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You don't seem to be considering that each one of those additional people is a mouth to feed, agricultural land to farm, a house, car and iPhones for them, some

You don't seem to be considering that each one of those additional people is a mouth to feed, agricultural land to farm, a house, car and iPhones for them, some number of tonnes of carbon and other lifetime emissions. The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. Given we have most of the world in need of developing to reach the levels we enjoy, I suspect we are far past that capacity already -- though I am unlikely to live to see the consequences of that. We've used the world's most fertile land already. We've had the fossil fuel fertiliser dividend. Do we continue to grow and pretend growth is normal and necessary until we absolutely need another agriculture miracle? Or do we try and construct a future where everyone has a chance of abundance? Even claiming innovation is partly a function of population size is far too simplistic - we've had periods where small countries were punching orders of magnitude above their population weight. There'll be little innovation if the food supply breaks.

nickles 7y ago
> The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. Given we have most of the world in need of developing to reach the levels we enjoy, I suspect we are far past that capacity already This argument has been made for hundreds of years, and for hundreds of years it's failed to pan out. Perhaps this time is different though. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." - Thomas Malthus (1798)
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Malthus was a while ago - what leads you to believe the planet now has an infinite capacity for humans?
  - nickles 7y ago
    I should clarify I was responding to your assertion that the earth is far past capacity. ~10% of Earth’s land is occupied by humans. Not all of that is arable, but humans have successfully terraformed throughout history and conceivably will become more capable with technological advances. Malthus is not unique in his prognostications. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) was more recent and predicted mass famine by the 1970s. Instead, we produce a massive surplus of food each year, although it’s not distributed adequately at present. This happened well after the Haber process (presumably the fossil fuel dividend you refer to) and occurred as a result of improved farming techniques, equipment, and crops. Thanks to technological developments in the fossil fuels sector (fracking, horizontal drilling, etc.), fears about running out of oil have largely subsided. Simultaneously, advances in renewable energy sources are rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Already, some electric grids are struggling with capacity — not because of a shortage of energy, rather due to an excess of electricity produced by renewable sources. Although none of this points to an Earth beyond its carrying capacity, it also does not factor in further efficiency gains resulting from future technological progress. At the same time, we are attempting to develop the technology necessary to access extraterrestrial resources. Given that, even the finite resources available on Earth are not necessarily a limiting factor to growth.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Call it half of land area, not 10%. Of total land area circa 10% is developed, 10% arable and a shade over 25% permanent pasture for livestock[1], and a few other minor agricultural uses. Of the rest we have forests, permafrost, deserts, mountains, marsh, scrub and other marginal land. The best crop and pasture land is long gone. What's left with potential appear to be the places we need to not lose - rainforests and such. God help everyone if we are able or need to start farming former permafrost. Changing farming through mechanisation, artificial fertiliser and de-population of agriculture has been a steady march since WW2 (mostly). All leveraged on fossil fuel, and mostly a one-time dividend. Past capacity as the rest close the development gap (you can't just miss that out), based on all resource use, and associated pollution - environmental overshoot - not mere calories. Not just a baseless assertion as we are assessed to be 70% beyond the ecosystem's capacity to absorb[2] right now. We've