Those slabs are pretty cool, except this 500 million number. That's Age of Discovery population. Back then, China and India both had like 120 million people each.
One of the reasons I've committed to never having children is because there isn't a NEED for more children. We (our species) has a far excess of humans to survive just anything.
<sarcasm>
Yeah, at this problematic moment, what we need is less scientists telling us bad news and more politicians distroying nature actively while telling us fake news. That would solve all.
</sarcasm>
As usual, the process is already well underway. Birth rates are dropping fairly rapidly, and we are pretty close to seeing total population hit equilibrium and maybe even start declining.
Growth rates of 1.14-1.12-1.08 and lower, any predictions when it drops below zero? This site pegs it at 11 billion. [1]
Seems like infertility will be a major contributor, combined with technology, income distribution, and massively changing roles of women.
Children are all at once the best thing you will ever do, your greatest joy, tremendous pains in the ass, and terrifically expensive. I highly recommend it, and highly advise against it!
But seriously anyone who would sign a letter saying we need to reduce population as a solution to climate change doesn’t merely lack imagination, they are actively damaging the goal to which they claim to aspire.
The way to fight for climate change is to recruit an ever larger plurality of humans to voting with their dollars and their voices for products and technologies and investments that make the Earth better. The way to fail is to alienate people with bullshit like population control and straw bans which betray a political agenda beyond mere climate.
No matter what technology, there will be an absolute upper limit of what population earth can bear. So the the discussion can only be what the correct number is, isn't it? And it could well be that the number is lower than the current population. For our current technology, population is way too high. So either we regulate that or nature will do it for us.
I have two children and I am grateful for them. But it would be dangerous to miss that we run up to hard limits.
We don't know what the future carrying capacity of earth will be, and wild speculation there helps noone.
We do know current carrying capacity appears to be too low but what is the best way to fix that? Is it telling the people who have many kids today - primarily the poor and uneducated - to have fewer kids? Is that likely to work?
I believe Hans Rosling is right, who said birth rates are a direct consequence of how rich or poor you are. We've seen hundreds of millions lifted from poverty in the last few decades, with dropping birth rates as a result. The best action has to be to work to lift more out of poverty. Sitting in our ivory tower and declaring that people should have fewer kids is not going to work.
Yeah, if you start declaring that not everybody can have kids, then you‘re in the business of picking who gets to have kids, which would be extremely draconian to impose and enforce and could be done badly in all sorts of ways.
Back of the napkin: following Wikipedia world energy consumption is roughly 1/10,000 of the yearly radiation input by the sun. This means about 450,000 km² of area for harvesting if we assume roughly 10% efficiency. This larger than the size of Germany. I don't think this is realistic in the short term. For keeping population only stable at current levels by providing everyone the lifestyle let's say of Europe we would need much more energy than that.
For our current technology population is too high in my opinion. I cannot provide a solution but if we strive for providing everyone Europe's life style, nature will show us another way of reducing population, I fear.
> No matter what technology, there will be an absolute upper limit of what population earth can bear.
The Puppeteer Homeworld in Larry Niven's Known Space is so largely populated they have to cool the planet down due to the passive energy output by the inhabitants. That always struck me as a pretty unrealistic barrier to beat.
> So either we regulate that or nature will do it for us.
Then let nature do it for us. There is so much uncertainty surrounding the question that no one can say what the "population limit" is. We could have already passed it. It could be far larger than what people might think. And there really isn't any reliable way of determining which is more likely. So it would be a terrible idea to use this asa basis for creating population control measures, which at worst would be draconic, and at best could have potentially dangerous or unforseen consequences (like they did in China).
We should absolutely seek solutions to ensure the future health of our planet and humanity. But we also need to realize that some "solutions" aren't actual solutions and are well beyond what we can and should do.
damaging the goal to which they claim to aspire. ... The way to fight for climate change is to recruit an ever larger plurality of humans to voting with their dollars and their voices for products and technologies and investments that make the Earth better.
