Happy to see the world population growing. Unlike many here I don't believe the world is overpopulated and that we need more people to grow and expand beyond the planet.
Located in the U.S. where we could double the population without starting to feel cramped. We can and we should.
Personally I'd be okay with the population being 10% its current value (though I don't see any non-apocalyptic way of that coming to be). In any case, I think we should decrease our population to whatever extent possible.
But I guess that's just my opinion.
edit: I'm not really sure why you're being down-voted. You're just expressing your opinion here.
yeah... and it would be great if decrease in quantity would come with increase of quality. People themselves, their life conditions, human life appreciation all that stuff you know. (Cause I do not understand why would somebody want 2x of fat dolts).
Because you live in the wealthiest country in the world (over 100 continuous years of highest GDP) with high salaries and lots of habitable space (from exterminating the native populace).
But that's not sustainable - the US has the highest CO2 emissions per capita when you factor in imports, etc. nevermind other environmental damage. And is also dependent on terrible conditions in Asia, etc. to produce all the cheap goods and clothes that you enjoy.
It's like the prisoner's dilemma though - the first countries that try to act responsibly with environmental policies, transitioning from fossil fuels, reducing population growth and unnecessary consumption are just at a disadvantage to those that don't.
We’re on track for electric cars to overtake gas cars in twenty years. Nuclear power is making a comeback. Even electric planes are in the wings. Best of all, lab-grown meat is here now and we’re just waiting for the price to come down. It seems as though we’ll have solved our emissions issues by the next generation.
Would you still argue against a higher population once we largely solve the emissions issues? Or is there a more fundamental reason you’re against a higher population?
We consume many resources and we won't consume less of them just because cars become electric. Emissions are just one of many pressures we out on the environment.
I think it's better to ask why should population keep growing? We don't need it and it physically has to stop growing at some point.
It seems much better to focus on growing quality of life and quality of environment rather than growing number of people.
I think it's better to ask why should population keep growing? We don't need it and it physically has to stop growing at some point.
Because you can’t stop people from breeding apart from killing them, at which point you’ve become Hitler. That or tax and social disincentivization at which point you’ve become the Illuminati. That or a procreation suppression field at which point you’re the Combine.
I'm pretty skeptical on electric planes (it's hard to generate that much thrust) but the others are all great improvements.
Still slowing population growth would be the easiest gradual way of dealing with resource and environmental issues. It also helps to spur automation and innovation by reducing the amount of cheap, desperate labour available (which is not a fulfilling existence for the workers either).
It can also be tied into ensuring that children have a good upbringing - introduce a child licence with requirements for raising a child to ensure some stability and responsible parenting - e.g. mandatory parenting and nutrition classes, $10+k in savings, living space requirements, etc. - this would help reduce crime and poverty and improve everyone's lives.
If you take a 'planetary boundaries' view [1] we're outside of the safe operating limits for several factors: Extinctions, land system change, novel entities, biogeochemical flows, and climate change. 'Solving' emissions would only really address one of those (climate change).
Take a theoretical world where population was drastically lower (or individual consumption is hugely slashed amongst the top consumers): We would drop within the safe boundary for all limits simultaneously, because the underlying multipliers for all of them are number of people and individual consumption.
Americans are saints when it comes to environmental destruction. Many African countries have very high birth rates and they do whatever it takes to survive, environment be damned, such as pouring used motor oil on the ground without batting and eye or thinking twice about the effects to their own health. Don't even get me started about the mining and deforestation.
I often see this problem of comparing America to one country. We have 350 million people spread out in an area larger than EU. It's really one state is equivalent to one country in EU or Africa.
I would think it's still more energy consumption but not as huge of a gap, depending on the state.
Every american consume about 1000x the resources of every African. It's incredible how the media brainwash you into believe you are actually taking care of the environment when 90% of the CO2 emissions comes from America (and China joined them but just in the latest 5 or 10 years)
All the issues you mentioned are problems we can and we will solve. Population growth is the best thing that happened to humanity. "Soon" we will become an inter-planetary species so it will get even better and exciting!
The current fertiliser shortages might undo some of that, there's a real chance we see severe famines in Lebanon, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Yemen, and other countries next year.
Yes, that was before we manufactured fertilizer. If that invention didn't exist, this number absolutely wouldn't be sustainable.
Soil is now becoming depleted and fertilizer isn't enough.[1] Globally, much also depends on rapidly depleting ground water that isn't being replenished. Agriculture is exceeding its limits.
Humans thought they'd find a fix for their problems before, so nothing to worry about.
A lot of those people died because no fix was found in their lifetimes. Nobody fixed the plagues that went around Europe. Nobody fixed the droughts that killed millions. Entire civilizations went extinct because they weren't able to find a fix before a problem caught up with them.
A lot of problems won't have a fix within our lifetime. Thinking it's guaranteed to happen is magical thinking--assuming we're the main characters in the universe and things must work out. Most of the time, they don't.
> But that's not sustainable - the US has the highest CO2 emissions per capita when you factor in imports, etc. nevermind other environmental damage. And is also dependent on terrible conditions in Asia, etc. to produce all the cheap goods and clothes that you enjoy.
Thanks to globalization... corporations influencing governments around the world to favor a global market. It's colonization all over again. Even back then, at the time of discovering America, for example, it was corporations that went around the world in their ships and did it for profit. The only difference today, is that there are no governments doing it explicitly (i.e. Iraq war), but rather corporations via the excuse of capitalism.
I'd be fine with buying everything local and more expensive, but often that option is not even present anymore. It's like the battle was won, and now we're all dependent on this global chain of commerce in one way or another.
The difference here is that corporations are subjected to local laws and legislations. Through those mechanisms, as well as general education and awareness efforts of the public we can overcome the environmental challenges imposed by globalisation.
Instead of taking a defeatist attitude, this has the opportunity to be a conversation starter with many big companies to champion a more ethical, sustainable future.
Sorry for the off topic reply, but I saw your post "Ask HN: Variable naming guide of matching length?" when looking for the same thing and couldn't find a way to contact you on your profile; is this what you were looking for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359214
Physical space is not the only issue. Your average US adult consumes more than 100 times than an adult from a developing country. Doubling that number would have disastrous consequences for the planet.
The root cause of this is not "overpopulation" as often proclaimed, but our mode of production, which assumes endless economic growth is possible and everyone can be lifted out of poverty - all while relying on those in poverty to generate wealth (and more wealth inequality). Steven Pinker can shift the poverty line all he wants, it doesn't make the world less unequal.
I really dislike degrowth arguments, but it needs to be acknowledged that the standard of living for the top few percent is simply impossible to scale. At least with the means we currently have, and I'd rather measure based on those than hypothetical future developments that may or may not come to be.
Overpopulation isn’t really about running out of space or feeling cramped, it’s about not having enough resources to sustainably support the population.
In that case the population is dominated by the suicidally bad water management in CA. You could cut the population by 99% and you would still have a looming water crisis there.
If you build a solar energy farm on the dark side of the moon you shouldn't be blaming the people who want to use the energy, you should be blaming the people who managed the project.
People are like Replicants: we're "either a benefit or a hazard".
If the population increases in a system where there is enough access to good education, and enough economic opportunity, to advance humanity's knowledge, we will be fine.
If the population increases in a system with too much ignorance and destitution, we are in trouble.
We were all born into a very fortunate time in earth's history regarding natural disasters.
The dust bowl absolutely destroyed a large part of the US. In prior centuries, massive droughts, volcanic explosions that blackened the skies, and massively deadly pandemics ravaged the world. These things happen periodically and absolutely destroy any population that's pushing the limits of its population totals.
So far we've managed to sustain huge population numbers by pumping up ground water. That's drying up across the world. We've survived off fish. Those populations are collapsing. We've diverted rivers for agriculture in deserts. There isn't enough rain to keep those flowing and hasn't been for years, plus with climate change glaciers and mountain snow that fed into rivers are increasingly a thing of the past--rivers and lakes that exist today will cease to exist within our lifetime (and long before we expect). Fertilizer let us push the land well beyond sustainable limits and vegetables are less nutritious than they've ever been due to nutrients being wiped out of the soil. Most countries are dependent on food being shipped from hundreds if not thousands of miles away and often from other countries entirely.
The world is severely overpopulated. We've just been lucky to have had a few decades of peaceful trade and a very, very, very mild environmental situation with zero major global disasters. This isn't the norm. One massive volcanic eruption, one actual plague, one massive drought and it's all over.
You’re being downvoted, but for rather silly reasons. There are people who wrongly assume less people means higher quality of life for everyone else. There’s simply no empirical data to back such a claim up. The most concerning growth is unsustainable growth, exponential growth that cannot be sustained which causes immediate stress on the local economy. Likewise, there’s also economic stress when the opposite happens as economies are built under the guise of population growth, not just capitalism.
What we see continually rather is a narrative of overpopulation pushed and advanced by seemingly related points about lack of food and water. In reality these are completely orthogonal points which have some correlation to, but are not directly proportional to population growth all.
I'm with you on this. The world can still house a lot more people and we should stop being worried about the current population.
In terms of energy, nuclear. In terms of food, there are still large swaths of un-farmed areas. We can farm these and still maintain natural parks and not destroy the environment. Opening up immigration will solve labor issues.
We have the technology, we just have to distribute it to easily quadruple the carrying capacity of the earth
It's not about the space and feeling cramped. A rich human's land and ecological footprint goes way beyond than "feeling cramped" walking around in a city.
I'm not against population growth, but this whole rhetoric fueled by Musk, among others, stirring panic that the population will collapse is crazy. Sure, we would have a problem if people suddenly stopped having children. But this is not the case. World population is still growing, and it should stabilize at around 10B people. That's not too bad, why do we need to keep growing?
Human beings represent 3% of all animals on earth by weight. At this point, 90% of all birds and mammals on Earth are human-raised livestock [1].
