad? Good question. The answer is that within consequentialism Y is just a convenience. Strictly speaking things you do in response to X are still just f(X) which is how you determine the meaning of X, so Y -> X. In other ethical frameworks, that’s not the case. What X makes you do exists separately. For example, purely deontological ethics can argue that murder is always wrong even when that murder would solve every problem forever: there is a strict separation between motivating issue and action.
Isn’t it suspicious only awful people care about this?
The article also makes the more traditional Hitler ate sugar style argument:
The 20th century fascist movements were also very open about their imperative to out-populate, and thus outcompete, national rivals. Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini instituted policies that sought to increase the country’s birth rate by reducing women’s employment and access to contraception, and instituting harsher punishments for abortions, which Mussolini outlawed.
The fact a fascist thinks X doesn’t make X wrong. It’s wrong if it’s wrong and it’s right if it’s right.
Now, admittedly, it’s very hard to think of things fascists have their heads screwed on about, but let’s take the Mussolini myth. Would having trains run on time be a bad thing if Mussolini had actually done that? Obviously not. The implication of the “well, he made the trains run on time” myth is that Mussolini pursued timely trains as a policy objective; a sort of compact with the Italian public, yes you have to live under fascism but at least you’ll get trains that work. The question for us here is whether this compact’s existence justifies side-eying working trains? And it’s not entirely empty question premised on a myth either. This compact does exist in China today. That’s still an authoritarian, genocidal regime, even if it isn’t strictly fascist (and under Xi, maybe it is fascist).
The stupidity of seriously entertaining side-eying on time trains, is the whole premise of “Hitler at sugar” as a(n informal) fallacy. (Strictly speaking this version is a TV Trope but Reductio ad Hitlerum sounds stupid.) The quality of X has nothing to do with who else agrees with, disagrees with, does or rejects X. Pointing out that the fascists or White Australia or Elon Musk or whoever else are all pro-natalist/population growth is just word count padding. It’s true but it doesn’t mean anything.
Embracing the Inner Conspiracy Theorist
And then there’s the usual issue of bad science being presented as advanced thinking for geniuses (the main way conspiracy theories perpetuate):
First, just because younger people are having fewer kids now, that doesn’t mean they never will. In the U.S. today, surveys of middle-aged women and men find that not having had children is far rarer than having had children. According to government health statistics, “Among women and men aged 40–49 in 2015–2019, 84.3% of women had given birth and 76.5% of men had fathered a child.” This suggests that a vast majority of Americans eventually become parents. There’s no reason to believe that Millennials and Zoomers will widely deviate from this tendency, especially if they begin to catch up with older generations in household wealth.
This is, of course, the whole premise of the demographic transition. Middle-aged men and women today have far fewer children than elderly people today. My grandfather had seven children. The most any of his children have had is three. That’s an anecdote but it’s how this graph happened:
What the article is saying is that these numbers are going to pick up. Well, sort of. Strictly speaking it’s saying that the proportion of people having children will remain the same, which can theoretically happen if what counts as a lot of children falls low enough. What makes it bad science is:
- how tortured a concept this is
- without that tortured outcome, we need the trend to reverse
You can’t make the “trends will stay the same” argument when the trends disagree with the position but this article cited by Philosophy Tube does exactly that. And maybe the video pivots from how it starts and this article is held up by Philosophy Tube as “look, the people who agree with me are also dumb as hell and propagating bad science to serve their political agenda”. I don’t know if it does or not. I didn’t finish the video and even if I had I wouldn’t remember now months down the line. I’m just putting it out there that it’s a theoretical possibility. Just like how theoretically enough one child families could happen to maintain those statistics. It could happen but it doesn’t make sense with what we know so far.
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n.b. there are measurements of exactly what the article is measuring over time, i.e. the proportion of women who never have children. In the US the picture’s a bit complex but you can see it’s not static, so you still can’t assert that the statistic won’t change. There are countries where their presumed demographic transition TFR fall has been caused by a roughly static childless rate combining with declines in what is “a lot”, but the US isn’t one of them. There are also some other countries where it has monotonically increased, e.g. Japan.
I also just need to note this:
Chimps are Homo sapiens’ next closest relative among other animals, and so they are a good proxy for a natural great ape population density.