I disagree that total number of humans has anything to do with making the right decisions. The key to favorable plurality has always seemed to be education. I also think that the optimal path forward is easier to ascertain / implement when there are less variables in play. It's possible that by sheer luck a person is born with never before seen capabilities - leading to the extreme betterment of society, but if that were a stated goal then it'd be better to protect our ability to iterate into the distant future than to iterate so fast now that we potentially jeopardize our near future.
Agree. The idea of "there are too many humans" plus robot soldiers (instead human soldiers that would be "culled" in war), can lead only to a bleak future when some politician on drugs concludes that the only way out to keep their lifestyle is sending the robots to kill people massively. To kill us
Condoning unfair debt created thousands of years ago to alleviate pressure over ecosystems is out of the table, as usual.
I think overpopulation is having/growing a population larger than you can support. I think this definition scales also. Don't have more kids than you can afford to feed and educate. This applies to families and to countries. Societies facilitate this thru cooperation. Regarding places like sub-Saharan Africa, the land was ravaged to the point of desertification where they cannot grow food. And disease ravages them in a way that they have 5 children hoping 1 or 2 will survive to adulthood. Perhaps large-scale change can turn the tide on the desertification, so they can feed their population. And so they can fight disease and survive.
I fail to see how overpopulation is a myth. While I believe that we could raise the bar for how many humans the Earth can support at one time; I also believe that it's difficult to argue that our current trajectory is sustainable without relying on some not-guaranteed advancements.
The solution to creating a better future for humans is planning, not genocide.
Okay, I'll bite. Overpopulation certainly could be a concern in the future, but we aren't there yet, and things seem to be moving in the right direction. Over the past half-century we have seen birth rates dropping fast, particularly in the "third world", and many "first world" countries are already below replacement rates. Add in the fact that the average human has a dramatically smaller environmental footprint than the average American, and it becomes clear that the problem is not the number of people, but the inefficient use of resources. We have enough to provide for everyone, it just isn't evenly distributed.
I think all of your points are valid, but I'm not convinced that there is only one best solution worth pursuing. For instance, reframing the issue as a problem with the distribution of resources makes sense, but I wonder to what extent the actual problem is people's unwillingness to distribute themselves; i.e. go closer to where the resources are. People want to live where the people are; where the things and the jobs are, and it's these overpopulated urban / industrial centers that people collect in which have the large environmental footprints.
Basically, the population is sustainable if people decide to change their values; move out of cities, distribute themselves across the available land, participate in self-sufficient local economies / work remotely, etc. I just don't believe that betting on people changing according to some timeline to be a winning bet.
While the climate crisis is very real, entirely too much attention is focused on it as part of the overall environmental destruction that has been caused, and is accelerating, due to massive overpopulation. The massive extinction of insects, animals and fish. The saturation of our environment with toxins, waste and industrial chemicals. The destruction of our soil from overfarming and monocropping. The mass extinction of plants and increasing deforestation. The list goes on and on. All direct results of massive overpopulation.
Unfortunately most people choose to ignore, or worse yet, deny the obvious because of a variety of factors. Some because of religion, some of of blind faith in technology to solve all of our problem, some out of denial because the problem seem too daunting to face and some out of sheer ignorance and/or stupidity. Many of these people engage in ridiculous hyperbole about potential solutions. They talk about people who understand the problem of overpopulation as seeking mass genocide or forced sterilization. Others talk about the "slowing birth rate" as if a deceleration in population growth (as opposed to a reduction) will cause the problem to solve itself.
The fact is that the problem of overpopulation is easily solved if we approach it rationally. Instead of incentivizing people to have children as we do now, offer incentives for people not to have children, both at home and abroad. Offer subsidies to couples who have one or no children and remove subsidies from those who choose to have 2 or more children. Its a problem that could be solved in a generation or two at most if we had the will and intelligence to implement common sense solutions.