There is room on this planet for more humans, but taking it for our own comes at a cost. If we choose to use it for people, then it can't also be wild. So, we have a choice to make about the kind of world we wish to live in.
That makes little sense - what we're seeing in Africa like everywhere else is that increased living standards, education and healthcare including family planning consistently leads to dropping birth rates. At most improved treatment of HIV will lead to a short-term bump if life expectancy increases faster than birth rates drop.
In the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly).
I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.
No one knows the future - but all we do know points that the future is far more optimistic than people realise. If Africa fails to reach 4.3bn then it will most likely be because of faster prosperity and not due to the pessimistic causes you mention.
To illustrate the point: The last 40 years have been the worst we will see in terms of stability, economic growth etc .... yet Population growth in Africa thrived and the % of people living in poverty reduced dramatically and the current population is healthier, wealthier, and more educated than ever before (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-po... ).
It doesn't matter when Africa is exploding. All the low birthrate in the West does is weaken the countries trying to protect the environment. As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them.
This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.
Heh. When the complaint is that the high birthrates of the world are unsustainable, it's the people with the high birthrates that are doing that. Also keep in mind that Africa relies heavily on aid from these countries with the high CO2 emissions. Cutting CO2 really means starving them.
Doesnt matter how small of a footprint the Ethiopian has. The Ethiopian is an exponential function, and the Westerner is a linear one. The exponential function will always overtake the linear function. Eventually.
Once they move to the US they have a high carbon footprint like anyone else there. Their culture won't change though, that takes many generations and a relatively homogeneous culture to assimilate into which is going away (largely due to attitudes like this.)
> As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them
Cut this xenophobic crap right now. Have a look at the facts. For example, the per capita CO2 emission in Ethiopia is 0.13 tonnes, whereas it's 14.24 tonnes in the US. That's over a factor of 100 more.
It doesn't matter when they're brought to the West to replace the children we didn't have they'll live with the infrastructure that's already here which means having a similar carbon footprint.
They're also relying on us for a lot of aid, I'm not sure if your calculation takes that into account.
>these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them.
I live in Latin America, in my trips to the US I get disgusted when I see hundreds of family cars with giant gas engines that we only use in construction trucks, idling all day just to run their air conditioner in a slightly hot day.
It's incredible the delusion that the first world has about how 'sustainable' their lifestyles are.
Given the "theme song" linked to in your profile, it's quite obvious where this is coming from, but let's talk unsustainable cultures then:
Again, from your theme song and your apparent fondness for the Teutonic Order I'm assuming you're at least familiar with Germany and the German social security system, which is very much a part of their culture.
The German state pension system basically amounts to a Ponzi scheme that requires a continuous influx of new contributors in order to not implode.
Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable", but given German culture is quite averse to change (which is unsustainable, too, by the way) and it therefore isn't particularly likely they're going to abandon their current pension system anytime soon, "bringing people from these undeveloped countries" also is about their only option left to keep the system from collapsing for just a little longer.
I'm not even talking general economic and societal repercussions here. It can be argued that a society with a declining population isn't long-term sustainable and ultimately will succumb to stagnation and a lack of innovation.
Just looked up the Teutonic Order (from Wikipedia [0]):
> Before and during World War II, Nazi propaganda and ideology made frequent use of the Teutonic Knights' imagery, as the Nazis sought to depict the Knights' actions as a forerunner of the Nazi conquests for Lebensraum. Heinrich Himmler tried to idealise the SS as a 20th-century reincarnation of the medieval Order. Yet, despite these references to the Teutonic Order's history in Nazi propaganda, the Order itself was abolished in 1938 and its members were persecuted by the German authorities. This occurred mostly due to Hitler's and Himmler's belief that, throughout history, Roman Catholic military-religious orders had been tools of the Holy See and as such constituted a threat to the Nazi regime. Hitler based his German Order on the Teutonic Order, especially the Hochmeister's ceremonial regalia itself even though they abolished the said order.
Linking to this "theme song" and your (not yours, usrn's) xeonophic comments have no place on Hacker News.
> The German state pension system basically amounts to a Ponzi scheme
Yes and no - that is how the world, how life works!
The currently working take care of the currently too-old-to-work. No matter what layer and labels you put on top, that has always been and will always be true. Unless you create time machines, or eliminate aging (with its own huge set of issues).
So yes, the new generations have to take care of the previous ones. "Capital" is only an information layer on top of that reality used to determine who gets what, but it does not replace the reality of who and when produces goods and services. You can shift information about capital into the future (you "saved" for retirement - but only this information is transmitted to the future, not goods or services, which are always used in the present), but actual goods and services always have to be produced and provided by the working part of the population. You can shift as much "capital" (information) into the future as you want, "save" incredible amounts of money, it will change nothing.
> Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable",
Quite the opposite. That is the best kind of sustainable because it actually represents truth most faithfully. The "capital" based magic - that is much more problematic. It masks and attempts to hide the reality. Also a problem in the German system is the many exceptions.
The core German system is the most honest one about reality: The currently working take care of those that no longer don't. If there are too few in the new generation to take care of the expected number of old non-working people in the country, then seeing that problem is GOOD, trying to hide it behind some finance magic is bad.
All available data shows that high birthrates are linked to societal effects of poverty, low access to education and healthcare, not to culture. When Africans move elsewhere, their birth rates adapt rapidly to their new home countries, as do every other group.
As such, talking about "unsustainable cultures" here is pure xenophobia.
>will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down.
Why? intuitively it would seem that that less humans will improve the environment, but intuition is often wrong.
The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
Remember, most of the environmental damage was done by a very small number of very rich countries. The poorest countries is where most of the population lives, and those cause the least environmental impact.
For now! They all want the quality of life of the rich nations and understandably so. I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living, let alone more. There isn’t enough land to grow feed for all the livestock we’d need for a start!
>I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living
That's a completely different problem. So basically what you want is to poor people to stay poor.
Well, luckily technology improves and with that resource consumption is optimized. But that wont happen if you halve the population because there will be half of the scientists and engineers to do it (and likely, much less than half).
I’m definitely not saying I want the poor to stay poor!
I’m saying I’d like more equality and that isn’t possible at current technology levels. I don’t buy that decreasing population would limit technological progress at all. The vast majority of people are currently living subsistence existences and contributing almost nothing to technological progress.
We could easily reduce population and end up with more not less scientists and engineers
I think this argument that engineers or scientists will save the world removes the responsibility everyone has to consume less/better. Besides that this will probably only happen once the richer countries get hit, see the famines and water shortages all over the world. Mostly NGO’s and organizations like the UN are trying to fix those issues, while most of the money is spent on trying to get us to buy more
The problem isn't that we want the poor to stay poor but rather that the "rich" utilize resources very inefficiently. By our current definition of rich it is impossible for every human to live like the rich, that would mean automating everything like food production, food delivery, food preparation, construction and all of the associated menial labor which we are a very long way from.
In theory you are right, there is a lot of space to grow the population but in practice most people want to live in big popular cities and chase the dream of being rich which simply isn't sustainable and promotes a lot of waste.
A lot of people as they mature will give up their big city life dreams once they realize the cost / stress / commute isn't worth it unless you're very successful and rich. They move to the city to "make it", survival of the fittest selects some % of people who make it and the rest either cope with distractions / drugs or move to cheaper areas.
So we have a lot of space for many people to live but they won't live in luxury and since human nature is to compare ourselves to others and strive to climb social hierarchies most of the population will just overcrowd the already popular areas to live which is a problem
> more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
> was done by a very small number of very rich countries
And where do you think the (actionable) "intelligence" and money comes from?
It's not that poorer countries don't have intelligence, but they don't have the resources to put it to good use. One random person in a TED talk gets more attention than the people actually dealing with the issue
"More population" has always meant more misery and more conflict
> The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
"Empty" is a very biblical word, with shades of the brass age Hebrew mission of “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
It's time to drop superstitious beliefs and take a hard look at reality. For example, we're using resources at a rate that is no longer sustainable (https://www.footprintcalculator.org/home/en).
We can discover new resources though. Look at the discussions around "peak oil." Every time people think we can't get more oil we find a way. It's going to be the same for every other resource.
We _can_, but will we? We're not fated to discover new resources to sustain ourselves. Fracking opened up new oil reserves, for sure, but that didn't mean that the concern wasn't valid.
> It's going to be the same for every other resource.
That's superstition / survivor bias.
Is your statement that far off from "the house is on fire, but I'm not going to move from the couch because a fire crew will be here sooner or later"?
It is not remotely the same. Technologies in agriculture, energy production, and human health have all followed this path. By the way, it isn't just fracking that defeated calls of "peak oil" - deepwater drilling came the time before that, and offshore drilling the time before that, and so on. People have been crying "peak energy" and "peak food" reliably for the last 150 years, and we're still growing as a species.
This isn't just some hope, this is the way human history has run. To suggest otherwise is the lunacy here.
It's absolutely the same. You're predicting the future based upon the trajectory of the past. In 2019 you'd probably have ridiculed the idea of a pandemic occurring, based on us having "solved" the various outbreaks that took place in the prior 20 years; or in 2021 you'd have ridiculed the idea of a land war in Europe based on the relative peace achieved in the previous 70+ years.
The past 50 years have shown abundant evidence of us causing severe damage to the environment. Physics is finite, discoveries are finite, human ingenuity is finite. The chances of us being on a fantasy path of becoming magicians, able to conjure up anything our hearts desire, is low. There are bounds to reality.
There are, but our species is not even remotely close to them. Also, we aren't even remotely close to exploiting all the resources in the solar system.
By the way, a land war in Europe over Ukraine has been very likely since Crimea and the election of Zelensky, which some people believe was rigged by the CIA. It was only a matter of time. The evidence from 80 years ago is there.
I am suggesting that the entire course of history is marked by the expansion of available resources to the human race. Not a cherrypicked 70 years.
