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In theory this will suck for you because the entire society is structured so that younger people support the old and reducing the number of people who have to s

In theory this will suck for you because the entire society is structured so that younger people support the old and reducing the number of people who have to support you is a terrible thing, especially if we continue to rise life expectancy (although suicide/accidents/drugs are doing a fine job at countering this in aggregate). But there is no telling how things will pan out with economy in the future, to what extent will automation increase productivity, etc. Also if the anti-aging research comes through the productive age of individuals could be extended along with longer lifespan. Whatever happens the environment argument is ridiculous, environment has always been unstable, life on earth has been hit by major cataclysmic events throughout the history - the only difference is that historically we couldn't do anything about it - which is changing significantly with technological development. If we don't start decoupling our survival odds from the environmental factors we are going to suffer as a society irregardless of what we do to environment.

neutronicus 6y ago
Figuring out how to structure society in a way that doesn't require the young to outnumber the old is a band-aid the species will have to rip off eventually.
throwaway5752 6y ago
"environment argument is ridiculous" It isn't. The environment isn't unstable right now, it has relatively stable rate of change, and it's predictable. It's just getting worse for our survival as a population. We are using carbon based energy sources too quickly for the environment to follow the natural cycle to sequester it, and as a result we won't be able to feed the existing number of humans. We cannot decouple survival odds from environmental factors. You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  >You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations. On the timescale of declining birth rates affecting this - this is probably the simplest problem to solve - we have multiple ways reduce environmental impacts on food production with different levels of innovation/change required - from engineering resilient crops and using the same approach as we do now, over vertical farming in controlled environments (still producing the same food but with low surface requirement and isolation from environmental effects), all the way to producing essential nutrients from simple organisms large scale (eg. algae) (here we need to figure out a lot more about nutrition to provide reasonable healthy substitutes over complex food) - this is a matter of economics, scaling, research - not trivial but clearly possible. Building cities able to withstand large scale environmental disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis, temperature control, isolation from air pollutants (eg. radioactive waste in the air), imposing strict bounds on entering/leaving to prevent viruses/bacteria from spreading (through humans and animals) - these are the kinds of things we will need to be able to do in the future - otherwise the next COVID, avian flue, Fukushima or global warming is going to leave us in a shit situation without any way of responding - we will be left in the same shit situation we are now - forced to hide and hope it goes away.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    The single biggest problem is consumption of resources that are altering the parameters of nature such that they will be less hospitable to human life. At its base, almost all consumption requires fossil fuel due to its unbeatable properties of energy density, storage, versatility, ease of use, and cheap cost. I don’t see how any idea which increases consumption (such as building cities and farms and whatever can help mitigate the more immediate problem of carbon emissions and other fossil fuel related pollution. Only solution I can see is reduction in consumption per capita (mainly in developed countries), and accompanying that is reduction of ”capita”s Aka reduction in population .
    - rubber_duck 6y ago
      That argument is assuming nature is hospitable to human life by default and if we stop doing what we're doing everything will be fine... Droughts can still cause famine and starvation in many parts of the world. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, vulcano eruptions, forest fires, localised disease (like lime disease) etc. all part of the natural disasters happening without human intervention. These are the small scale common occurrences that we still really don't have good ways of dealing with. A lot of these are exacerbated by climate change - which is already in motion and there is very little proof that we can predict what will happen accurately, so even if we cut green house gas emissions to 0 - and that's not a realistic scenario - we're still going to have to deal with the consequences. Then there are global outlier events that can be extinction level - meteor impact, deadly virus strains crossing from animals to humans and spread by animals (eg. bird flu - we're covering from COVID with IFR of sub 1% which is largely targeting old people past average age of death - bird flue IFR was close to 50% and spread by birds which aren't so easy to contain - imagine if the transmission was easier). Again 0 human intervention required, have historical precedent, just not frequent enough to worry about when you have more pressing issues. In any realistic scenario we will be living in a world were local actions can have global impact - nuclear disaster can spread radiation between continents, virus originating in one place can spread globally and we have no containment units, climate change is going to make the weather more volatile and many natural disasters are going to become more frequent and it can destroy currently hospitable areas, etc. Nature is not great by default, and we're already on a path that will make it less hospitable - the only realistic long term solution I see is learning to live in that environment.
iandanforth 6y ago
To your first point. I think contraction economics (the study of economics under declining populations) would be a great area to enter right about now.