Unfortunately even many of the people who realize overpopulation is an unsustainable problem refuse to address it out of concerns for our similarly unsustainable economy which depends on endless growth to keep our debt-service based economic pyramid from collapsing. The "wealth" of these people is illusory, based on "debts" that depend on future payments. The fact is that our overpopulation problem is tied to our economic problem. Neither will be solved unless and until people are willing to face reality and work towards solutions. Both will end disastrously in time if we choose to ignore them and pretend they are sustainable.
I was thinking the same but more simply: joke's on them, this solution is already being rolled out, in a bankruptcy scenario. First slowly, then suddenly.
This line of thinking is the old Malthusian catastrophy, expressed in terms of climate change instead of famine.
Malthus did some extrapolations and decided that population growth would outpase food production, causing famines. Now it is clear believe that a huge rise of agricultural productivity prevented this catastrophy. He thought the 19th century would not support more population growth and yet during the 20th century the human population grew more than ever.
Politicians and scientists need to learn to target the right problen with their policy, which is greenhouse emissions, not population growth. It is possible to increase productivity while controlling and even reducing emissions. Taxing carbon, investing RnD in greener technology, subsidising energy efficiency and banning the most poluting practices is actually more easy to implement in a non-totalitarian society than population control. With those policies the "output per ton of CO2" will increase. And also consider that reducing emissions would need a workforce, it would be more expensive to do it if a big chunk of it is used to care for elderly masses.. unless productivity rises of course.
The ‘agricultural productivity’ comes at a very high price. We have chemical Ag now and we turn fossil fuels into calories rather than sunlight+water into calories via photosynthesis.
The loss of biodiversity, habitat and the acidification of our oceans is going to bankrupt the future of the generations indiscriminately spawned.
> Also, it is basically white countries telling Africa to stop having children.
Birth rates in europe + descendant countries, china, korea, and japan are already at stable or slightly falling levels. So this is more like asking Africa to make the same pro-stability adjustments others have made already.
> So this is more like asking Africa to make the same pro-stability adjustments others have made already.
Notice that all of those countries are highly developed. So its less white countries, and more like countries that have made it pulling up the ladder behind them and telling everyone else that "its for their own good".
Considering the cost and fuel involved in getting something into space, it's save to say that most humans alive today will never leave the planet.
Even if we somehow acquired the material science to build something like a space tether, there's a minuscule chance a project like that would be completed within the lifetime of anyone reading this. And we'd still need way more than one tether to move humanity at scale.
We are on our way to causing a mass extinction event way before we become space-faring at scale.
And if we somehow managed to move humanity to space we would still need to make another planet habitable. And what would be the point of that colossal exercise when we got a perfectly good planet right here and just not destroying it is many many magnitudes easier.
Smaller populations are healthier and more prosperous because resources aren’t strained. This is why there is more interest in migration from high populace countries to those that are sparsely populated. Because of more access to shared resources.
I mean honestly, if we could commit the biggest polluting factories to cut down pollutants 50% and then to stop manufacturing the 50% most polluting cars, those would be good steps.
It's not really the humans destroying the planet. It's the invasive, destructive industries.
True for now... and when the global south further industrializes, modernizes? I don't think that the argument is flawed, but population is not an indicator of blame; it's a constraint on solutions.
It’s very simple. Half a surviving child non transferable quota per person. This ensures genetic diversity and reproductive rights across all economic stations.
I think 1-1.5 billion is the planet’s carrying capacity.
The question tho is this..should this be absolute law or should following the quota be regarded with an incentive as in UBI plus for anyone until they procreate and upto 1/2 surviving child after they procreate and until they die. They lose benefits if they have more children.
All genetic material must be collected and preserved. Not just as in a DNA bank but also for future possibilities as in medical intervention as science gives us ways to stay alive longer. And hopefully healthier.
53 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadQuite selfish.
