Regardless of your general opinion of Tucker Carlson, he’s on the money with this monologue about the unfortunate results of the recent explosion in the US population (it has gone up about 65 percent just in my lifetime). The idea of the US reaching a *billion* people, most of whom would almost certainly be third worlders with little interest in truly adopting American ideals, culture, language, etc., is basically horrifying.
And he’s right about where people want to live. As COVID made it sot hat people worked from home, and could thus live wherever the want, people rushed to get away from high population density urban areas and flooded into low population density rural areas. Just a few months before the pandemic hit I did the exact opposite, moving from rural Utah to somewhere far less open and free. Shrug. Had I known then what I know now… dunno. Maybe if I’d waited a couple years I could have sold my place in Utah for a *fortune.*
As an aside: in my Zaneverse stories, space operas set about 500 years from now, the three most populace planets in human space are Mars, Atlantis and Asgard. All have a population of about 50 million. All have had that population for a few hundred years, with little prospect of the populations increasing. Because after The Fall and The Bottleneck, humans necessarily got a lot smarter. Mars, completely terraformed at this point, is seen as horribly overpopulated, while Atlantis and Asgard, roughly Earthly and also completely terraformed, are seen as optimally populated. And yet people have *large* families generally. How is this sustained? By people getting the hell out of Dodge as soon as they can. There is a constant urge to get away from massive population centers and head out for the frontier. Of course the frontier is more often than not a new Habitat, a pair of rotating cylinders miles in diameter and more miles long, floating in the asteroid belt of this or that solar system. With good AI, easy nuclear fusion power and propulsion, and five centuries worth of advancement in manufacturing technology, the resources of asteroids and comets means that *billions* of this state-sized habitats can be built, almost free of charge, in any decent solar system.
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. But this time, without the cynicism.