been beyond it for years. We're on borrowed time even without more development. Overshoot day[3] has gained a fair bit of publicity in recent years, but there's plenty of different measures all pointing to the same trends and issues. With that level of accelerating overshoot, the planet can barely cope - the list of global scale and population related issues is huge. Yet coming en masse as a "surprise" is mostly to be expected given the growth curve. So there seems precious little headroom left, even if we do miraculously work to achieve zero carbon by 2050. Not expecting us to get anywhere near it any more though. Pretending population is just fine, or "growth is vital" as TFA claims is, whilst the globe does almost naff all to become sustainable is, frankly, nuts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Ecological_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Ecological_f... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
      - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
        Thank you. A lot of what you have said resonates and you have made your points eloquently and patiently.
baybal2 7y ago
> The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. And we are nowhere near reaching it. Increase in economic output with population increase is what matters. If you have people who can't earn a living and die from hunger, it's bad. If you have people who can cook porridge out of an axe, that's good. Loonie idle intellectuals from places like Club of Rome are first to point "let's sterilise Asians," like as if they don't see that Western material consumption was bigger than that of all "dreaded Chindonesia" combined. Remember, those loonie first dreamed of those Malthusian horrors long before even agriculture in the West was doing well, and their prime imperative was to plainly get more resources for themselves. I do not doubt that when we will hit the feared "Malthusian runaway" at 40B-50B people, planet's economic output would be so great that people would have hard time imagining how nutrient scarcity ever been a thing, and we will be able to "simply throw more petawatt-hours" at the problem.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  > And we are nowhere near reaching it Evidence for that? There's a fair selection of serious planetary scale human impacts right now - food chains, species loss, plastics, and I haven't even mentioned climate yet. I haven't heard of any of the Club of Rome calling for sterilisation of Asians either - neither have the search engines. So that seems baseless hyperbole.
  - XorNot 7y ago
    There's a substantial difference between the carrying capacity of the planet and specific problems related to resource mismanagement. The idea climate change wouldn't be an issue with "less people" is absurd. "less people" don't suddenly create viable electric cars and fusion power.
    - khuey 7y ago
      Why is that absurd? Unless you believe for some reason that there's no safe level of CO2 emissions?
      - 7y ago
noonespecial 7y ago
>The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. It's a hard jump, but there's not just the one.
- foobar1962 7y ago
  We could all be dead, or society be reduced to medieval levels where the technology to leave our gravity well no longer exists.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Not even sure if that's about space or about heaven. Same baseless belief in salvation to me.
- jbay808 7y ago
  Yes, granted, but there's not an unlimited number of planets out there either. Have you heard the puzzle about the bacteria colony that doubles its area in the agar tray every night? On day 10, it occupies half the area. How long before it occupies the whole tray? One more day. You can add another agar tray or ten or a thousand, but it doesn't buy you that much time. At a constant growth rate, if the solution eventually involves spreading to multiple planets, it's just a few more centuries before we're running low on planets, almost regardless of the size of the galaxy.
  - mensetmanusman 7y ago
    It’s unlimited on any practical timescale an individual should reasonably care about.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  We aren't going to be shipping billions of people off to Mars. We'll send some small number and they'll reproduce over there. Having a backup will be great, but it does nothing to address the population that's already here.

