7 ms·

> For humanity to continue growing as a species I'm pretty young. Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperat

> For humanity to continue growing as a species I'm pretty young. Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius. The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it. We can't go on like this.

Karrot_Kream 7y ago
> We can't go on like this. What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point? > The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something. Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
- CPLX 7y ago
  > maybe involving terraforming other planets This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here. Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead? I mean, seriously.
  - Karrot_Kream 7y ago
    No that's exactly what I mean, you read "terraforming" and took it too far. The parent was saying that, the general conclusion is making housing smaller and smaller. Today's apartment buildings will be too big as the population grows and we'll have to fit more people in more limited amounts of space. This is assuming several things, that we won't be able to build tall buildings, that we won't be able to go on another planet, or one of the many other things that can come in the far future. The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      Whatever "solution" you come up with would obviously be better if shared amongst a reasonable number of humans. That's my main point, not what the solution looks like. Tall buildings are inherently communal. Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader. We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that. My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
      - Karrot_Kream 7y ago
        > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
      - CPLX 7y ago
        > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Cool so stop building them. You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK. For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      You're not solving the problem. There is no shortage of space for the future 11 billion humans. The big problem is the centralization of companies within few top tier cities without a corresponding increase in housing for the (locally) growing population.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    It's easier to colonize Mars. No planning board.
tmh79 7y ago
"We can't go on like this." There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Mmm. I live in the UK. London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really. Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance. We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.
jdavis703 7y ago
A huge amount of US crop land is dedicated to livestock feed. I'm usually skeptical of market based solutions, but an omnivorous diet will probably become a luxury (middle-class people will have a generally herbivorous diet, with occasional meat for special occasions) before factory farming becomes the only way to feed the masses. Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
swsieber 7y ago
Don't worry, we're not. Human population growth is slowing down at a remarkable rate.
sien 7y ago
Look at this map of total fertility : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/media/File:2013_Fertility_per_woman_world_map.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med... If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement. There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates. Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers. There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

Karrot_Kream 7y ago

> We can't go on like this. What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point? > The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something. Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.

CPLX 7y ago
> maybe involving terraforming other planets This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here. Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead? I mean, seriously.
- Karrot_Kream 7y ago
  No that's exactly what I mean, you read "terraforming" and took it too far. The parent was saying that, the general conclusion is making housing smaller and smaller. Today's apartment buildings will be too big as the population grows and we'll have to fit more people in more limited amounts of space. This is assuming several things, that we won't be able to build tall buildings, that we won't be able to go on another planet, or one of the many other things that can come in the far future. The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Whatever "solution" you come up with would obviously be better if shared amongst a reasonable number of humans. That's my main point, not what the solution looks like. Tall buildings are inherently communal. Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader. We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that. My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
    - Karrot_Kream 7y ago
      > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
    - CPLX 7y ago
      > Tall buildings are inherently communal. Cool so stop building them. You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK. For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    You're not solving the problem. There is no shortage of space for the future 11 billion humans. The big problem is the centralization of companies within few top tier cities without a corresponding increase in housing for the (locally) growing population.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  It's easier to colonize Mars. No planning board.

tmh79 7y ago

"We can't go on like this." There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.

esotericn 7y ago
Mmm. I live in the UK. London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really. Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance. We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.

jdavis703 7y ago

A huge amount of US crop land is dedicated to livestock feed. I'm usually skeptical of market based solutions, but an omnivorous diet will probably become a luxury (middle-class people will have a generally herbivorous diet, with occasional meat for special occasions) before factory farming becomes the only way to feed the masses. Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

swsieber 7y ago

Don't worry, we're not. Human population growth is slowing down at a remarkable rate.

sien 7y ago

Look at this map of total fertility : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/media/File:2013_Fertility_per_woman_world_map.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med... If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement. There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates. Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers. There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline