So I watched this video about Egypt. I keep going back to Egypt with my mind, because I just struggle to think of a place that’s more clearly in trouble than Egypt. It has to be the most existentially horrifying thing, to be a smart person stuck in Egypt right now.
Egypt has around 118 million people today, all huddled around the river Nile. Those people are living in houses built on top of what used to be their fertile farmland. Egypt today imports most of its wheat, about half of the flour of its bread program comes from imported wheat. They pay 4.2 billion dollar a year to import wheat. And Egypt being Egypt, a place with few natural resources left, you have to wonder what they have to offer in return to the countries they’re importing from.
To try to solve some of its problems, the government has decided on an ambitious projects to simply create new fresh water rivers of its own in the desert, to irrigate new farmlands that will be used for food production. Those new artificial rivers are of course filled up with sand almost straight away by the Sahara desert, so now they have to come up with some way to stabilize all the sand.
The worst thing Egypt seems to be dealing with however, is the fact that it ultimately doesn’t control the Nile, as it originates in Ethiopia before moving through South Sudan and Sudan, from where it then ends up in Egypt. And when Ethiopia decides to dam its river, creating a big reservoir where water evaporates, then Egypt, South Sudan and Sudan end up with less water for them.
This seems to have violated some water treaties, but Ethiopia doesn’t care, it wants the electricity. Egypt did it with the Aswan dam, now it’s Ethiopia’s turn. So, one of these days, it seems that Egypt and Sudan are just going to go out there and bomb the dams that Ethiopia is constructing.
A sustainable level of population in Egypt would look like less than three million:
The current higher CO2 concentrations in the air now makes it slightly easier to grow food (if you don’t mind a lower protein content in your grains), but other than that, there simply isn’t a whole lot of stuff that changed since the medieval period in Egypt to improve food production in a sustainable manner, when it repeatedly bumped into the same population limit of around three million before going down again. Well, again, it’s at 118 million people now. It has forty times too many people.
Every country has its problem, but even the Netherlands, the most densely populated part of Europe, is just not as overpopulated as Egypt. We have 18 million today. We’re supposed to have around one million if you look at medieval Europe, so you could say we’re now about 18 times overpopulated.
But now think of Ireland. In 1841, they have 6.5 million people. Today they have just over five million. Their population remained stable, in the same time period during which Egypt’s population shot up around twenty-fold. The industrial revolution affected different parts of the world differently. Norway again, is the same story as Ireland. In 1841 they have 1.5 million people, today they have just over five and a half million. They shot up four-fold, but Egypt shot up an insane twenty-fold during that same period. Estonia less than doubled its population since the mid 19th century.
Some parts of the world ballooned, other parts clearly did not. The problem of course is that when you point out a part of the world that ballooned in response to industrialization, people there won’t say “yeah you’re right, it’s time we all jump off the highest tower in the city”. No, when your population skyrockets twenty times, now you’re stuck with twenty times as many people who all want to live, who desperately cling onto the only thing they know. And they don’t want to end up as rando expats in some other place without friends, family and their native culture either. No, they all just want to stay in the same spot, which now has twenty times too many people.
There is this part of me that thinks the best solution is a new virus that just kills everyone, but again, we’ve seen how people respond when there’s a new virus. They don’t say: “Finally, our problems are going to be solved.” No, when something like that happens they freak out and you’re no longer allowed to leave your house. So we’re just stuck in this situation that any morons can figure out is never going to work, where every moron can see there can be only one solution, but where I’m seen as the bad guy when I dare to point it out.
But when I look at Egypt, all I can think is: “How could you let it get this bad.” I can’t imagine living in Egypt right now and deciding you’re going to have children. “I need to have five children to defeat the zionists.” Look bro, I’m not a genius but it seems to me, you, the Israelis, the Palestinians and everyone else in the neighborhood is living on borrowed time.
In the Netherlands, the natives have a fertility rate below replacement level. The population would have looked like an Eastern European country, if it had not been for immigration. But in Egypt, the fertility rate today is stuck at an insane 2.8 children per woman. The worst thing about Egypt however, is that when shit hits the fan, they respond with EVEN MORE children:
I had this game, “Fate of the World”, where you have to try to stop civilization from collapsing. One of the nasty parts about it was that whenever things went poorly, people lost the ability to regulate their fertility, family planning just imploded and birth rates shot up.
Well, places like Egypt and Gaza suggest the real world works like this too. After the 2009 recession, the 2011 Arab spring, the election of an Islamist president, Egypt’s fertility began steadily climbing again. To me this is entirely insane, but it is the fact of the matter. Social upheaval in the Arab world leads to optimism about the future, which leads to an increase in births.
For what it’s worth, it ultimately doesn’t matter anymore whether Egypt reaches replacement level fertility or not. They could suddenly be stuck at 2.1 children per woman for the next twenty years and the outcome would be pretty much the same. Why? Well easy. This is what a big city in Egypt looks like right now:
What do people who live like this want? A garden. A local park where they can walk their dog. A field where they can play tennis or soccer. People refuse to live in circumstances like this for very long. It’s too dense. And sooner or later, you’re going to have people occupy more physical space. Because the only nearby physical space is fertile farmland, the fertile farmland will be sacrificed, as the cure for people’s growing claustrophobia.