For how long? Being recent (on evolutionary timescales), evolution has created selection pressures on previously irrelevant variables (the desire to have children, in particular). Without contraception or female labor force participation, people didn't decide how many children to have before urbanisation: everyone who didn't die just kept having kids. The poorest places are still like this. But in evolutionarily novel urban contexts, people choose how many kids to have; if this decision has a genetic component, that means the current urban millieu selects for people who want more kids. Basic genetics tells us that the number of people who "want more kids" will grow exponentially (so long as culture doesn't keep driving preferences for children down). The key question, of course, is "what's the exponent?". It depends on the heritability of fertility, and data from behavioural genetics indicates that it's high in urbanised societies. If your parents had more kids than average, you probably will (even if you were adopted at birth and didn't grow up with your parents). The effect is large enough that it would have a big impact on the UN population estimates by 2100. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important.
I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow.
All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.
My great-grandma was born in 1920 and died in 2020. She was lucid to her final breath. I spent a lot of time talking to her about the ‘before times’.
She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s.
However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was.
We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a single (long lived) individual.
My grandad was born in 1925 - he remembers them installing the electric streetlights in Birmingham.
The main difference seemed to be car traffic and tourism. It's just unrecognisable nowadays (and even from the 1980s tbh).
Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
Pre 80s a lot of the best and brightest worked in engineering.
Post 80s they went into finance and then tech. The latter a mixed bag - brought us Google maps etc but sadly mostly focused on selling ads.
That’s the risk I see. We either need to change incentives or change culture to get back to a focus on progress / exploration rather than exploitation.
While incentives are pretty fucked (Instacrack being worth more than SpaceX, etc), allocation of labour is not a problem.
We simply have a lot more best and brightest in everything. There's so much talent it's unreal. There's not enough money to hire everyone, or technology to equip them in engineering.
It's kind of like art (pictures, movies, music, anything) - there's so much of it, so high quality these days that there really isn't anything that will stand out on its own. Same for celebrities, for that matter. Actors/singers/presidents? Meh, go to Instagram and OnlyFans and take your pick.
The only reason people 100 years from now will show something as an example of early 00's is marketing and survival.
We don't even have a Concorde though. It's genuinely frustrating to me honestly. I feel like the level of advancement during that time was truly fascinating and it impacted people's life. Today, what do we have? Another iPhone? More faster computers? It's all incremental.
Why can't we fly on a Concorde? (I know why obviously). I guess I am sad to see that tech that truly changed people's lives doesn't happen as much anymore.
We didn't actually regress in terms of supersonic flight though, it just got relegated to specialist uses such as military. The actual advantage of the Concorde specifically was less than imagined - basically: would you prefer 7 hours in business or first class on a slower but vastly more spacious jet, or 3.5 hours on a much more cramped one? The Concorde was very fast but ordinary passenger jets are also quite fast, they're no slouches!
No, jets are slow and they getting slower to be even more economic. 800 km/h is just a fraction of 3500 km/h that planes can do. Bureaucrats are the ones who restricting progress to the point there will be no Wrights, or Jacques-Yves Cousteau or any other inventors. Everything restricted and regulated, controlled.
It's a problem across any number of areas that an incremental improvement of the same percentage becomes less valuable to most of your potential market as the starting point improves, even as the cost of the improvements often goes up.
But we don’t get 7 hours in a more spacious jet. First class may be getting roomier in the most luxurious of first class having airlines. But many airlines ditched first class and their business class didn’t get more room when they added bigger planes, they simply adjusted the row placements, maybe one or two rows more business class on their busy routes that could justify it.
Airlines seating (minus first class) has on average become smaller in both business and economy class during the same timespan that relegated the Concorde to history. The airlines decided what they wanted. For most of this time airline tickets weren’t as competitive a market either with more flag carriers and less budget airlines cutting the costs at the bottom of the market.
Apparently people are happy choosing both slower and cheaper even if it costs them legroom (up to a point obviously, since Ryanair famously wasn’t allowed to try the standing room only short haul <2hr flights)
Per your next sentence, customers decided what they wanted. Which was to pay less.
>For most of this time airline tickets weren’t as competitive a market either with more flag carriers and less budget airlines cutting the costs at the bottom of the market.
I guess you're right. In 1700, I don't think instant worldwide communication was in anyone's wildest predictions of the future. Or even weapons capable of leveling a city in seconds.
I'll be happy if I get to see a scramble for the solar system thanks to some sort of anti-gravitational device or full dive VR tech (or isekai-as-a-service by Mitsubishi).
> Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
I think about this, perhaps more than I should. My great-grandmother was born under monarchy, in a mud hut, somewhere along the Danube. When she was 14, she got stolen on a horse by the son of a band of real highwaymen. She and the son built a house by hand (that still exists, modernized). They had no electricity, no cars anywhere around. Her husband traveled for maybe some tens of miles out of town to the nearest towns. Herself, not even that.
The first time she saw a car, it was passing by, and all the children were running after it smelling the fumes; they had no idea what it was or that there was a human inside. It belonged to an industrialist from the nearest city who made a chicken farm in the area.
World wars came and went, biplanes, radar, the transistor... the village was bombarded, and the state became a popular republic, then a socialist one. Industrialization started. The beginning of globalization, cinematography, and mass media. They still had lights only on the main street. She became a sort of accountant for the collectivized farm and raised her sons and granddaughters.
The Berlin wall fell, and the regime changed again. Democracy. She discovered capitalism, global mass production, and consumerism. Post-communist corruption tore down the town and sold it for scraps. By this time, yours truly came, and she went to the city to help my parents while they were studying and working.
Together, we discovered the contemporary world. Quickly traveling to other countries, computers, internet, QR codes, VoIP, HD media, WiFi, social media, mobile devices, global media streaming, mRNA vaccines, and probably so much more that I can't remember now.
God, this post got long, and it teared me up. I've considered not posting, but I will. I'm unsure if I'm terrified or comforted by the thought that I might not live through so much change, though it feels like the world is changing even faster.
> She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it.
Glad to read that, I'm a sucker for Gen Z's world and I like the adult ones a lot!
Every counterculture thing I was into is normal with them! Like, broadly attractive people are totally into things that only socially maladjusted and visually unattractive people were into prior. That is perfect for me!
Depends on the region where your grandma lived, the two villages where my parents grew up (and where my grandparents used to live their entire lives) are almost empty now, especially when it comes to young people. You’d think that everyone fled to the towns/cities, and you’d be correct, but that happened starting with the 1960s and continued for about twenty years. But when we (I’m from Romania) joined the European Union back in 2007 even those cities and towns started to empty out.
Love it. Just before my grandmother died (89), I asked her what the biggest change was on the planet in her lifetime. She was silent for a moment and then gleefully blurted out "PLASTICS!".
She explained that when she was a girl "everything was made of something and someone knew how to do it". Now everything is just plastic.
is this website accurate? https://www.census.gov/popclock/world says we're notably farther away, and im inclined to trust a government over a site run by an unknown group
We will never know, this site is just a fake js counter, actual population data is very much hidden and obscured by statistics. For example, Russia claim they have 144 millions but in fact according to all data it is close to 120 millions. Same for china, where villages increase their reported population just to get subsidized.
Africa? Middle east? Help me god India? Are you sure anyone know how many people died from hunger and anticovid measures recently? It must be a 100 millions deaths at least last two years due to shut down of medicine around the world.
>The new Soviet Census (1939) showed a population figure of 170.6 million people, manipulated so as to match exactly the numbers stated by Stalin in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party.
fun fact: if the Habsburgers - during the Thirty Years' War - would have known that the Swedish Kingdom only had around a million citizens at this time they could have marched on straight to Stockholm and called it a day.
But population numbers were highly confidential in those days and since Sweden was vast to the north they wrongly assumed it was populated much more densely.
Might as well say it: 8 billion is too many, and it’s a good thing that population growth is levelling off. A decline down to ~1 billion would be fine. If we have to change retirement planning, so be it.
No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to avoid that check.
Why? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einstiens, Newtons, Da Vincis etc.
I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not the end.
No other species can grow it's population exponentially. True. However, we aren't any other species (that we know of at least). The planet can support far more people, it truly can, and more so, the rest of space awaits. We can spread further and further. Is it really good to wish for a reduction of our species? of the only life we know that can truly observe and appreciate the beauty of creation?
> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things.
More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
And all that innovation happened thanks to the population living a good life with excess of resources. The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all, making more people who live in poverty wont add any innovation.
And even worse, if you add people until most has to live a life on the brink of starvation again that could stop innovation from ever happening again in the future, our current time is an historical anomaly and there is no guarantee that we can ever get back here if we screw up and get everyone back to a state of misery. There are only so many ways we can improve food production, we found a lot of them the past 200 years and that led to a ton of innovations since people no longer had to worry about starvation. But all of that will quickly revert if you can no longer buy food at a supermarket, since there is simply not enough food to feed every American, some will have to starve to death.
> The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all
But as their incomes tripled and their children survived childhood, their birthdates dropped and their surviving children are better educated and less malnourished. This has been happening almost everywhere in the world, and is why world population will peak in a couple decades without mass starvation.
How about $2 to $6 in just the last 40 years. Give it a couple generations with rising incomes, lower birth rates, higher literacy, lower child malnutrition, and you’ll see more Einsteins.
> poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing
That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
> That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
the max? I don't know about max. However, yeah, you're right. That does not mean we cannot continue in the future and do it better. Lab Grown meat is nearly a thing, and reducing the price of that will drop global emissions. EVs are becoming far more common and will be replacing ICE vehicles come the turn of the decade, we're building more and more solar and renewable energy resources.
We can fix these problems. Yes, the problems are created by us. That does not mean we cannot fix them while continuing to progress and reduce poverty. More people, more brains only benefits that effort. Not reduces it.