We are not fucking chimps. Nor are chimps our closest relatives. They’re not even our closest living relatives. Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos jointly, which have different populations because chimps aren’t fucking bonobos and bonobos aren’t fucking chimps, either. Our closest relatives are Denisovans and Neanderthals collectively and there’s a very good chance that the main difference between Neanderthals and us is that we had (and have) higher “natural” population densities. I have just quoted a pretty short sentence and literally every single part of it is wrong. What’s worse is the whole is the appeal to nature fallacy. Yes, the false premises mean that we can readily argue the natural population density of H. sapiens is our current population density but doing so is fucking meaningless.
We’ve moved past bad demography to bad biology. We’re now talking about the kind of bad science that we expect fifteen year olds to do better than. Demography, at least, is a university subject. It makes a lot more sense that people are so wrong about it. It’s not easy. This sentence should’ve been easy and instead it’s… that.
The Context Trap
There is something important to remember about the article we’ve been looking at. Ostensibly, it’s making the case that Children of Men is not on the cards:
In a February [2025] New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.
But our article’s author’s read of the movie is highly questionable, saying in an aside:
He [Lewis-Kraus] seems to have gotten the impression that the simple absence of children is what is dystopian about the film, rather than the deteriorating social fabric, fascist rule, and civil war.
Children of Men is saying the absence of children — the complete collapse of human fertility — is what caused that world. The deteriorating social fabric, fascist rule and civil war are caused by the infertility. Children of Men and Idiocracy have nearly nothing in common, but they both use who has and doesn’t have children as the premise for their worlds. You can’t just set that aside as though it doesn’t matter. Just like we can’t set aside that this bad argument is trying to establish that The Bomb’s bomb is not an extinction level event. The problem is that this context doesn’t excuse the article. This is the context trap.
Yes, it’s true the article isn’t trying to say “no ELE, no problem” but it does say that. Yes, it’s true the article isn’t trying to say “population policy is fascist”, but how is it not saying that? Nearly none of what it talk about is actually relevant to the case it’s making. And no point does the term population momentum get mentioned. Nor does it ever talk about literally the foundational idea of this subject: demographic transition.
In principle, below replacement fertility should lead to a zero population. I don’t know how long that would take to happen and while I did a search for it, all I found was a Reddit post which outsourced the calculation to Claude. This doesn’t justify the ELE narrative. Having a falling human population at either a local or global level is a different problem to having a population that is heading towards extinction. The implications of a world with six billion people in decline are not the same as one with four hundred million people in decline. We also don’t know what will happen once we really start to feel the effects of population decline. It may be the case that the world that results creates structural incentives for larger families that overrides everything else. Even Japan’s only been in population decline for about fifteen years. The oldest cohort of Japan’s shrink era is barely old enough to have children and we’re talking at a biological level here not a practical one: they’re fifteen. The image could be the same in 2041 but it also might have changed. We don’t know.
Oh and that’s the other insane thing about that article. Not only does it not mention population momentum or the demographic transition, but it also doesn’t mention below replacement fertility. It might be arguing with Elon Musk’s deranged takes but it says none of the things it should be. We can very easily give it too much credit and end up excusing the endless bad choices it made. Elon Musk’s being wrong doesn’t make you right just because you’re disagreeing with him.
Okay, so the Philosophy Tube Video is Bad, Now What?
There are a lot of things that this post has not done. I haven’t even tried to show you that f(X) < 0. I really have quite singularly focussed on making the point that the fertility decline sceptics are giving world terrible arguments. This is really important to remember: part of why their arguments are bad is that they reach for who’s talking to conclude what’s being said is bad. Elon Musk is an idiot. The fact the Philosophy Tube video is bad and the article we’ve looked at for quotes is bad doesn’t make Elon Musk right. Similarly, the fact I’m criticising the Philosophy Tube video doesn’t mean anything other than that video is wrong. That being said, I am not just pointing at the video and the article because they’re badly argued but coincidentally right. They are badly argued and wrong.
[Insert quibbling about disproving the ELE case here.]
