Readers are aware of mariner’s concerns about the future. Specifically, there are four global phenomena that are trying to make serious changes to the status quo of human life and to the planet.

The first to be measured is population. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded eight billion in mid-November 2022. It took around 300,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 218 more years from there to reach 8 billion.

The global population is still increasing, but there is significant uncertainty about its long-term trajectory due to changing fertility and mortality rates.The United Nations projects between 9 and 10 billion people by 2050 and gives an 80% confidence interval of 10–12 billion by the end of the 21st century with a growth rate by then of zero.

This pattern of accelerated birth rates hits a point of psychosomatic collapse where the population begins to fall. This behavior also was proven in population studies with mice back in the 1960s. Those mouse studies also showed a societal collapse into two classes: a few very stable families where some family members served as border guards and, by mouse cage standards, were very wealthy. The other class being subject to mob violence, constant fighting, killing and an indifference toward newborns.

If population were an isolated phenomenon, it would be comparatively simple to manage. However, it becomes part of today’s fog because population is related to economics, habitat and behavior of the planet – as each of the four are integrated with the other three.

Hence the fog. Will the planet ignore human viability and destroy the balance of the surface with heat, storms and mass extinction or will the planet be influenced by dollars because there aren’t enough worldly resources to sustain modern economics as we have known it? The relationship between habitat and population is close.

Have humans made it too expensive to be the only creature who needs a fancy toilet, a water tower and septic system along side piped in fresh water just to pee? The industrial/technical age has created large economies at great expense to the habitat. It used to be instead of consuming millions of acres for grazing giant herds of beef, transportation and factory processing at local populations, that a person could buy fresh beef, lamb and chicken from a local butcher shop requiring only a dozen or so workers from farmer to customer.

Which causes are hurt the most of the four – economy, habitat or over population? Mariner hasn’t mentioned global warming.

Climate change is big in the news today because in just a few years, big cities, massive industrial centers and land itself will be destroyed.

So which should humans fix first? It looks like AI will tell the remaining pseudo humans the answers.

It’s all a big fog.

Ancient Mariner