nickles 7y ago

> The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. Given we have most of the world in need of developing to reach the levels we enjoy, I suspect we are far past that capacity already This argument has been made for hundreds of years, and for hundreds of years it's failed to pan out. Perhaps this time is different though. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." - Thomas Malthus (1798)

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Malthus was a while ago - what leads you to believe the planet now has an infinite capacity for humans?
- nickles 7y ago
  I should clarify I was responding to your assertion that the earth is far past capacity. ~10% of Earth’s land is occupied by humans. Not all of that is arable, but humans have successfully terraformed throughout history and conceivably will become more capable with technological advances. Malthus is not unique in his prognostications. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) was more recent and predicted mass famine by the 1970s. Instead, we produce a massive surplus of food each year, although it’s not distributed adequately at present. This happened well after the Haber process (presumably the fossil fuel dividend you refer to) and occurred as a result of improved farming techniques, equipment, and crops. Thanks to technological developments in the fossil fuels sector (fracking, horizontal drilling, etc.), fears about running out of oil have largely subsided. Simultaneously, advances in renewable energy sources are rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Already, some electric grids are struggling with capacity — not because of a shortage of energy, rather due to an excess of electricity produced by renewable sources. Although none of this points to an Earth beyond its carrying capacity, it also does not factor in further efficiency gains resulting from future technological progress. At the same time, we are attempting to develop the technology necessary to access extraterrestrial resources. Given that, even the finite resources available on Earth are not necessarily a limiting factor to growth.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Call it half of land area, not 10%. Of total land area circa 10% is developed, 10% arable and a shade over 25% permanent pasture for livestock[1], and a few other minor agricultural uses. Of the rest we have forests, permafrost, deserts, mountains, marsh, scrub and other marginal land. The best crop and pasture land is long gone. What's left with potential appear to be the places we need to not lose - rainforests and such. God help everyone if we are able or need to start farming former permafrost. Changing farming through mechanisation, artificial fertiliser and de-population of agriculture has been a steady march since WW2 (mostly). All leveraged on fossil fuel, and mostly a one-time dividend. Past capacity as the rest close the development gap (you can't just miss that out), based on all resource use, and associated pollution - environmental overshoot - not mere calories. Not just a baseless assertion as we are assessed to be 70% beyond the ecosystem's capacity to absorb[2] right now. We've been beyond it for years. We're on borrowed time even without more development. Overshoot day[3] has gained a fair bit of publicity in recent years, but there's plenty of different measures all pointing to the same trends and issues. With that level of accelerating overshoot, the planet can barely cope - the list of global scale and population related issues is huge. Yet coming en masse as a "surprise" is mostly to be expected given the growth curve. So there seems precious little headroom left, even if we do miraculously work to achieve zero carbon by 2050. Not expecting us to get anywhere near it any more though. Pretending population is just fine, or "growth is vital" as TFA claims is, whilst the globe does almost naff all to become sustainable is, frankly, nuts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Ecological_footprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Ecological_f... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      Thank you. A lot of what you have said resonates and you have made your points eloquently and patiently.

baybal2 7y ago

> The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. And we are nowhere near reaching it. Increase in economic output with population increase is what matters. If you have people who can't earn a living and die from hunger, it's bad. If you have people who can cook porridge out of an axe, that's good. Loonie idle intellectuals from places like Club of Rome are first to point "let's sterilise Asians," like as if they don't see that Western material consumption was bigger than that of all "dreaded Chindonesia" combined. Remember, those loonie first dreamed of those Malthusian horrors long before even agriculture in the West was doing well, and their prime imperative was to plainly get more resources for themselves. I do not doubt that when we will hit the feared "Malthusian runaway" at 40B-50B people, planet's economic output would be so great that people would have hard time imagining how nutrient scarcity ever been a thing, and we will be able to "simply throw more petawatt-hours" at the problem.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
> And we are nowhere near reaching it Evidence for that? There's a fair selection of serious planetary scale human impacts right now - food chains, species loss, plastics, and I haven't even mentioned climate yet. I haven't heard of any of the Club of Rome calling for sterilisation of Asians either - neither have the search engines. So that seems baseless hyperbole.
- XorNot 7y ago
  There's a substantial difference between the carrying capacity of the planet and specific problems related to resource mismanagement. The idea climate change wouldn't be an issue with "less people" is absurd. "less people" don't suddenly create viable electric cars and fusion power.
  - khuey 7y ago
    Why is that absurd? Unless you believe for some reason that there's no safe level of CO2 emissions?
    - 7y ago

noonespecial 7y ago

>The planet and its resources has a finite carrying capacity. It's a hard jump, but there's not just the one.

foobar1962 7y ago
We could all be dead, or society be reduced to medieval levels where the technology to leave our gravity well no longer exists.
usrusr 7y ago
Not even sure if that's about space or about heaven. Same baseless belief in salvation to me.
jbay808 7y ago
Yes, granted, but there's not an unlimited number of planets out there either. Have you heard the puzzle about the bacteria colony that doubles its area in the agar tray every night? On day 10, it occupies half the area. How long before it occupies the whole tray? One more day. You can add another agar tray or ten or a thousand, but it doesn't buy you that much time. At a constant growth rate, if the solution eventually involves spreading to multiple planets, it's just a few more centuries before we're running low on planets, almost regardless of the size of the galaxy.
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  It’s unlimited on any practical timescale an individual should reasonably care about.
homonculus1 7y ago
We aren't going to be shipping billions of people off to Mars. We'll send some small number and they'll reproduce over there. Having a backup will be great, but it does nothing to address the population that's already here.