I’m not saying the Egyptians are going to live like the Americans:
I’m simply saying that the claustrophobic lifestyle of modern urban Egypt can not last for very long. People will want more space. There will have to be space for trees in cities like this, if only because you need trees for shade, to cool down a city. And as capitalism leads to escalating inequality, at lost a minority of the population in Egypt will be able to spend a lot of money, to buy a house with a garden in a place that’s right now occupied by farmland.
The other thing I feel like pointing out again. I know people are horrified by the virus scenario, but if you have some sort of utopia emerge overnight where the Egyptians become vegans and start composting their spent coffee grounds and riding around in Cairo on bicycles it’s still not going to be some kind of heavenly ordeal. Living with a projected 162 million people by 2050 around the Nile with desert on either side will suck regardless of what you do and it’s looking like they’re approaching a horrifying scenario regardless of what they do.
But if you live in Egypt, your family, neighbors, friends, colleagues, just expect you to blindly go through the motions, to work hard on a future that doesn’t exist, to build these fake rivers that are flooded with sand by nature, to live in these overpopulated neighborhoods that don’t even have room for a single tree. They always expect you to just keep going, even when there is no point to it.
And some of you are smart, some of you will have been looking at this sort of stuff ten, twenty or thirty years ago, thinking to yourself: “Man I really need to hurry up and get myself a couple of acres of land for my own permaculture homestead to feed my family, before everything goes to shit.” But you know what’s going to happen, right?
The first four or five years it goes alright. That’s the best case scenario, you managing to figure it out. But then after that, you get your climate-change fueled forest fire moving into the neighborhood, your mud-avalanche from the mountains, your whole plot of land is just flooded with water and the plants die. Then what do you do? There’s a reason we have these globally integrated supply chains in the industrial era. the climate changed, if you’re entirely dependent on things going right locally, then you get your once in a century storm and you’re in big trouble.
I don’t really see a solution to any of the problems we’re dealing with at a global level. But considering the average Egyptian has 2.8 children, they don’t even seem to see the problem itself.
If you wanted some good news the TFR in Egypt was already down to 2.4 from the latest 2024 data and there’s generally no floor with these things – they can go all the way down to basically zero. There are places in Manchuria where it’s down to like 0.3 or so already. Demographers are generally overestimating the future population by a fair amount because the TFR has usually dropped faster than projected in recent decades and the projections don’t usually take into account that it can continue to drop significantly below 2.1 and just keep going down from there.
The sun is rising, and I am tired. It is time for me to go back to my coffin.
However, I did want to say that this is a very interesting post and there are many things to think about in it.
https://www.jfeed.com/news-israel/sretab
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/02/17/israeli-military-analysis-website-floats-plan-to-destroy-aswan-dam-kill-up-to-10-5-million-egyptians/
Egypt might have some other problems coming up.
Original Hebrew article that caused some trouble
https://nziv.net/113571/
Yeah Israel has had blowing up the Aswan dam as a hypothetical option in case of a catastrophic war for a while. It’s why war between Egypt and Israel is essentially unthinkable. You just don’t want to mess with Israel, they have too many options available to make you regret it. Hence why after they developed a nuclear weapon programs the invasions by their neighbors basically came to an end and the Arab struggle against Israel took a more diplomatic route, centered around maximizing Palestinian suffering.
everyone can move underground: https://nypost.com/2025/03/23/world-news/vast-underground-city-found-below-egypts-giza-pyramids-scientists/
Sobering post, Radagast. Even a war with their jewish neighbors, if it will cost them the estimated 15 million lives, will not nearly be enough to take the pressure away when shtf.
I think they will ultimately go reverse Sea Peoples. In the direction of Europe of course. And with the same results. The Ummah is coming soon to a place near to you. Very near….
Yeah, what a miserable place.
Everywhere with high population densities is miserable.
Despite being in ecological overshoot already, global population is predicted to increase still despite (and ironically because) of the extreme events it is causing before it levels out and falls.
There’s just so much momentum that it’s unsolvable, so barring a miracle, it will burn itself out.
But why will the population still increase, even as conditions get more extreme?
Even if there are wars and multiple plagues worse than covid, etc?
For the answer, watch this exchange for a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJwsJhFK98o&t=4159s
Perhaps if we burned the whole industrial-technological system down, globally, we could mitigate the damage to some extent, but there’s not any appetite for that, not yet anyway, and there may never be.
For people struggling to cope with the horror, perhaps you can try to skip forward through the grieving process to acceptance.
One of the fixes. Is the requirement of the man to be economically established before even qualifying for sex and hence marriage. This will tend to delay male reproduction and subsequently female reproduction because of natural preferences of people.
This will force the population to live within carrying capacity. Or create it to make it possible to have children.
Then what do you do?