neutronicus 6y ago

Figuring out how to structure society in a way that doesn't require the young to outnumber the old is a band-aid the species will have to rip off eventually.

throwaway5752 6y ago

"environment argument is ridiculous" It isn't. The environment isn't unstable right now, it has relatively stable rate of change, and it's predictable. It's just getting worse for our survival as a population. We are using carbon based energy sources too quickly for the environment to follow the natural cycle to sequester it, and as a result we won't be able to feed the existing number of humans. We cannot decouple survival odds from environmental factors. You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations.

rubber_duck 6y ago
>You show a lack of understanding of how food is made to think that is possible at current populations. On the timescale of declining birth rates affecting this - this is probably the simplest problem to solve - we have multiple ways reduce environmental impacts on food production with different levels of innovation/change required - from engineering resilient crops and using the same approach as we do now, over vertical farming in controlled environments (still producing the same food but with low surface requirement and isolation from environmental effects), all the way to producing essential nutrients from simple organisms large scale (eg. algae) (here we need to figure out a lot more about nutrition to provide reasonable healthy substitutes over complex food) - this is a matter of economics, scaling, research - not trivial but clearly possible. Building cities able to withstand large scale environmental disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis, temperature control, isolation from air pollutants (eg. radioactive waste in the air), imposing strict bounds on entering/leaving to prevent viruses/bacteria from spreading (through humans and animals) - these are the kinds of things we will need to be able to do in the future - otherwise the next COVID, avian flue, Fukushima or global warming is going to leave us in a shit situation without any way of responding - we will be left in the same shit situation we are now - forced to hide and hope it goes away.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  The single biggest problem is consumption of resources that are altering the parameters of nature such that they will be less hospitable to human life. At its base, almost all consumption requires fossil fuel due to its unbeatable properties of energy density, storage, versatility, ease of use, and cheap cost. I don’t see how any idea which increases consumption (such as building cities and farms and whatever can help mitigate the more immediate problem of carbon emissions and other fossil fuel related pollution. Only solution I can see is reduction in consumption per capita (mainly in developed countries), and accompanying that is reduction of ”capita”s Aka reduction in population .
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    That argument is assuming nature is hospitable to human life by default and if we stop doing what we're doing everything will be fine... Droughts can still cause famine and starvation in many parts of the world. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, vulcano eruptions, forest fires, localised disease (like lime disease) etc. all part of the natural disasters happening without human intervention. These are the small scale common occurrences that we still really don't have good ways of dealing with. A lot of these are exacerbated by climate change - which is already in motion and there is very little proof that we can predict what will happen accurately, so even if we cut green house gas emissions to 0 - and that's not a realistic scenario - we're still going to have to deal with the consequences. Then there are global outlier events that can be extinction level - meteor impact, deadly virus strains crossing from animals to humans and spread by animals (eg. bird flu - we're covering from COVID with IFR of sub 1% which is largely targeting old people past average age of death - bird flue IFR was close to 50% and spread by birds which aren't so easy to contain - imagine if the transmission was easier). Again 0 human intervention required, have historical precedent, just not frequent enough to worry about when you have more pressing issues. In any realistic scenario we will be living in a world were local actions can have global impact - nuclear disaster can spread radiation between continents, virus originating in one place can spread globally and we have no containment units, climate change is going to make the weather more volatile and many natural disasters are going to become more frequent and it can destroy currently hospitable areas, etc. Nature is not great by default, and we're already on a path that will make it less hospitable - the only realistic long term solution I see is learning to live in that environment.

iandanforth 6y ago

To your first point. I think contraction economics (the study of economics under declining populations) would be a great area to enter right about now.