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> Maybe you don't care what happens to the next N generations, but I do It's not about not caring - it's about not knowing what will and will not be relevant.

> Maybe you don't care what happens to the next N generations, but I do It's not about not caring - it's about not knowing what will and will not be relevant. As I've said before - people have been talking about population explosion since forever - we should be starving from 80s. All these people consistently ignore progress in their predictions. You don't know what the dominant method for food production will be in 20 years or what will be the dominant energy source - as someone linked above the things I'm talking about are already starting. How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years ? We should deal with problems coming in 10-20 years - we don't have the tools to deal with the longer term than that.

lisper 11y ago
> people have been talking about population explosion since forever No, that's not true. Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay less than 200 years ago. The oldest human writings are only a few thousand years old. That's the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. > How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years? Because I can do math. So I can understand that exponential growth cannot be sustained in a finite universe, let alone a finite planet. I can calculate how long we can continue at current (or historical) growth rates before we run into various limiting factors. For example: the carbon biomass of earth is ~10^15 kg. The carbon mass of homo sapiens is about 10^11 kg. Our current doubling time is about 60 years. That works out to about 600 more years of growth at current rates before the biomass of earth consists entirely of homo sapiens. That's a hard upper bound on how long we have left if we don't slow our growth rate.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  600 years to figure out space colonization with efforts under way already and likely to happen in a 100 years ... I see that you're trying to make a point it's just not making any sense. Honestly we have no idea how society will look like in 50 years with the advent of AI and such nobody knows what close future holds let alone 100 years - this "we're doing it to save the future" is like people talking how there's going to be unsustainable urban problems in 100 years with horses before the cars were invented - you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable - sorry but as far as problems go those are fairly straightforward on such a long timescale.
  - lisper 11y ago
    > space colonization That won't help. Suppose we manage to completely terraform Mars (extremely unlikely in just 600 years) and suppose that the biomass of Mars can be made equal to that of earth. It will only be one more doubling time (i.e. 60 years) before Mars is completely full as well. Then what? > you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable No. I don't know what the limiting factor will ultimately turn out to be. It may be that we will eventually succeed in transmuting matter and turning the entire mass of the universe into homo sapiens. You can do the math on that too. That will get you out to a couple of thousand years. After that we would need to find a way to get around the law of conservation of mass. You have to be a pretty extreme optimist to believe we'll have that figured out by then.
    - moonchrome 11y ago
      I think we've gone so far from what I was arguing - we can talk hypothetical 500 year future - but that has no bearing on what we should do right now. We still have more than enough resources even with current technology to sustain current population growth for the foreseeable future - suggesting that we should start population control is just green bullshit these so called environmentalist bring up because they are afraid that their favorite animal is going extinct. I'm not much in to that "native American wisdom" about how we should be one with nature and how we can't eat money - money = resources + capital + labor = solution to whatever problem you're facing given enough time. As far as I'm concerned we should be working on solutions to reduce our dependence on the ecosystem - climate change is just an a symptom of a bigger problem - the environment we depend on is fragile - the solution isn't praying that everything stays the same and maiming ourselves so we stay within some magical limit they think is going to "appease" the "balance of nature" - we should be working towards replacing it with a more robust systems (eg. like controlled/engineered food production instead of relying on weather, pesticides, herbicides, etc. and hoping all goes well). This is what I mean by regressive thinking - instead of focusing on how these eventual problems could be solved trough innovation their solution is "stop doing whatever we beleive might cause that and hope for the best".

lisper 11y ago

> people have been talking about population explosion since forever No, that's not true. Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay less than 200 years ago. The oldest human writings are only a few thousand years old. That's the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. > How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years? Because I can do math. So I can understand that exponential growth cannot be sustained in a finite universe, let alone a finite planet. I can calculate how long we can continue at current (or historical) growth rates before we run into various limiting factors. For example: the carbon biomass of earth is ~10^15 kg. The carbon mass of homo sapiens is about 10^11 kg. Our current doubling time is about 60 years. That works out to about 600 more years of growth at current rates before the biomass of earth consists entirely of homo sapiens. That's a hard upper bound on how long we have left if we don't slow our growth rate.

moonchrome 11y ago
600 years to figure out space colonization with efforts under way already and likely to happen in a 100 years ... I see that you're trying to make a point it's just not making any sense. Honestly we have no idea how society will look like in 50 years with the advent of AI and such nobody knows what close future holds let alone 100 years - this "we're doing it to save the future" is like people talking how there's going to be unsustainable urban problems in 100 years with horses before the cars were invented - you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable - sorry but as far as problems go those are fairly straightforward on such a long timescale.
- lisper 11y ago
  > space colonization That won't help. Suppose we manage to completely terraform Mars (extremely unlikely in just 600 years) and suppose that the biomass of Mars can be made equal to that of earth. It will only be one more doubling time (i.e. 60 years) before Mars is completely full as well. Then what? > you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable No. I don't know what the limiting factor will ultimately turn out to be. It may be that we will eventually succeed in transmuting matter and turning the entire mass of the universe into homo sapiens. You can do the math on that too. That will get you out to a couple of thousand years. After that we would need to find a way to get around the law of conservation of mass. You have to be a pretty extreme optimist to believe we'll have that figured out by then.
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    I think we've gone so far from what I was arguing - we can talk hypothetical 500 year future - but that has no bearing on what we should do right now. We still have more than enough resources even with current technology to sustain current population growth for the foreseeable future - suggesting that we should start population control is just green bullshit these so called environmentalist bring up because they are afraid that their favorite animal is going extinct. I'm not much in to that "native American wisdom" about how we should be one with nature and how we can't eat money - money = resources + capital + labor = solution to whatever problem you're facing given enough time. As far as I'm concerned we should be working on solutions to reduce our dependence on the ecosystem - climate change is just an a symptom of a bigger problem - the environment we depend on is fragile - the solution isn't praying that everything stays the same and maiming ourselves so we stay within some magical limit they think is going to "appease" the "balance of nature" - we should be working towards replacing it with a more robust systems (eg. like controlled/engineered food production instead of relying on weather, pesticides, herbicides, etc. and hoping all goes well). This is what I mean by regressive thinking - instead of focusing on how these eventual problems could be solved trough innovation their solution is "stop doing whatever we beleive might cause that and hope for the best".