The system of our society needs tweaks. Our incentives are sometimes wrong. But again, reducing people doesn't fix that. More people aids us to build better systems.
Yes but this has been improving in recent decades as well. See the book More From Less for an argument. Thanks to modern efficiencies, digitization, and government action, resource use has decoupled from economic growth and some has even peaked.
> no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased
Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.
I mean, If you want to be pedantic you could define poverty in such a relative way that we’re all poor compared to Musk and Bezos. But I think you’d be surprised how much you have to inflate the definition of poverty to still fit 1.5 billion people into it. It’d certainly be the richest definition of poverty the world’s ever seen, with the lowest numbers of starvation, malnutrition, infant mortality, etc
Just put off curiosity, it looks like only 689 million are "living in extreme poverty" but 1.3 billion people are "multidimensionality poor" which seems to be trying to capture some the things you're talking about.
> More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems.
I mean .... why? Why are we assuming that more people aren't working to create more energy, more resources? The Earth can feed, and provide far more energy than we currently are using. Pump out nuclear reactors for every town and we will have enough energy for 10 times the people. Granted, it's not as easy as saying that but my point is that energy is not finite, and resources are far more that we are currently not utilizing.
I don't imagine more people will be living with the same resources. After all, the growth to nearly 8 billion resulted in most people's quality of life rising and poverty decreasing. This is a fact. A cold hard fact, that nearly everyone on an absolute level has gotten better lives.
If we can do that for 8 billion, why can't we for another 8?
More so, increased population results in different, new problems and solving those problems results in us further progressing, not regressing.
I guess, I just don't like thinking of this as the end of history. We can grow and grow, and grow. I don't wish for humanity to simply fizzle out. We've done pretty well till now, let's keep going. We can do better.
As far as we know, we're the only species in the universe, in the whole wide universe that can truly appreciate the beauty of the universe. That can observe. Catalogue. Create Art. Sing songs and so on.
The vast wide massive universe. It deserves to be seen. It deserves to be documented. To be explored. We need to live, and grow far more than now to do that.
Population growth doesn't create nuclear plants, well educated people who don't have to worry about their daily needs creates nuclear plants. Our current infrastructure only supports X billion people to not live in poverty, every person you add over that X will be a miserable and thus unproductive life that still costs resources.
Sure I believe the earth can support 10 billion people who doesn't live in poverty, but that would require a lot of infrastructure that we don't yet have. Adding people before you can ensure they don't have to live a life of misery will just hurt progress, for progress it is better to have 100 people who live a good life than 1000 people who live near starvation, so the fastest way to get to 10 billion people living a well life is not to first add 10 billion people who have to live in misery.
> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty.
Fortunately, we've made huge strides in this area in the last few decades. Global poverty is at an all time low and is decreasing. The same is true for food, female empowerment, family sizes, suicide, plastics, etc.
The world, really actually is getting better on a lot of major measures.
Yes, there are big challenges ahead. But as a species, we're honestly doing okay, maybe even better than okay.
There's a lot of data backing all this enthusiasm up. I'd link to a few papers, but GapMinder[0] is the best place I've seen where all the data is collated and searchable. They have great graphing interactives too [1]. GapMinder is an effort by the late-great Hans Rosling. You may remember his as that Swedish doctor from the TED talks [2]. I'd suggest any HN readers to dive into the site and see. They have a great little quiz[3] to help you renormalize yourself to current data as well.
All hope is not lost! Things really are going to be okay-ish. Not the same, but not terrible. Our work is not in vain.
> More people means less energy and resources per person though
Does it? It does if we're at the level of cutting wood to feed our individual fireplaces, and there's only so much wood around. But we don't live in that world any more.
You need a large number of people to be able to manufacture giant windmills in... Texas, I think? Installed in Wyoming, with generators built in Switzerland. Combined with solar panels built in China. This is to replace oil from North Dakota, drilled with equipment manufactured in Texas, piped to whereever. And that's replacing coal dug in Wyoming, hauled hundreds of miles by locomotives built in Pennsylvania or Texas or Mexico or Canada.
That takes people. It takes a lot of people, connected to each other, to give us a world where we're not just competing for who can chop down more of the few remaining local trees.
> More people means less energy and resources per person though
Malthusianism didn't work in 1700s and doesn't work now. Economists produced endogenous growth theories explaining how more population could lead to higher output per capita in the 80s. Romer won a Nobel prize for it.
The evidence we have now strongly supports their arguments. Productivity scales superlinearly with urban population so that each doubling leads to a 15% increase in p.c output. This is true everywhere we look i.e. regressing log(income per capita) on log(city population) produces near-perfect lines with slopes close to 1.15 whether you're looking at the U.S or Bangladesh. This is easily explicable in terms of the network externalities. Furthermore, studies comparing the networked lives of people living in more/less populous areas (inferred from phone usage data) show that people living in bigger cities do indeed communicate more. How much more? 15% for every doubling of city size! All of this can be explained in terms of graph theory. More nodes -> more cultural and technical niches (interconnected node clusters) -> more potential synergies as every niche has more niches to connect to. And so on. Connectivity increases faster than linearly, hence the superlinear scaling. Not coincidentally, the connectivity of brains seems to be the same (double the number of cortical neurons in a mammal, the number of synapses per neuron increases by 15-20%).
All this to say, we certainly aren't approaching a world of less abundance per capita as the world continues to urbanise. Anybody who thinks this just isn't acquainted with the evidence.
That's a very selfish view. More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Watch Earthling to see only one part of human needs.
All the advances are due to exploitation all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
Not sure how advocating for more people is selfish, but okay.
> More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits.
Energy can be practically infinite. Simply requires us to use nuclear power. Yes, Yes, there's issues of waste with that. It's overblown and a moral panic.
More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite".
That's what i mean. Resources and Energy are practically infinite when you look at it on a long term scale.
I simply don't think, it's a good idea to advocate for humanity to simply reduce and fizzle out. No. Why should we? We should advance life forward. That does not mean in the same way as before. We can do better. But advocating for the reduction of humanity, of life, is wrong in my opinion.
After all, there is no other life we know of out there like us. Why stop?
Quality energy (stored in a lower state of entropy, conveniently accessible and usable when and where we need it) is not infinite. This one is obviously not true today. If it were, people would not be complaining about increasing fossil fuel prices, since they would be happy using the cheap (due to infinite supply) “clean” energy.
"Trees are literally infinite. Just plant enough of them while you cut them down."
Nice in theory but there's a big, big problem in the interim: in many instances that interim exceeds 300-plus years before there's a solution (if there's a practical one at all)!
Many of the world's best timbers have been exploited to the point of extinction and the few trees that remain in the wild are strictly controlled by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) in that the export trade is strictly banned (just like elephant tusks - that means exporting any quantity no matter how small is illegal). Even so, illegal logging is now out of control and it's reducing their remaining numbers to critically low levels.
Demand for timbers such as the dalbergias: Brazilian Rosewood - Dalbergia nigra, Cocobolo D. Retusa, etc. and many other depleted species such as Lignum vitae is already so high that - like the drug trade - there are instances where people in the illegal trade are killing one another over 'territory' and the 'rights' to illegal smuggling.
Many good hardwood tree can take many hundreds of years to mature and despite many, many decades of the very best science chemical engineering has devised, it hasn't come anywhere near producing good artifical verions of these timbers. If we immediately started a planting operation of Manhattan Project size proportions to repopulate these trees to the level they were two hundreds years ago it would still take several hundreds of years before the world had sufficient timber to meet current (let alone the future) demand. And that's just the beginning of supply problems in the lumber industry.
So what's your solution for the next few hundred years?
Incidentally, in China, rosewoods (dalbergias) are revered with almost mystical significance, they are symbols of huge cultural and personal importance. With its newfound wealth, Chinese demand for these now rare timbers has skyrocketed and the Chinese will pay almost any amount to get their hands on them. As the population of more affluent Chinese grows, this problem will get steadily worse.
Now consider this is only one of many similar environmental problems the world is currently facing.
There is plenty of clean energy, here on Earth, using existing technologies.
There is even more than that if we go proactively grab a fraction of the the billions of galaxies of resources just meaninglessly burning themselves away.
> More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too.
Also, the per capita usage of energy/garbage/resources tends to decrease as populations go up. The net, of course, increases, but the per capita decreases. Combine that with cleaner fuels are were set to get carbon neutral as a globe by ~2080, if I'm remembering correctly (I may not be!)
What things though? It is mostly materialistic, isn't it? We are more comfortable than ever. We can talk to a person on the other side of the planet anytime we want. Yet, we don't know our neighbors. More people are lonely, more people are single etc. We live longer today, yet my generation seems less happy than my parents' generation. When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today? We can't even be sure kids are safe in schools (though this particular problem is just American one).
On one side, we are relentlessly moving ahead, mostly materialistic. Fantastic communication tools, medical equipment etc. On the other side, people are obese, unhappy, unhealthy (mentally and physically).
We can't even a significant portion of the people accept that climate change issues are real and maybe slightly alter their lifestyle (eat less meat, less dairy, use less plastic...). How are you proposing to achieve any kind of cooperation between people when the population keeps going up?
"When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today?"
Exactly. The trouble is that those who weren't there to experience the freedom we had as kids and the resilisence and self confidence it instilled and developed in us simply don't understand.
That's illogical thinking: should we increase our population by a factor of 10? To get 10x the Einsteins, Newtons, and Da Vinci's? By a factor of 100? 1000?
There will always be smart people and brilliant artists. If we reduce population, they will just come at a slower rate, which is fine. Will just make them more special when they do come.
I hate people and definitely would love to see fewer of them.
This makes no sense whatsoever. 8 billion is too many, for what, for whom? Next to 8 billion of us, we also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals, which is enormously expensive and horrible for the environment.
Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow that is out there.
8 billion is too many to also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals. If we had 10x fewer people and kept 10x fewer cattle (and more generally, consumed 10x fewer resources), the environment would be doing just fine. But it’s not doing fine, and that’s why 8 billion is too many.
