In the 20 century, many demographists considered population growth cessation and even depopulation as a common good. And now this dream is about to coming true. Humanity decelerated its growth sharply.
However the amount of human knowledge is in direct proportion to the global population and the latter directly depends on the gross domestic product (GDP). So should population growth be ceased, GDP per capita would stop growing as well (chapter 3). In other words there is no reason to expect better life in future.
On the other hand, this means that technology including environment friendly is not developed. The only thing to do will be to burn out the rest oil, contaminate the Earth with waste and observe how society which has stopped developing degrades.
Actually there is a dilemma, what is better: population growth and technology development combined with the treat of environment pollution and the hope to remediate it basing on the advanced technology or stable population figures and degrading combined with slack consumption of scraps of natural resources.
There is another more beneficial alternative that is to learn how to enrich knowledge under zero population growth. Humanity is unable to do so yet. We can just reckon on the knowledge revolution. Estimations prove its first stage may start in about 40 years. Whether we will be able to stretch out to it is the key challenge of the human development.
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