<sarcasm> Yeah, at this problematic moment, what we need is less scientists telling us bad news and more politicians distroying nature actively while telling us fake news. That would solve all. </sarcasm>
Growth rates of 1.14-1.12-1.08 and lower, any predictions when it drops below zero? This site pegs it at 11 billion. [1]
Seems like infertility will be a major contributor, combined with technology, income distribution, and massively changing roles of women.
Children are all at once the best thing you will ever do, your greatest joy, tremendous pains in the ass, and terrifically expensive. I highly recommend it, and highly advise against it!
But seriously anyone who would sign a letter saying we need to reduce population as a solution to climate change doesn’t merely lack imagination, they are actively damaging the goal to which they claim to aspire.
The way to fight for climate change is to recruit an ever larger plurality of humans to voting with their dollars and their voices for products and technologies and investments that make the Earth better. The way to fail is to alienate people with bullshit like population control and straw bans which betray a political agenda beyond mere climate.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-–-W...
I have two children and I am grateful for them. But it would be dangerous to miss that we run up to hard limits.
We do know current carrying capacity appears to be too low but what is the best way to fix that? Is it telling the people who have many kids today - primarily the poor and uneducated - to have fewer kids? Is that likely to work?
I believe Hans Rosling is right, who said birth rates are a direct consequence of how rich or poor you are. We've seen hundreds of millions lifted from poverty in the last few decades, with dropping birth rates as a result. The best action has to be to work to lift more out of poverty. Sitting in our ivory tower and declaring that people should have fewer kids is not going to work.
Ok, I agree that this is still up for discussion.
> For our current technology, population is way too high.
Uhh, you just said that is up for debate.
Back of the napkin: following Wikipedia world energy consumption is roughly 1/10,000 of the yearly radiation input by the sun. This means about 450,000 km² of area for harvesting if we assume roughly 10% efficiency. This larger than the size of Germany. I don't think this is realistic in the short term. For keeping population only stable at current levels by providing everyone the lifestyle let's say of Europe we would need much more energy than that.
For our current technology population is too high in my opinion. I cannot provide a solution but if we strive for providing everyone Europe's life style, nature will show us another way of reducing population, I fear.
The Puppeteer Homeworld in Larry Niven's Known Space is so largely populated they have to cool the planet down due to the passive energy output by the inhabitants. That always struck me as a pretty unrealistic barrier to beat.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1517/puppeteers-ho...
Then let nature do it for us. There is so much uncertainty surrounding the question that no one can say what the "population limit" is. We could have already passed it. It could be far larger than what people might think. And there really isn't any reliable way of determining which is more likely. So it would be a terrible idea to use this asa basis for creating population control measures, which at worst would be draconic, and at best could have potentially dangerous or unforseen consequences (like they did in China).
We should absolutely seek solutions to ensure the future health of our planet and humanity. But we also need to realize that some "solutions" aren't actual solutions and are well beyond what we can and should do.
I disagree that total number of humans has anything to do with making the right decisions. The key to favorable plurality has always seemed to be education. I also think that the optimal path forward is easier to ascertain / implement when there are less variables in play. It's possible that by sheer luck a person is born with never before seen capabilities - leading to the extreme betterment of society, but if that were a stated goal then it'd be better to protect our ability to iterate into the distant future than to iterate so fast now that we potentially jeopardize our near future.
Condoning unfair debt created thousands of years ago to alleviate pressure over ecosystems is out of the table, as usual.
The solution to creating a better future for humans is planning, not genocide.
Basically, the population is sustainable if people decide to change their values; move out of cities, distribute themselves across the available land, participate in self-sufficient local economies / work remotely, etc. I just don't believe that betting on people changing according to some timeline to be a winning bet.
Unfortunately most people choose to ignore, or worse yet, deny the obvious because of a variety of factors. Some because of religion, some of of blind faith in technology to solve all of our problem, some out of denial because the problem seem too daunting to face and some out of sheer ignorance and/or stupidity. Many of these people engage in ridiculous hyperbole about potential solutions. They talk about people who understand the problem of overpopulation as seeking mass genocide or forced sterilization. Others talk about the "slowing birth rate" as if a deceleration in population growth (as opposed to a reduction) will cause the problem to solve itself.