IMHO 8 billion is too many for the size of the earth. With a total of 150 million km2 in land, each person corresponds to 0.018 km2 or 18000m2 which is equivalent to a 130x130 meter space. That includes sleeping, eating and "food growing" spaces. And the 150 million also includes inhospitable places.
I think that no matter how efficient our food generation processes get, this is very little space per person. That's why people live in the air and on top of each other.
While your math is correct it also contains a false assumption about how much land is needed:
What do you think about Netherlands? It seems to me they had a good way to use the space while keeping it green and also caring about nature.
Earth can support at least twice the current number of people with a better organisation while also disrupting less the natural habitat.
What makes it hard to achieve this is our focus on nationalities and countries instead of thinking about a global society combined with our greed and our individual/centrism way to think about the world as if the only way forward is us vs the forest or us vs the wild animals ... we should focus more on how to embed into nature and not how to change it to make it work for us.
Where does this kind of thinking lead us? Should we not be even more proactive, then, and start reducing our population as fast as possible to avert the catastrophe that you predict? If less is more, and time is running out, will you live by your own belief, and volunteer for euthanasia? To save the planet, for our children, and our children's children?
Every generation has it's soothsayers that are absolutely certain we are near the population limit and heading for certain doom. And every one of them was wrong. Our population soared past those limits, no problem.
I share the opinion that earth can sustain about 100B of us, with a bit of planning and thoughtful engineering. So long as most people don't mind living in sky scrapers. More people = more brains to solve the type of problems that I assume you are worried about.
I don't actually believe we will continue growing like we have, as nothing in human affairs follows a strait line for long. Every great kingdom has fallen, every empire divided. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. We don't need to try and control it, but only observe and adapt to it.
These stats are frightening. In the past I recall seeing several different sets of figures for the amount of food the average human consumes in a lifetime. One estimate was about 70 tons and the other was 100 tons. (If anyone has better or more definite figures then let's hear about them.)
Now, if we consider the other resources every new human will also consume during his or her lifetime - houses, vehicles, white goods, electronic tech etc., etc. - then that extra demand on the planet's resources will be enormous.
What's worried me for a long time - ever since I read Anne and Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb is that the population will outstrip our ability to find extra resources to support this population growth. Whilst the Ehrlichs overestimated the exponential growth rate I evertheless reckon the evidence supports the fact that they'd gotten the growth trend correct.
It seems to me that unless we quickly take drastic action to either limit population growth or vastly increase food resources or both - not to mention simultaneously keeping environment in a state of sustainability (climate change, etc.) - then the future is likely to be very rocky.
Yes, it's a pessimistic outlook but it looks as if the stats are pretty much against us unless there's a collective realization that something must be done urgently.
I made no moral judgment whatsoever. I only stated what many who are much more knowledgeable than I am have said about the subject over the past 50 or more years.
Moreover, it's just a fact that people have been controlling population growth since before recorded history both at a family and state level - take China's one child policy for instance. I never even mentioned this let alone take a moral stand on the matter. Presumably, you would be much more critical of those who've actually acted to control population numbers rather than those who've just mentioned the subject.
What's more, the comment I made was a logical OR statement - that is either the world has the resources OR it doesn't, if it doesn't then the world has to do something about it, especially when exponential growth is involved.
What are your objections to that? And why are you so indignant and afraid of the subject that you want discussion about it shut down?
See the book More From Less for a counter-argument. Thanks to modern efficiencies and digitization a lot of resource use has decoupled from economic growth and some has actually peaked
"Thanks to modern efficiencies and digitization a lot of resource use has decoupled from economic growth..."
I'm aware of the counter argument but in the light of exponential growth of the population at what point does the graph of 'modern efficiencies' intersect with that of the exponential growth one?
Exponential growth has to stop somewhere as resources aren't infinite, so 'decoupling' cannot last forever.
Incidentally, I'm aware that some demographers have predicted a leveling off of exponential population growth in decades to come. For those who've implied (wrongly) that I've a hide to suggest limiting population growth I'd say that if or when exponential population growth does happen then they'd have to be critical of everyone involved in that turnaround (as it will require active participation of the population for that to happen).
I did say that Ehrlich's timeline was inaccurate. I'm also familiar with the counter arguments. Other than comments I've already made in replies to others I've nothing futher to add as it would invite addional political criticism.
My grandfather (1931) has 7 grades of education and a lifetime history of building and repairing radios and television sets. He worked for the army and spent some time on submarines, instructing navy officers on how to use radio equipment -- with his 7 grades of formal schooling.
Once, during a autumn storm (we're in Estonia), I remember him stating on a business-as-usual tone: "I was 15, when I first got to know electricity."
Man, I thought. Here, in front of me, is a living person who spent the first 14 years (!) of his life completely off-grid. No electricity, period.
That was also the moment I realized that this same person -- my grandpa -- has accumulated all of his knowledge by first-hand, hit-and-miss experiments. The contemporary model of "theory first" was and is almost completely alien to him, along with book-knowledge of any kind. The result of this? Even at age 90, you can be 99% sure that everything my grandpa states is true -- simply because he only speaks or proposes things that he has tested out himself.
As a person with lots of "book knowledge", I find this absolutely fascinating. Obviously, all the technological solutions he has in his household are 1) rock solid and 2) dead simple.
It almost appears that if you somehow manage to maintain decent work ethic (and the ethic of being human), a modest amount of formal schooling may have its benefits.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadLocated in the U.S. where we could double the population without starting to feel cramped. We can and we should.
But I guess that's just my opinion.
edit: I'm not really sure why you're being down-voted. You're just expressing your opinion here.
Though the US could cut emissions in the neighborhood of entire developed countries in Europe right now if they just stopped military spending.
But that's not sustainable - the US has the highest CO2 emissions per capita when you factor in imports, etc. nevermind other environmental damage. And is also dependent on terrible conditions in Asia, etc. to produce all the cheap goods and clothes that you enjoy.
It's like the prisoner's dilemma though - the first countries that try to act responsibly with environmental policies, transitioning from fossil fuels, reducing population growth and unnecessary consumption are just at a disadvantage to those that don't.
Would you still argue against a higher population once we largely solve the emissions issues? Or is there a more fundamental reason you’re against a higher population?
I think it's better to ask why should population keep growing? We don't need it and it physically has to stop growing at some point.
It seems much better to focus on growing quality of life and quality of environment rather than growing number of people.
Because you can’t stop people from breeding apart from killing them, at which point you’ve become Hitler. That or tax and social disincentivization at which point you’ve become the Illuminati. That or a procreation suppression field at which point you’re the Combine.
(Godwin point reached very quickly...)
Still slowing population growth would be the easiest gradual way of dealing with resource and environmental issues. It also helps to spur automation and innovation by reducing the amount of cheap, desperate labour available (which is not a fulfilling existence for the workers either).
It can also be tied into ensuring that children have a good upbringing - introduce a child licence with requirements for raising a child to ensure some stability and responsible parenting - e.g. mandatory parenting and nutrition classes, $10+k in savings, living space requirements, etc. - this would help reduce crime and poverty and improve everyone's lives.
Take a theoretical world where population was drastically lower (or individual consumption is hugely slashed amongst the top consumers): We would drop within the safe boundary for all limits simultaneously, because the underlying multipliers for all of them are number of people and individual consumption.
[1]https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2...
The US is at a huge scale though, and that mining is probably going towards building American SUVs, military equipment, etc.
Most African countries need less than one
You mention mining and deforestation but where do you think the material extracted are going ?
I would think it's still more energy consumption but not as huge of a gap, depending on the state.
Telling Africans they need to stay poor and stop having children is a pretty standard Western stuff.
100 years ago people were saying we would all die from starvation after a few billion more people. Doom sayers have zero credibility.
The current fertiliser shortages might undo some of that, there's a real chance we see severe famines in Lebanon, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Yemen, and other countries next year.
Soil is now becoming depleted and fertilizer isn't enough.[1] Globally, much also depends on rapidly depleting ground water that isn't being replenished. Agriculture is exceeding its limits.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...
Why ignore human ingenuity ?
A lot of those people died because no fix was found in their lifetimes. Nobody fixed the plagues that went around Europe. Nobody fixed the droughts that killed millions. Entire civilizations went extinct because they weren't able to find a fix before a problem caught up with them.
A lot of problems won't have a fix within our lifetime. Thinking it's guaranteed to happen is magical thinking--assuming we're the main characters in the universe and things must work out. Most of the time, they don't.
Living today doesn’t guarantee living tomorrow.
The discussion is around whether the human race will survive and continue to grow.
As you may have noticed, population numbers have increased since the days of the Aztecs.
Hence proving the fact that we have no good insight of the future.
Thanks to globalization... corporations influencing governments around the world to favor a global market. It's colonization all over again. Even back then, at the time of discovering America, for example, it was corporations that went around the world in their ships and did it for profit. The only difference today, is that there are no governments doing it explicitly (i.e. Iraq war), but rather corporations via the excuse of capitalism.
I'd be fine with buying everything local and more expensive, but often that option is not even present anymore. It's like the battle was won, and now we're all dependent on this global chain of commerce in one way or another.
Instead of taking a defeatist attitude, this has the opportunity to be a conversation starter with many big companies to champion a more ethical, sustainable future.
Talk by Hans Rosling worth watching:
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_gro...
The root cause of this is not "overpopulation" as often proclaimed, but our mode of production, which assumes endless economic growth is possible and everyone can be lifted out of poverty - all while relying on those in poverty to generate wealth (and more wealth inequality). Steven Pinker can shift the poverty line all he wants, it doesn't make the world less unequal.
I really dislike degrowth arguments, but it needs to be acknowledged that the standard of living for the top few percent is simply impossible to scale. At least with the means we currently have, and I'd rather measure based on those than hypothetical future developments that may or may not come to be.
