4 ms·

I'm absolutely certain that the Earth has space for a finite number of humans. I don't want to live in a pod and eat a protein slurry of crushed bugs. Note also

by Asooka 7y ago

I'm absolutely certain that the Earth has space for a finite number of humans. I don't want to live in a pod and eat a protein slurry of crushed bugs. Note also that human population was more or less flat for a long time of our existence - explosive growth happened over the last 200 or so years. That has been long enough that we structured our economy around it, but it's coming to an end. The free lunch can't last forever. Quite similar to the end of Moore's law and for much the same reason - people don't want to be packed too close together and transistors can't really get much smaller. I see it as more of a return to a norm than some catastrophic event. With proper sustainable resource usage humanity, should last on Earth until the Sun kills us. Which is a sort of tautological statement if you think about it - if our resource usage is not sustainable, our population will shrink eventually to the point where it is.

loeg 7y ago
Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? We're not remotely close to human population maximum density and this "pods and bugs" dystopia you envision.
- magduf 7y ago
  >Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? Have you ever been to those places? There's a severe limit to the amount of freshwater available in those places, and the weather is pretty lousy in many parts. Not many people want to live in a place where the summer temperatures are over 110F, or where the winter temperatures are around -40. There's lots of unused space on this planet, sure. Antarctica is the prime example of this: an entire continent with almost no humans living there. Would you like to live there? And finally, and time humans build and live on land that's in a nice, temperate location, that means there's that much land that's now unavailable for agriculture. We can't grow food in Antarctica.

by Asooka 7y ago

loeg 7y ago

Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? We're not remotely close to human population maximum density and this "pods and bugs" dystopia you envision.

magduf 7y ago
>Do you know how much empty space there is in the western US? Not to mention the midwest? Have you ever been to those places? There's a severe limit to the amount of freshwater available in those places, and the weather is pretty lousy in many parts. Not many people want to live in a place where the summer temperatures are over 110F, or where the winter temperatures are around -40. There's lots of unused space on this planet, sure. Antarctica is the prime example of this: an entire continent with almost no humans living there. Would you like to live there? And finally, and time humans build and live on land that's in a nice, temperate location, that means there's that much land that's now unavailable for agriculture. We can't grow food in Antarctica.