The fact is that the problem of overpopulation is easily solved if we approach it rationally. Instead of incentivizing people to have children as we do now, offer incentives for people not to have children, both at home and abroad. Offer subsidies to couples who have one or no children and remove subsidies from those who choose to have 2 or more children. Its a problem that could be solved in a generation or two at most if we had the will and intelligence to implement common sense solutions.
Unfortunately even many of the people who realize overpopulation is an unsustainable problem refuse to address it out of concerns for our similarly unsustainable economy which depends on endless growth to keep our debt-service based economic pyramid from collapsing. The "wealth" of these people is illusory, based on "debts" that depend on future payments. The fact is that our overpopulation problem is tied to our economic problem. Neither will be solved unless and until people are willing to face reality and work towards solutions. Both will end disastrously in time if we choose to ignore them and pretend they are sustainable.
This line of thinking is the old Malthusian catastrophy, expressed in terms of climate change instead of famine.
Malthus did some extrapolations and decided that population growth would outpase food production, causing famines. Now it is clear believe that a huge rise of agricultural productivity prevented this catastrophy. He thought the 19th century would not support more population growth and yet during the 20th century the human population grew more than ever.
Politicians and scientists need to learn to target the right problen with their policy, which is greenhouse emissions, not population growth. It is possible to increase productivity while controlling and even reducing emissions. Taxing carbon, investing RnD in greener technology, subsidising energy efficiency and banning the most poluting practices is actually more easy to implement in a non-totalitarian society than population control. With those policies the "output per ton of CO2" will increase. And also consider that reducing emissions would need a workforce, it would be more expensive to do it if a big chunk of it is used to care for elderly masses.. unless productivity rises of course.
The loss of biodiversity, habitat and the acidification of our oceans is going to bankrupt the future of the generations indiscriminately spawned.
How about raising education levels and giving people a motive to live a good life?
I am afraid that this precludes rich people and inequality.
So let's proceed with the current extermination plan?
Also, it is basically white countries telling Africa to stop having children.
Birth rates in europe + descendant countries, china, korea, and japan are already at stable or slightly falling levels. So this is more like asking Africa to make the same pro-stability adjustments others have made already.
Notice that all of those countries are highly developed. So its less white countries, and more like countries that have made it pulling up the ladder behind them and telling everyone else that "its for their own good".
With our current usage of Nature's resources, human civilization is probably not sustainable. Therefore, protecting Nature benefits humans.
> and that humans will never be space-faring.
A forced mass-exodus to the stars might help. Depending on the resources necessary to move billions of humans, this might well doom this planet.
Exploiting off-world resources is a non-solution since it would mean just throwing more resources at our problems.
Basic survival of Nature and the Human race is almost certain, even without space travel. Survival of our civilization is not.
Even if we somehow acquired the material science to build something like a space tether, there's a minuscule chance a project like that would be completed within the lifetime of anyone reading this. And we'd still need way more than one tether to move humanity at scale.
We are on our way to causing a mass extinction event way before we become space-faring at scale.
And if we somehow managed to move humanity to space we would still need to make another planet habitable. And what would be the point of that colossal exercise when we got a perfectly good planet right here and just not destroying it is many many magnitudes easier.
We do our best to change that tho.
Which is to say: we should focus our energy on keeping this rock habitable, not on making other rocks somewhat habitable.
It's not really the humans destroying the planet. It's the invasive, destructive industries.
I think 1-1.5 billion is the planet’s carrying capacity.
The question tho is this..should this be absolute law or should following the quota be regarded with an incentive as in UBI plus for anyone until they procreate and upto 1/2 surviving child after they procreate and until they die. They lose benefits if they have more children.
All genetic material must be collected and preserved. Not just as in a DNA bank but also for future possibilities as in medical intervention as science gives us ways to stay alive longer. And hopefully healthier.