Persons are autonomous, and if we would educate them correctly, they could help to make more of earth hospitable and use resources more efficientlly.
Fascism is generally used to describe right wing dictatorships with hierarchical structures which are opposed to democratic principles.
Do you really believe any of the people advocating for population stability are fascists?
You're already running out of resources: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-11/californ...
If you build a solar energy farm on the dark side of the moon you shouldn't be blaming the people who want to use the energy, you should be blaming the people who managed the project.
A solar panel on the dark side wont be much use.
But then people have discussed landing on the Sun at night.
As things stand, doubling of US population would be a global disaster.
If the population increases in a system where there is enough access to good education, and enough economic opportunity, to advance humanity's knowledge, we will be fine.
If the population increases in a system with too much ignorance and destitution, we are in trouble.
The dust bowl absolutely destroyed a large part of the US. In prior centuries, massive droughts, volcanic explosions that blackened the skies, and massively deadly pandemics ravaged the world. These things happen periodically and absolutely destroy any population that's pushing the limits of its population totals.
So far we've managed to sustain huge population numbers by pumping up ground water. That's drying up across the world. We've survived off fish. Those populations are collapsing. We've diverted rivers for agriculture in deserts. There isn't enough rain to keep those flowing and hasn't been for years, plus with climate change glaciers and mountain snow that fed into rivers are increasingly a thing of the past--rivers and lakes that exist today will cease to exist within our lifetime (and long before we expect). Fertilizer let us push the land well beyond sustainable limits and vegetables are less nutritious than they've ever been due to nutrients being wiped out of the soil. Most countries are dependent on food being shipped from hundreds if not thousands of miles away and often from other countries entirely.
The world is severely overpopulated. We've just been lucky to have had a few decades of peaceful trade and a very, very, very mild environmental situation with zero major global disasters. This isn't the norm. One massive volcanic eruption, one actual plague, one massive drought and it's all over.
What we see continually rather is a narrative of overpopulation pushed and advanced by seemingly related points about lack of food and water. In reality these are completely orthogonal points which have some correlation to, but are not directly proportional to population growth all.
In terms of energy, nuclear. In terms of food, there are still large swaths of un-farmed areas. We can farm these and still maintain natural parks and not destroy the environment. Opening up immigration will solve labor issues.
We have the technology, we just have to distribute it to easily quadruple the carrying capacity of the earth
I'm not against population growth, but this whole rhetoric fueled by Musk, among others, stirring panic that the population will collapse is crazy. Sure, we would have a problem if people suddenly stopped having children. But this is not the case. World population is still growing, and it should stabilize at around 10B people. That's not too bad, why do we need to keep growing?
There is room on this planet for more humans, but taking it for our own comes at a cost. If we choose to use it for people, then it can't also be wild. So, we have a choice to make about the kind of world we wish to live in.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...
And some refusal to use condoms.
If this changes, the trend will sharply reverse.
Most forecast say population will peak at 10bn to 11bn - https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
- A big part of this increase in indeed from Africa which is expected to increase by 3bn - from 1.3bn in 2020 to 4.3bn in 2100
- The largest uncertainty is also about Africa where faster economic growth is expected to bring down population growth (counter-intuitively).
To illustrate the point: The last 40 years have been the worst we will see in terms of stability, economic growth etc .... yet Population growth in Africa thrived and the % of people living in poverty reduced dramatically and the current population is healthier, wealthier, and more educated than ever before (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-po... ).
Africa fertility rate is dropping around 1.5% per year annually for the region as a whole.
Increasingly technologized populations drop fertility fast
Once you start increasing quality of life and education, birth rates will plummet.
It would only be “over population” because our current in-effecient systems can’t keep up and they need to evolve.
This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.
I hope you are aware of the carbon footprint of an american versus someone from, say, ethiopia?!
Cut this xenophobic crap right now. Have a look at the facts. For example, the per capita CO2 emission in Ethiopia is 0.13 tonnes, whereas it's 14.24 tonnes in the US. That's over a factor of 100 more.
Here's a good source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
They're also relying on us for a lot of aid, I'm not sure if your calculation takes that into account.
I live in Latin America, in my trips to the US I get disgusted when I see hundreds of family cars with giant gas engines that we only use in construction trucks, idling all day just to run their air conditioner in a slightly hot day.
It's incredible the delusion that the first world has about how 'sustainable' their lifestyles are.
Again, from your theme song and your apparent fondness for the Teutonic Order I'm assuming you're at least familiar with Germany and the German social security system, which is very much a part of their culture.
The German state pension system basically amounts to a Ponzi scheme that requires a continuous influx of new contributors in order to not implode.
Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable", but given German culture is quite averse to change (which is unsustainable, too, by the way) and it therefore isn't particularly likely they're going to abandon their current pension system anytime soon, "bringing people from these undeveloped countries" also is about their only option left to keep the system from collapsing for just a little longer.
I'm not even talking general economic and societal repercussions here. It can be argued that a society with a declining population isn't long-term sustainable and ultimately will succumb to stagnation and a lack of innovation.
> Before and during World War II, Nazi propaganda and ideology made frequent use of the Teutonic Knights' imagery, as the Nazis sought to depict the Knights' actions as a forerunner of the Nazi conquests for Lebensraum. Heinrich Himmler tried to idealise the SS as a 20th-century reincarnation of the medieval Order. Yet, despite these references to the Teutonic Order's history in Nazi propaganda, the Order itself was abolished in 1938 and its members were persecuted by the German authorities. This occurred mostly due to Hitler's and Himmler's belief that, throughout history, Roman Catholic military-religious orders had been tools of the Holy See and as such constituted a threat to the Nazi regime. Hitler based his German Order on the Teutonic Order, especially the Hochmeister's ceremonial regalia itself even though they abolished the said order.
Linking to this "theme song" and your (not yours, usrn's) xeonophic comments have no place on Hacker News.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutonic_Order#Modern_organiza...
Yes and no - that is how the world, how life works!
The currently working take care of the currently too-old-to-work. No matter what layer and labels you put on top, that has always been and will always be true. Unless you create time machines, or eliminate aging (with its own huge set of issues).
So yes, the new generations have to take care of the previous ones. "Capital" is only an information layer on top of that reality used to determine who gets what, but it does not replace the reality of who and when produces goods and services. You can shift information about capital into the future (you "saved" for retirement - but only this information is transmitted to the future, not goods or services, which are always used in the present), but actual goods and services always have to be produced and provided by the working part of the population. You can shift as much "capital" (information) into the future as you want, "save" incredible amounts of money, it will change nothing.
> Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable",
Quite the opposite. That is the best kind of sustainable because it actually represents truth most faithfully. The "capital" based magic - that is much more problematic. It masks and attempts to hide the reality. Also a problem in the German system is the many exceptions.
The core German system is the most honest one about reality: The currently working take care of those that no longer don't. If there are too few in the new generation to take care of the expected number of old non-working people in the country, then seeing that problem is GOOD, trying to hide it behind some finance magic is bad.
As such, talking about "unsustainable cultures" here is pure xenophobia.
Why? intuitively it would seem that that less humans will improve the environment, but intuition is often wrong.
The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
Remember, most of the environmental damage was done by a very small number of very rich countries. The poorest countries is where most of the population lives, and those cause the least environmental impact.
For now! They all want the quality of life of the rich nations and understandably so. I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living, let alone more. There isn’t enough land to grow feed for all the livestock we’d need for a start!
That's a completely different problem. So basically what you want is to poor people to stay poor.
Well, luckily technology improves and with that resource consumption is optimized. But that wont happen if you halve the population because there will be half of the scientists and engineers to do it (and likely, much less than half).
I’m saying I’d like more equality and that isn’t possible at current technology levels. I don’t buy that decreasing population would limit technological progress at all. The vast majority of people are currently living subsistence existences and contributing almost nothing to technological progress.
We could easily reduce population and end up with more not less scientists and engineers
> The planet can sustain much more people
This is only true if we add only poor people.
I think this argument that engineers or scientists will save the world removes the responsibility everyone has to consume less/better. Besides that this will probably only happen once the richer countries get hit, see the famines and water shortages all over the world. Mostly NGO’s and organizations like the UN are trying to fix those issues, while most of the money is spent on trying to get us to buy more
In theory you are right, there is a lot of space to grow the population but in practice most people want to live in big popular cities and chase the dream of being rich which simply isn't sustainable and promotes a lot of waste.
A lot of people as they mature will give up their big city life dreams once they realize the cost / stress / commute isn't worth it unless you're very successful and rich. They move to the city to "make it", survival of the fittest selects some % of people who make it and the rest either cope with distractions / drugs or move to cheaper areas.
So we have a lot of space for many people to live but they won't live in luxury and since human nature is to compare ourselves to others and strive to climb social hierarchies most of the population will just overcrowd the already popular areas to live which is a problem
> was done by a very small number of very rich countries
And where do you think the (actionable) "intelligence" and money comes from?
It's not that poorer countries don't have intelligence, but they don't have the resources to put it to good use. One random person in a TED talk gets more attention than the people actually dealing with the issue
"More population" has always meant more misery and more conflict
With less people, each one can go further
"Empty" is a very biblical word, with shades of the brass age Hebrew mission of “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
It's time to drop superstitious beliefs and take a hard look at reality. For example, we're using resources at a rate that is no longer sustainable (https://www.footprintcalculator.org/home/en).
> It's going to be the same for every other resource.
That's superstition / survivor bias.
Is your statement that far off from "the house is on fire, but I'm not going to move from the couch because a fire crew will be here sooner or later"?
This isn't just some hope, this is the way human history has run. To suggest otherwise is the lunacy here.
The past 50 years have shown abundant evidence of us causing severe damage to the environment. Physics is finite, discoveries are finite, human ingenuity is finite. The chances of us being on a fantasy path of becoming magicians, able to conjure up anything our hearts desire, is low. There are bounds to reality.