Here’s the case for why you need to care about the bomb:
- human societies are presently premised on a pool of workers who support everyone too old, too ill or too young to work, but as the proportion of people too old to work increases as the population ages, the burden per working person increases
- the kinds of jobs which people have the least love for are the kinds of jobs that increase fastest in the face of an ageing population. It is not wrong for people to find working with patients with dementia soul destroying. It is not wrong for people to be uninterested in the prospect of cleaning human shit out of a bed. Human dignity is important and valuable and the older a population gets, the harder keeping it for everyone becomes.
- the global economy might actually be based on an infinite growth assumption, so while a declining labour force is inherently a resource decrease simply from the fact of fewer humans, the level of resources in the world could rapidly collapse due to population growth’s significance in economic growth
- we can’t fight climate change without resources and the ability of our societies to maintain quality of life with a shrinking population could well come at the cost of killing the planet faster than we have been doing as governments pursue quick, dirty and cheap solutions which are inefficient but manageable given the shrinking resource base
- the “old men see no further than tomorrow’s meat” problem; a society’s interest in maintaining the planet is a function of its own interest in its own future, but an ageing population has less future per person and the childless have less skin in the game when it comes to the future, so an ageing population that is not yet in decline may be the biggest planetary threat, and this is exactly the scenario created by population momentum
Look, Malthus may strike again and Asimov will save us all but these are, all of them, serious problems and it’s time for anyone to realise that just because this moron:
has somehow become the guy for this conversation, that doesn’t mean the conversation is unserious.
Whales in the Hudson aka Thanos did nothing wrong
Let’s make a penultimate check in with article:
The human population is currently so massive, so out of balance with the rest of life on Earth, so pathologically “abundant” that it would take decades or centuries of decline to put a noticeable dent in it — unless, that is, there is some external force which leads to mass death and reproductive crisis, like, say, the ongoing ecological crises, pollution, nuclear war, or a deadlier pandemic than the one that’s still ongoing.
This is what I meant by:
very few people are making the case for the collapse of the human population. It’s not even a particularly difficult argument to make, people just don’t make it
I don’t know if that argument is making the ecoterrorist or Thanosian or neo-Malthusian case for fewer humans is better but it’s less obvious that fewer humans is the solution than you’d think. Say what you will about the carbon footprint, there are fewer humans in the United States than in India and yet:
That global figure of 39,023.94 would be 16,767 with India’s per capita figure. But at the same time population growth and economic growth do not have to come at the cost of more environmental damage; not all of these numbers have gone up. How do you frame this data? Are humans the problem or is the level of economic development the problem? And if the level of economic development is the problem, how come the EU, Japan and the US have got better in this graphic? This isn’t even a per capita decline, there’s just straight up less than was 23 years earlier. The data doesn’t pull in one direction and cuts across the ecoterrorist concept of the subject.
I am making a “population decline is bad for the planet” case because it is entirely possible that a US that’s in decline has the same relationship with emissions growth as all these developing economies do. However, the global economy re-orders post detonation, it is nothing more than wishcasting to imagine that it’ll re-order in a way that is useful. And even if it does, that doesn’t mean the transition to that point will be smooth. As Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead. We can do a lot of damage to the planet in the transitional phase trying to maintain quality of life. And I really imagine the transitional phase will be much more like China on its way up than the US maintaining hegemony.
Two Tribes Go to War
There’s one more thing I want to say about the article so let’s quote it one last time:
As with many other issues, if the right wing’s greatest fears were to come true, it would almost certainly be fine for everybody… except, maybe, a few oligarchs.
There is something so… tribalistic about modern political discourse. The notion of extending any kind of humanity to the opposition, that is, to see them as human instead of the opposition is alien to how people talk. It’s definitely related to the ideological purity that’s become an obsessive part of the discourse over the last fifteen or so years but there’s an abstract disinterest in trying see why someone thinks… whatever they think. This leads to a cottage industry of people asking questions like “Why do Capitalists dislike Communism?”. Well, the answer is, primarily, they’re Capitalists. Compare the humanistic version of that question “Why do people like Capitalism?”. You can’t answer that with “because it’s not Communism”. You have to be willing, as a human being, to imagine the point of view of someone who isn’t you because if you don’t you lose your own humanity. And in a democracy you have to be able to imagine the point of view of someone you disagree with because if you don’t you’re removing humanity and replacing it with ideology.
