Demographics and Futurism

You know. I've been thinking. And a news article today triggered more thoughts. Apparently, French sperm counts are steadily declining.

There's a trend going on across the planet right now. White people are having fewer children. The rest of humanity are taking up the slack. White people are likely to become a minority in huge tracts of the United States in the not too distant future.

When we, in the west, envision the future, we populate it with white people. Now, as time goes on, the other ethnicities will also slow their breeding. It's a natural result of longer life spans, better medical care and higher standards of living.

But it got me thinking. Where will the colonists come from? Space X plans on charging $500,000 for passage to Mars. That limits it to reasonably wealthy people, a lot of whom will be white. However, the Chinese are working on their own colonization efforts. The future 'Martian' is likely to be Asian or an Asian-white mix.

Meanwhile, taboos about ethnic mixing are breaking down. A study in Washington, D.C. indicated that a substantial minority of teenagers were showing a preference for dating outside their own ethnicity, indicating an increase in interracial relationships. Some of these will end up long term and produce children.

If humanity spreads out to the stars, then we may leave our miscegenation taboos behind. On top of that, some planets that we colonize may give advantages to different ethnicities. A higher level of UV, and you may want your colonists to be black. Then there's gene therapy. If it's good to be black on a certain planet, then might people who move there not have themselves made black? If nanomedicine and gene therapy allow skin color to be changed at will...then we may finally leave racism behind.

Ultimately, the future of humanity is probably multi-colored, not white. And that is a very good thing.