By the way, a land war in Europe over Ukraine has been very likely since Crimea and the election of Zelensky, which some people believe was rigged by the CIA. It was only a matter of time. The evidence from 80 years ago is there.
I am suggesting that the entire course of history is marked by the expansion of available resources to the human race. Not a cherrypicked 70 years.
The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important.
I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow.
All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.
She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s. However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was.
We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a single (long lived) individual.
The main difference seemed to be car traffic and tourism. It's just unrecognisable nowadays (and even from the 1980s tbh).
Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
There's an even better cognitive bias than this describing your «optimism» about the future, but I fail to find its name.
Like it's hard to imagine an even faster passenger aircraft than the Concorde for example.
I think it’s an allocation of resources problem.
Pre 80s a lot of the best and brightest worked in engineering.
Post 80s they went into finance and then tech. The latter a mixed bag - brought us Google maps etc but sadly mostly focused on selling ads.
That’s the risk I see. We either need to change incentives or change culture to get back to a focus on progress / exploration rather than exploitation.
We simply have a lot more best and brightest in everything. There's so much talent it's unreal. There's not enough money to hire everyone, or technology to equip them in engineering.
It's kind of like art (pictures, movies, music, anything) - there's so much of it, so high quality these days that there really isn't anything that will stand out on its own. Same for celebrities, for that matter. Actors/singers/presidents? Meh, go to Instagram and OnlyFans and take your pick.
The only reason people 100 years from now will show something as an example of early 00's is marketing and survival.
Those people still live and survive - they're just optimising ad spend instead of working on engineering problems or medical research, etc.
>Post 80s they went into finance and then tech. The latter a mixed bag - brought us Google maps etc but sadly mostly focused on selling ads.
So you havent been able to tell if search engines make or break a company, product or service with the results it delivers?
As weapons go, controlling the economy of other countries through search engine results would be novel and advantageous to the US military!
Why can't we fly on a Concorde? (I know why obviously). I guess I am sad to see that tech that truly changed people's lives doesn't happen as much anymore.
Airlines seating (minus first class) has on average become smaller in both business and economy class during the same timespan that relegated the Concorde to history. The airlines decided what they wanted. For most of this time airline tickets weren’t as competitive a market either with more flag carriers and less budget airlines cutting the costs at the bottom of the market.
Apparently people are happy choosing both slower and cheaper even if it costs them legroom (up to a point obviously, since Ryanair famously wasn’t allowed to try the standing room only short haul <2hr flights)
Per your next sentence, customers decided what they wanted. Which was to pay less.
>For most of this time airline tickets weren’t as competitive a market either with more flag carriers and less budget airlines cutting the costs at the bottom of the market.
https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...
Does any science claim or even attempt to estimate its own comprehensiveness?
It's all the same bias. We're living in the stone age.
I'll be happy if I get to see a scramble for the solar system thanks to some sort of anti-gravitational device or full dive VR tech (or isekai-as-a-service by Mitsubishi).
I didn't know what Isekai was, so I looked it up: [0]
Isekai (Japanese: 異世界, transl. "different world" or "otherworld") is a Japanese genre of portal fantasy and science fiction.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai
I think about this, perhaps more than I should. My great-grandmother was born under monarchy, in a mud hut, somewhere along the Danube. When she was 14, she got stolen on a horse by the son of a band of real highwaymen. She and the son built a house by hand (that still exists, modernized). They had no electricity, no cars anywhere around. Her husband traveled for maybe some tens of miles out of town to the nearest towns. Herself, not even that.
The first time she saw a car, it was passing by, and all the children were running after it smelling the fumes; they had no idea what it was or that there was a human inside. It belonged to an industrialist from the nearest city who made a chicken farm in the area.
World wars came and went, biplanes, radar, the transistor... the village was bombarded, and the state became a popular republic, then a socialist one. Industrialization started. The beginning of globalization, cinematography, and mass media. They still had lights only on the main street. She became a sort of accountant for the collectivized farm and raised her sons and granddaughters.
The Berlin wall fell, and the regime changed again. Democracy. She discovered capitalism, global mass production, and consumerism. Post-communist corruption tore down the town and sold it for scraps. By this time, yours truly came, and she went to the city to help my parents while they were studying and working.
Together, we discovered the contemporary world. Quickly traveling to other countries, computers, internet, QR codes, VoIP, HD media, WiFi, social media, mobile devices, global media streaming, mRNA vaccines, and probably so much more that I can't remember now.
God, this post got long, and it teared me up. I've considered not posting, but I will. I'm unsure if I'm terrified or comforted by the thought that I might not live through so much change, though it feels like the world is changing even faster.
Glad to read that, I'm a sucker for Gen Z's world and I like the adult ones a lot!
Every counterculture thing I was into is normal with them! Like, broadly attractive people are totally into things that only socially maladjusted and visually unattractive people were into prior. That is perfect for me!
She explained that when she was a girl "everything was made of something and someone knew how to do it". Now everything is just plastic.
Ok that's way more than I would've thought, and it's only 11 AM. Not sure if it converts to the local time zone though.
That's at 6:16 AM EST / EDT (America/New York)
Looks like roughly 10,000 / hour.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi...
Lots of sources question population data as well as all other officials statistics. Nobody care. It is not just numbers, it is political statements.
But population numbers were highly confidential in those days and since Sweden was vast to the north they wrongly assumed it was populated much more densely.
https://www.worldometers.info/sources/
No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to avoid that check.
I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not the end.
No other species can grow it's population exponentially. True. However, we aren't any other species (that we know of at least). The planet can support far more people, it truly can, and more so, the rest of space awaits. We can spread further and further. Is it really good to wish for a reduction of our species? of the only life we know that can truly observe and appreciate the beauty of creation?
More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
And even worse, if you add people until most has to live a life on the brink of starvation again that could stop innovation from ever happening again in the future, our current time is an historical anomaly and there is no guarantee that we can ever get back here if we screw up and get everyone back to a state of misery. There are only so many ways we can improve food production, we found a lot of them the past 200 years and that led to a ton of innovations since people no longer had to worry about starvation. But all of that will quickly revert if you can no longer buy food at a supermarket, since there is simply not enough food to feed every American, some will have to starve to death.
But as their incomes tripled and their children survived childhood, their birthdates dropped and their surviving children are better educated and less malnourished. This has been happening almost everywhere in the world, and is why world population will peak in a couple decades without mass starvation.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?count...
That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
the max? I don't know about max. However, yeah, you're right. That does not mean we cannot continue in the future and do it better. Lab Grown meat is nearly a thing, and reducing the price of that will drop global emissions. EVs are becoming far more common and will be replacing ICE vehicles come the turn of the decade, we're building more and more solar and renewable energy resources.
We can fix these problems. Yes, the problems are created by us. That does not mean we cannot fix them while continuing to progress and reduce poverty. More people, more brains only benefits that effort. Not reduces it.
The system of our society needs tweaks. Our incentives are sometimes wrong. But again, reducing people doesn't fix that. More people aids us to build better systems.
Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.
https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...
Even the 689 million "extreme poverty" number does at least mean there's more people in poverty today than were total alive approx 300 years ago.
I mean .... why? Why are we assuming that more people aren't working to create more energy, more resources? The Earth can feed, and provide far more energy than we currently are using. Pump out nuclear reactors for every town and we will have enough energy for 10 times the people. Granted, it's not as easy as saying that but my point is that energy is not finite, and resources are far more that we are currently not utilizing.
I don't imagine more people will be living with the same resources. After all, the growth to nearly 8 billion resulted in most people's quality of life rising and poverty decreasing. This is a fact. A cold hard fact, that nearly everyone on an absolute level has gotten better lives.
If we can do that for 8 billion, why can't we for another 8?
More so, increased population results in different, new problems and solving those problems results in us further progressing, not regressing.
I guess, I just don't like thinking of this as the end of history. We can grow and grow, and grow. I don't wish for humanity to simply fizzle out. We've done pretty well till now, let's keep going. We can do better.
As far as we know, we're the only species in the universe, in the whole wide universe that can truly appreciate the beauty of the universe. That can observe. Catalogue. Create Art. Sing songs and so on.
The vast wide massive universe. It deserves to be seen. It deserves to be documented. To be explored. We need to live, and grow far more than now to do that.
Sure I believe the earth can support 10 billion people who doesn't live in poverty, but that would require a lot of infrastructure that we don't yet have. Adding people before you can ensure they don't have to live a life of misery will just hurt progress, for progress it is better to have 100 people who live a good life than 1000 people who live near starvation, so the fastest way to get to 10 billion people living a well life is not to first add 10 billion people who have to live in misery.
Fortunately, we've made huge strides in this area in the last few decades. Global poverty is at an all time low and is decreasing. The same is true for food, female empowerment, family sizes, suicide, plastics, etc.
The world, really actually is getting better on a lot of major measures.
Yes, there are big challenges ahead. But as a species, we're honestly doing okay, maybe even better than okay.
There's a lot of data backing all this enthusiasm up. I'd link to a few papers, but GapMinder[0] is the best place I've seen where all the data is collated and searchable. They have great graphing interactives too [1]. GapMinder is an effort by the late-great Hans Rosling. You may remember his as that Swedish doctor from the TED talks [2]. I'd suggest any HN readers to dive into the site and see. They have a great little quiz[3] to help you renormalize yourself to current data as well.
All hope is not lost! Things really are going to be okay-ish. Not the same, but not terrible. Our work is not in vain.
[0] https://www.gapminder.org/
[1] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v1
[2] https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling
[3] https://upgrader.gapminder.org/
Does it? It does if we're at the level of cutting wood to feed our individual fireplaces, and there's only so much wood around. But we don't live in that world any more.