You have two options:
1) Eat the people; or
2) Feed the people to pigs, and then eat the pigs.
Love,
Retard
>And some of you are smart, some of you will have been looking at this sort of stuff ten, twenty or thirty years ago,
Yep. It was blindingly obvious even back when I was at highschool in the 1980s.
>thinking to yourself: “Man I really need to hurry up and get myself a couple of acres of land for my own permaculture homestead to feed my family, before everything goes to shit.”
Nope. The results of THAT were blindingly obvious as well.
>But you know what’s going to happen, right?
Yep. And tbh I welcome it.
I’m far more nihilistic and fatalistic now than I was back then. But I’m also a scientist and I know what J shaped population curves do. I honestly don’t mind.
As much as misery loves company, anyone new to our predicament should probably stop themselves from kicking over that rock and just walk away.
Spare yourself.
All they need to do is build upwards. But I agree that sudden adjustments to their population size may happen.
On another note, I am beginning to have doubts about “vegan diet” as my blood sugar worsened recently.
I will see what I can do about it (giving blood and not eating vegan items with heme iron) and will wait until my next physical. This is a shame because I mostly like to eat vegan.
Build upwards. . .
More consumption. . .
Because that’ll fix the overconsumption.
Dumb animals just fuck and have babies without any thought to the future. Let them have miserable lives until they learn to control their urges, like civilized human beings.
Death is part of Life cycle. Death is not evil itself.
Forcing people against their free will is evil (vaccine mandates, climate change policies without consent…)
So, people should do something good if they can, but NEVER force something good against others’ will. Whenever they do that, they become evil themselves, in the name of good.
The rest is in the hands of God.
Leave what you can’t solve to God.
Never try to step out of the boundaries. Never try to play God.
Never try to sacrifice even 1 person “for the greater good”. (which pro-vaxxers are doing)
Gaza is not a country. It was a concentration camp, but now it’s a slaughterhouse to the Greater Glory of Zion.
Egypt isn’t a hopeless country like this article seems to imply. Firstly, the fertility rate has declined from above 6 to under 3 in a few decades. It is near certain that it will keep going down to under 2.0 quite soon.
The slight increase that happened a few years ago may be due to more people marrying. In times of uncertainty, women may just choose to marry rather than stay single. So the birth rate may have increased as a result. It’s unlikely that already married people decided to have an extra child.
Egypt is actually building a new capitol city east of Cairo. It is being built on desert soil. Look it up in google maps. It seems quite nice.
That will probably be the future, with building being done on desert land rather than extending existing cities.
It is worth noting that while there are plenty of Moroccans and Algerians in Europe, there aren’t many Egyptians. I wonder why. It suggests that Egypt isn’t such a bad place. Or maybe they are just not as nomadic, having lived in Egypt for so long.
On the topic of demographics, here is a chart of births versus deaths in south korea, from the years of 1925 until 2019:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/media/File:Live_births,_deaths_of_South_Korea_(1925-2019).png
For the amount of media attention this topic gets lately, I think this chart is very strange. First, note that it covers a 95-year period, from 1925 to 2020, which is longer than the south korean life expectancy of 82. Now, note that from the years of 1925 to 2000, there were more than 500,000 births in south korea every year. For almost all of the same years, with two exceptions for the years of 1950 and 1951 at the height of the korean war, there were always fewer than 500,000 deaths, and in most cases there were fewer than 300,000.
So what’s the problem? Well it’s the timespan of the data, and the discrepancy between the amount of births and deaths. A superficial view of the data makes it look as though there were a bunch of people who were born in the early parts of the 20th century, who lived well past the average life expectancy, and somehow never died. You have more than 500,000 people born in 1925, then again in 1926, 1927, 1928…all the way up to the year 2000, and yet a full 95 years later (this still holds through 2025 as well, so really 100 years later) there have never been more than 500,000 people who have died in a given year, since 1951. This is despite the life expectancy being 82, and the oldest members of the people described in the above dataset now being 100, with the annual discrepancy between births and deaths almost at a factor of two for a full century. As an analogy, if I pour water into a coffee filter, the water may sit in there for a while but I expect the same amount of water to eventually flow out of the other end. If only half of the water flows out the other side, and the other half seems to magically disappear, I will be confused and possibly concerned.
It’s not like this is an obscure piece of data either. The south korean birth rates get written about in the news all the time, the south korean government has spent $270 billion to try to address the issue which is described by this data set. The issue has been scrutinized by demographers and policymakers all over the world, as it’s a famous example of what is seen by many as a wider issue. Has nobody else noticed this problem, or is there an obvious explanation I’ve overlooked here?
What could account for this? I checked the immigration stats, they can’t explain it. Bad data collection? The oldest people emigrate to north korea every year, Logan’s Run-style? The reality we live in is a fake and gay potemkin village with only the superficial appearance of having a logical order to it? I’m curious if anyone here understands what I’m saying and has a potential explanation to offer.
that link got broken btw, just copy-paste it with the ‘.png’ included at the end.