A Brave New World Will Be Born from Today’s Fertility

A recent article discussed changes in the world’s demographic structure. According to it, global population growth is becoming increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia. For example, the fertility rates in the already highly populous countries of Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ethiopia are 3.50, 4.30, and 3.81 respectively.

Even more striking figures can be found in Chad, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In those countries, women give birth to an average of 5.94, 5.91, and 5.90 children respectively. At the opposite extreme are Macao, Hong Kong, and South Korea, with fertility rates of 0.69, 0.74, and 0.75.

In Finland, the fertility rate was 1.3 children per woman in 2025. Across the entire European Union, the average was 1.34 in 2024, and in North America last year it was 1.59.

In practice, this means that in the world of the future, people will predominantly have genetic and cultural roots in developing countries — above all African ones, but also Asian peoples belonging to the Islamic cultural sphere, as illustrated by the Wikipedia map below.

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The future scenario I have outlined above actually came to mind while I was reading a column by a journalist from Finland’s largest newspaper about the civil war in Sudan. In it, Europeans were criticized for not caring about the Sudanese civil war and its victims.

According to Mykkänen, the Deputy Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), Rania Dagash-Kamara, had spoken at an event held in the Finnish Parliament’s “Little Parliament” building about rapes committed against civilians in Sudan. These acts are carried out by armed men from the various sides in the conflict, and no one seems interested in protecting the victims from sexual violence.

After the event, Member of Parliament Eva Biaudet (Swedish People’s Party) reportedly showed a UNICEF report according to which rape has become a systematically used weapon of war. And it does not affect only women — one third of the victims are boys.

In addition, sixteen of the raped children were under the age of five. Four of them were only one year old.

I repeat: only one year old. In practice, babies! What kind of person rapes babies?

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Based on all this, I was left wondering what kind of world we may have in one or two hundred years’ time — taking into account what I said at the beginning of this text about the genetic and cultural roots of future humanity.

Previous thoughts on the same topic:
Deep Roots of Violence and Disregard for Human Dignity in History
Can Peace Emerge from Horrific War Crimes?
How to Increase Fertility Rates: A Finnish Solution