You need a large number of people to be able to manufacture giant windmills in... Texas, I think? Installed in Wyoming, with generators built in Switzerland. Combined with solar panels built in China. This is to replace oil from North Dakota, drilled with equipment manufactured in Texas, piped to whereever. And that's replacing coal dug in Wyoming, hauled hundreds of miles by locomotives built in Pennsylvania or Texas or Mexico or Canada.
That takes people. It takes a lot of people, connected to each other, to give us a world where we're not just competing for who can chop down more of the few remaining local trees.
Malthusianism didn't work in 1700s and doesn't work now. Economists produced endogenous growth theories explaining how more population could lead to higher output per capita in the 80s. Romer won a Nobel prize for it.
The evidence we have now strongly supports their arguments. Productivity scales superlinearly with urban population so that each doubling leads to a 15% increase in p.c output. This is true everywhere we look i.e. regressing log(income per capita) on log(city population) produces near-perfect lines with slopes close to 1.15 whether you're looking at the U.S or Bangladesh. This is easily explicable in terms of the network externalities. Furthermore, studies comparing the networked lives of people living in more/less populous areas (inferred from phone usage data) show that people living in bigger cities do indeed communicate more. How much more? 15% for every doubling of city size! All of this can be explained in terms of graph theory. More nodes -> more cultural and technical niches (interconnected node clusters) -> more potential synergies as every niche has more niches to connect to. And so on. Connectivity increases faster than linearly, hence the superlinear scaling. Not coincidentally, the connectivity of brains seems to be the same (double the number of cortical neurons in a mammal, the number of synapses per neuron increases by 15-20%).
All this to say, we certainly aren't approaching a world of less abundance per capita as the world continues to urbanise. Anybody who thinks this just isn't acquainted with the evidence.
All the advances are due to exploitation all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
Not sure how advocating for more people is selfish, but okay.
> More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits.
Energy can be practically infinite. Simply requires us to use nuclear power. Yes, Yes, there's issues of waste with that. It's overblown and a moral panic.
More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite".
That's what i mean. Resources and Energy are practically infinite when you look at it on a long term scale.
I simply don't think, it's a good idea to advocate for humanity to simply reduce and fizzle out. No. Why should we? We should advance life forward. That does not mean in the same way as before. We can do better. But advocating for the reduction of humanity, of life, is wrong in my opinion.
After all, there is no other life we know of out there like us. Why stop?
That's what people thought about oil, trees, etc. before.
Trees are literally infinite. Just plant enough of them while you cut them down.
Oil is not, but oil is energy, and energy is also practically infinite as long as we do it cleanly, and we have the capability to do so that today.
Quality trees are nowhere near infinite.
Quality energy (stored in a lower state of entropy, conveniently accessible and usable when and where we need it) is not infinite. This one is obviously not true today. If it were, people would not be complaining about increasing fossil fuel prices, since they would be happy using the cheap (due to infinite supply) “clean” energy.
Nice in theory but there's a big, big problem in the interim: in many instances that interim exceeds 300-plus years before there's a solution (if there's a practical one at all)!
Many of the world's best timbers have been exploited to the point of extinction and the few trees that remain in the wild are strictly controlled by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) in that the export trade is strictly banned (just like elephant tusks - that means exporting any quantity no matter how small is illegal). Even so, illegal logging is now out of control and it's reducing their remaining numbers to critically low levels.
Demand for timbers such as the dalbergias: Brazilian Rosewood - Dalbergia nigra, Cocobolo D. Retusa, etc. and many other depleted species such as Lignum vitae is already so high that - like the drug trade - there are instances where people in the illegal trade are killing one another over 'territory' and the 'rights' to illegal smuggling.
Many good hardwood tree can take many hundreds of years to mature and despite many, many decades of the very best science chemical engineering has devised, it hasn't come anywhere near producing good artifical verions of these timbers. If we immediately started a planting operation of Manhattan Project size proportions to repopulate these trees to the level they were two hundreds years ago it would still take several hundreds of years before the world had sufficient timber to meet current (let alone the future) demand. And that's just the beginning of supply problems in the lumber industry.
So what's your solution for the next few hundred years?
Incidentally, in China, rosewoods (dalbergias) are revered with almost mystical significance, they are symbols of huge cultural and personal importance. With its newfound wealth, Chinese demand for these now rare timbers has skyrocketed and the Chinese will pay almost any amount to get their hands on them. As the population of more affluent Chinese grows, this problem will get steadily worse.
Now consider this is only one of many similar environmental problems the world is currently facing.
There is even more than that if we go proactively grab a fraction of the the billions of galaxies of resources just meaninglessly burning themselves away.
Also, the per capita usage of energy/garbage/resources tends to decrease as populations go up. The net, of course, increases, but the per capita decreases. Combine that with cleaner fuels are were set to get carbon neutral as a globe by ~2080, if I'm remembering correctly (I may not be!)
What things though? It is mostly materialistic, isn't it? We are more comfortable than ever. We can talk to a person on the other side of the planet anytime we want. Yet, we don't know our neighbors. More people are lonely, more people are single etc. We live longer today, yet my generation seems less happy than my parents' generation. When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today? We can't even be sure kids are safe in schools (though this particular problem is just American one).
On one side, we are relentlessly moving ahead, mostly materialistic. Fantastic communication tools, medical equipment etc. On the other side, people are obese, unhappy, unhealthy (mentally and physically).
We can't even a significant portion of the people accept that climate change issues are real and maybe slightly alter their lifestyle (eat less meat, less dairy, use less plastic...). How are you proposing to achieve any kind of cooperation between people when the population keeps going up?
Exactly. The trouble is that those who weren't there to experience the freedom we had as kids and the resilisence and self confidence it instilled and developed in us simply don't understand.
It's a tragedy really.
There will always be smart people and brilliant artists. If we reduce population, they will just come at a slower rate, which is fine. Will just make them more special when they do come.
I hate people and definitely would love to see fewer of them.
Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow that is out there.
why? and why would it not be worse? just because of the number of people?
I think that no matter how efficient our food generation processes get, this is very little space per person. That's why people live in the air and on top of each other.
What do you think about Netherlands? It seems to me they had a good way to use the space while keeping it green and also caring about nature.
Earth can support at least twice the current number of people with a better organisation while also disrupting less the natural habitat.
What makes it hard to achieve this is our focus on nationalities and countries instead of thinking about a global society combined with our greed and our individual/centrism way to think about the world as if the only way forward is us vs the forest or us vs the wild animals ... we should focus more on how to embed into nature and not how to change it to make it work for us.
They're clearly wasting food an oxygen...
Every generation has it's soothsayers that are absolutely certain we are near the population limit and heading for certain doom. And every one of them was wrong. Our population soared past those limits, no problem.
I share the opinion that earth can sustain about 100B of us, with a bit of planning and thoughtful engineering. So long as most people don't mind living in sky scrapers. More people = more brains to solve the type of problems that I assume you are worried about.
I don't actually believe we will continue growing like we have, as nothing in human affairs follows a strait line for long. Every great kingdom has fallen, every empire divided. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. We don't need to try and control it, but only observe and adapt to it.
Now, if we consider the other resources every new human will also consume during his or her lifetime - houses, vehicles, white goods, electronic tech etc., etc. - then that extra demand on the planet's resources will be enormous.
What's worried me for a long time - ever since I read Anne and Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb is that the population will outstrip our ability to find extra resources to support this population growth. Whilst the Ehrlichs overestimated the exponential growth rate I evertheless reckon the evidence supports the fact that they'd gotten the growth trend correct.
It seems to me that unless we quickly take drastic action to either limit population growth or vastly increase food resources or both - not to mention simultaneously keeping environment in a state of sustainability (climate change, etc.) - then the future is likely to be very rocky.
Yes, it's a pessimistic outlook but it looks as if the stats are pretty much against us unless there's a collective realization that something must be done urgently.
I can only hope I'm wrong.
Moreover, it's just a fact that people have been controlling population growth since before recorded history both at a family and state level - take China's one child policy for instance. I never even mentioned this let alone take a moral stand on the matter. Presumably, you would be much more critical of those who've actually acted to control population numbers rather than those who've just mentioned the subject.
What's more, the comment I made was a logical OR statement - that is either the world has the resources OR it doesn't, if it doesn't then the world has to do something about it, especially when exponential growth is involved.
What are your objections to that? And why are you so indignant and afraid of the subject that you want discussion about it shut down?
I'm aware of the counter argument but in the light of exponential growth of the population at what point does the graph of 'modern efficiencies' intersect with that of the exponential growth one?
Exponential growth has to stop somewhere as resources aren't infinite, so 'decoupling' cannot last forever.
Incidentally, I'm aware that some demographers have predicted a leveling off of exponential population growth in decades to come. For those who've implied (wrongly) that I've a hide to suggest limiting population growth I'd say that if or when exponential population growth does happen then they'd have to be critical of everyone involved in that turnaround (as it will require active participation of the population for that to happen).
hasn’t that whole idea been proven wrong already? isn’t it a 70s myth that never materialised?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#Critici...
Once, during a autumn storm (we're in Estonia), I remember him stating on a business-as-usual tone: "I was 15, when I first got to know electricity."
Man, I thought. Here, in front of me, is a living person who spent the first 14 years (!) of his life completely off-grid. No electricity, period.
That was also the moment I realized that this same person -- my grandpa -- has accumulated all of his knowledge by first-hand, hit-and-miss experiments. The contemporary model of "theory first" was and is almost completely alien to him, along with book-knowledge of any kind. The result of this? Even at age 90, you can be 99% sure that everything my grandpa states is true -- simply because he only speaks or proposes things that he has tested out himself.
As a person with lots of "book knowledge", I find this absolutely fascinating. Obviously, all the technological solutions he has in his household are 1) rock solid and 2) dead simple.
It almost appears that if you somehow manage to maintain decent work ethic (and the ethic of being human), a modest amount of formal schooling may have its benefits.
Greetings to the grandparents of all HNers!