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> This is not sustainable. This is a longstanding concern going back to at least the 70s [1]. The argument is essentially twofold: 1. Population growth will c

by cletus 8y ago

> This is not sustainable. This is a longstanding concern going back to at least the 70s [1]. The argument is essentially twofold: 1. Population growth will continue at or near present rates indefinitely; and 2. We will exceed population N where N is the number of people the planet can support. For (1) the rate of growth has slowed and is projected to continue slowing over the next century [2] such that many of these estimates have been way off. For (2), we have a pretty narrow-minded view of how many people this planet can actually support but with sufficient automation hydroponic yield depending on crop can be 10x+ per unit of land area (eg [3]). Automation here is important for both constructing greenhouses and maintaining the crop. This could well increase food capacity to 50-100B people depending on diet, possibly much higher. What's more of a factor are resources and in particular energy costs. Commercial fusion power with deuterium would solve a whole bunch of problems at once (eg if the cost is below hydrocarbon based fuels then you can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into fuel, which also largely solves your greenhouse gas problem too). If we ever figure out commercial fusion based on normal hydrogen well that's basically unlimited energy. Fusion isn't a requirement though. Solar gets ever cheaper. At some point it will become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and I've seen estimates for the yield of this to be about 7x the energy production of the same panel on the ground since there's essentially no night and there's definitely no weather. Don't get me wrong: people are screwing up the planet and a lot of the larger animals seem doomed but that's more an issue of human vanity (eg wanting rhino horns, ivory, fish bladders and the like) rather than being driven by any actual need. Deforestation is an issue but more-so in the developing world and more of an issue for ecosystems rather than, say, the atmosphere (IIRC ~80% of the CO2 is produced by the oceans). Overfishing too is a problem but mainly for us because at some point there just won't be any fish to eat. People like to make alarmist predictions. In some cases I'm sure they truly believe them. This to me is largely a folly of youth as experience teaches you the poor track record of such prognostications. In other cases I suspect people are trying to prompt action from the complacent. The problem with this is that alarmist rhetoric about the environment tends to turn a lot of people off. And a history of bad predictions doesn't help your cause (whatever that cause is). People do and will continue to make short-term decisions based largely on self-interest. That's just human nature. In a lot of cases its based on need rather than want. It's hard to tell a poor family in a developing country not to chop down the forest when the alternative is not heating their homes (with the wood) and/or not feeding their families (with the farmland created) In others, it's not. But the notion that this planet can only support 5, 7 or 10 or 15B people is patently false. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/

deialtrous 8y ago
>But the notion that this planet can only support 5, 7 or 10 or 15B people is patently false. It is also a strawman. People don't say that, they say that the world can only support X many people with our current lifestyle. I do not want to make my life, and the life of every other person on the planet worse, simply to increase the population of humans. We are not endangered. We have more than enough humans. There is no need to breed even more replacements, we're covered. Why cause every single person on the planet to have a worse life simply to pack more people onto this rock?
- cletus 8y ago
  I pondered raising this issue in my above comment but decided not to since the comment was already long enough but the issue has been raised nonetheless. I agree that "the planet can't support X" is code for "I don't want to change my lifestyle" or, by extension, "I want my children to have the same lifestyle". Lots of animals return to the point where they were born to breed. Some cross vast distances. The human version of this is a mix of normalcy and nostalgia. By normalcy I mean however the world was when we were in our formative years we view as "normal". I really wonder what life was like 500 or 1000 years ago when politics may well have changed but largely there were few if any substantial everyday technological and societal differences from one generation to the next. The problem with this is that ew can easily start seeing everything through this lens such that things that diverge from our view of normal are (more likely) "bad" and those that don't are (more likely) "good". This I feel is a big part of conservativism/traditionalism. The nostalgia is obvious. The time when we were young is often romanticized, even fetishized. So as to maintaining lifestyle, let me put it this way: assume you're fo middle or upper class in the US. Could everyone in the world live as you do now? No. So by some measures we're already living beyond our (collective) means. And as hard as you may have worked, as smart as you are the biggest difference between you and a resident of some far less well off country is just plain old dumb luck that you were (probably?) born "here" (wherever here is). Granted some people from more disadvantaged backgrounds do better their lot in life but the odds are stacked against them in a way that just isn't true for someone born in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Western Europe and a handful of other places. Fun fact: the population density of Tennessee is 160/mi2. The land area of the US is 3.8m mi2. If you populated the entire US at the same density as TN you'd fit 6 billion people there. Would you consider TN overly dense? You may not have ever been there but it doesn't matter. No one is piled on top of each other (like, say, Hong Kong at ~7000/mi2). People live on large lots in big houses and there's still wilderness. We only live on a tiny fraction of available land. The vast majority of it is farmland but if farmland can produce 10 times as much per unit area then we need an awful lot less of it to support a much bigger population. Unfortunately preserving one's way of life is so often just code for NIMBYism, excluding certain groups (eg segregation in the US) and maintaining the status quo just because you were lucky enough to be born in the right place.

by cletus 8y ago

deialtrous 8y ago

>But the notion that this planet can only support 5, 7 or 10 or 15B people is patently false. It is also a strawman. People don't say that, they say that the world can only support X many people with our current lifestyle. I do not want to make my life, and the life of every other person on the planet worse, simply to increase the population of humans. We are not endangered. We have more than enough humans. There is no need to breed even more replacements, we're covered. Why cause every single person on the planet to have a worse life simply to pack more people onto this rock?

cletus 8y ago
I pondered raising this issue in my above comment but decided not to since the comment was already long enough but the issue has been raised nonetheless. I agree that "the planet can't support X" is code for "I don't want to change my lifestyle" or, by extension, "I want my children to have the same lifestyle". Lots of animals return to the point where they were born to breed. Some cross vast distances. The human version of this is a mix of normalcy and nostalgia. By normalcy I mean however the world was when we were in our formative years we view as "normal". I really wonder what life was like 500 or 1000 years ago when politics may well have changed but largely there were few if any substantial everyday technological and societal differences from one generation to the next. The problem with this is that ew can easily start seeing everything through this lens such that things that diverge from our view of normal are (more likely) "bad" and those that don't are (more likely) "good". This I feel is a big part of conservativism/traditionalism. The nostalgia is obvious. The time when we were young is often romanticized, even fetishized. So as to maintaining lifestyle, let me put it this way: assume you're fo middle or upper class in the US. Could everyone in the world live as you do now? No. So by some measures we're already living beyond our (collective) means. And as hard as you may have worked, as smart as you are the biggest difference between you and a resident of some far less well off country is just plain old dumb luck that you were (probably?) born "here" (wherever here is). Granted some people from more disadvantaged backgrounds do better their lot in life but the odds are stacked against them in a way that just isn't true for someone born in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Western Europe and a handful of other places. Fun fact: the population density of Tennessee is 160/mi2. The land area of the US is 3.8m mi2. If you populated the entire US at the same density as TN you'd fit 6 billion people there. Would you consider TN overly dense? You may not have ever been there but it doesn't matter. No one is piled on top of each other (like, say, Hong Kong at ~7000/mi2). People live on large lots in big houses and there's still wilderness. We only live on a tiny fraction of available land. The vast majority of it is farmland but if farmland can produce 10 times as much per unit area then we need an awful lot less of it to support a much bigger population. Unfortunately preserving one's way of life is so often just code for NIMBYism, excluding certain groups (eg segregation in the US) and maintaining the status quo just because you were lucky enough to be born in the right place.