Quote:
Originally Posted by dcarson
There is a treaty against settling Antartica. It is probable that a settlement would not make economic sense but currently it is forbidden.
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Yeah, but that isn't stopping anything that matters. The treaty is mostly honored because at the moment it suits the signatories to do so. When somebody with the power has a serious self-interested motive to ignore the treaty, they'll ignore it.
As Anthony notes, Greenland isn't treaty-protected and it's being mostly ignored right now, too. So for that matter are big swaths of the Great Plains in the USA and large parts of Asia.
Demographics is an interesting subject, and one that is by no means fully understood. If you read a lot of old classic SF by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc., you see a looming Malthusian dread that never materialized, the 'population bomb' was visibly a fizzle by 1980, for those willing to admit what they were seeing.
But the assumption of steadily growing population was natural, since it fit what had been going on for quite some time up until then. Now there's a tendency to assume that wealthy societies and advanced technology equal low or negative female fertility rates, and that's not established with any degree of certainty. It's perfectly possible that population growth rates will kick back into high gear at some point. Since we have an imperfect idea of why they fell, we can't say anything with much confidence about future trends.
(And if nothing else, evolutionary factors tend to press in that direction over long periods.)