There’s something deeply bizarre to me about the article. It seems to want to be humanist. It asserts that living standards will be just fine due to history (because living standards are the same now as in Ancient Rome? fascist Italy? I can’t see where else the reference to history is supposed to attach) and berates commentators for not caring about the quality (as opposed to quantity) of life. And especially not the quality of all human life. And yes the article is basically an ecoterrorist talking point equating human life with all human existence but that doesn’t really cut against humanism. You can imagine a mouse and a human are morally equivalent beings and still care about humans, right? But you cannot claim to care about humans and then use “the right” as a kind of boogeyman. This article does.
The reality is that there’s nothing left or right about the bomb. It just is. It’s something that’s going to happen without change. What there is are left and right interpretations of what the problem of the bomb is. Like it or not, there’s nothing green about any contemporary rightwing ideology. I guess there’s conservationism for hunting purposes or through conservatism but these aren’t widespread positions: they’re functionally idiosyncratic. If you look at my list for reasons to be concerned about the bomb, you’d need to remove (4) from it to be making something convenient to the rightwing frame of mind. And in return, I think many leftists would have an issue with (3) and (5). There’s also arguments I could’ve made but didn’t. I could’ve talked about preserving economic growth as a goal in itself. That’s a rightwing talking point, which is distinct to (3). And for a left wing idea that my list is missing? Maybe we could talk about the urban nature of queer culture and how a decline in cities would be bad for queer communities? Anyone who thinks that the bomb encodes a rightwing POV of the world is simply not trying to think. It’s the same manoeuvre as people who construct urbanism as leftwing:* they just want their tribe to be agreeing with them so they have to find a way to make it tribal.
Why do people want it this way? Why do they want there to be clear tribes? Why do they want labels? I don’t understand it. And it’s clear that the larger part of the bomb’s political existence comes from the fact that it’s tribalised not because it’s tribal. It’s not climate action.
The Politics of Art
It’s a little ridiculous to refer to The Bomb as art. It’s a pretty short movie pitch that doesn’t even explain what happens to its central characters because it stops at the plot hook. And while I think the tribalisation of the bomb is ridiculous, I can’t deny that The Bomb is nakedly political because it uses the bomb to detonate its main character’s life. Similarly, there’s this little detail:
Gloria has never thought her own choices stood against humanity before and now she’s hearing a ticking noise. It’s not just her biological clock.
Like, she’s childfree in order to keep the shockwaves of the detonation… resonating? through the movie but it’s an element that increases the politics within the pitch. It explicitly politicises the state of being childfree: aligning it against the wider benefit of humanity and framing the goal of childfreedom as… uh, explosive material in the bomb. How could anyone sit there and say that’s not a political statement? It clearly is. But it’s not a political movie. The Bomb isn’t a lecture. It’s supposed to work as a drama film… it’s like how Idiocracy uses, um, eugenics to create its dystopian premise. The Bomb just uses political material to keep its story burning. This post is what a lecture looks like.
It is true that The Bomb would, if it existed as a movie, be telling people to believe that the bomb is real. It would be telling them to believe that it does matter and they should care about it. But this is little different to Don’t Look Up and its fumbled, Covid-confused climate change metaphor meteor. In fact, it’s almost exactly the same because that movie’s real thrust is “why do you care what the broligarchs have to say?”. It was a discourse movie. And that’s what The Bomb’s real political message is:
It’s just for some weird reason the only people talking about it are all the worst people in the world.
I don’t really care what you think about the bomb. I don’t really care if you see it as the saviour of earth or agree with me that it’s likely to make everything worse. I don’t care if you’re wishcasting the fuck out of what population decline will do to the macroeconomic status quo or you’re prepping your doomsday bunker for when capitalism collapses. All that I ask is that you (1) stop thinking it’s a right wing grift just because right wing grifters love the bomb — but yes, they genuinely do love it — and (2) understand that the bomb is a very serious, very wonky topic that was around before we cared who Elon Musk is and will be after we’ve stopped.
And if you really, really want my real, real thoughts about the bomb, it’s this: we have absolutely no idea how to stop it. Basically: hope for the robots. Not because the bomb is an ELE, but because you don’t want to see what the world looks like when it goes off. The simple truth is: there’s a whole lotta bad between “not a problem” and “extinction”.
*Conventional urbanism is almost indistinguishable from rabid libertarianism.
