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This is why we need less humans on this planet. No one says that, because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagin
by mmaunder 6y ago
This is why we need less humans on this planet. No one says that, because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway.
- gonzo41 6y agoSo you're taking steps and not having children then?
- frequentnapper 6y agoAd hominem - tool of the mentally weak.
- whatshisface 6y agoThe irony of your comment is not lost on me. ;)
- frequentnapper 6y agoI'm just speaking in general terms of course :p
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mmaunder 6y agoCorrect. I’m 46 years old, healthy, fertile, heterosexual and I don’t have any kids. How about you?
- seibelj 6y agoI'm doing what my ancestors did, from 3.75 billion years ago until now - reproduce!
- happppy 6y agoyup, reproduce because earth belongs to you and only you. We are just visiting here, will go back to our places.
- mmaunder 6y agoAnd there it is. A sudden torrent of downvotes. Dropped from 4 to zero in seconds. Like is said, having kids is considered a basic human right. We’re so arrogant, yet so basic as a species.
- aSplash0fDerp 6y agoYeah. Some folks need to grow another mouth to tell themselves what they wanna hear. Not being status quo is probably a bit too much for them. The exchange of opinions concept does work well for most though.
- alehander42 6y agoisn't this is a very simplistic view on having children? There are much more obvious reasons to have some. also, .. most of use have enough mouths to tell them what they wanna hear, including you and me and our supposed echo chambers all over the internet (yes, having children is egoistical and naive! you're right aSplash0fDerp man! .. yes, we will overcome those problems, children are our duty, you're right alehander42 ! )
- aSplash0fDerp 6y agoWhy some people want a trophy for ejaculating in a vagina, I will never know. With the popularity of brainwashing and groupthink, talking out of someone elses butt should be considered an evolution of ventriloquism. Its a neat trick if you don`t get out much.
- alehander42 6y agohaving a child might be more meaningful than the whole world, I love you, mate!
- aSplash0fDerp 6y agoI'm in the states, but using your "mate" reference as a cue... I'm currently looking at Austrailia to settle down and raise a family. I think the opportunity to find a young lady with natural resilience is much higher in AU. Using Mick Jagger as an example, we can populate the planet well into our 70's, so unless you age like a fried turd, there is no hurry.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ohyeshedid 6y agoYou not having children to help slow population growth is like buying two powerball tickets to increase your chance of winning the jackpot.
- nitrogen 6y agoA case can also be made that those who want the least children for sustainability reasons should try to have more children who grow up to make a compounding difference in the future.
- torwayburger 6y agoNo evidence supports this.
- mmaunder 6y agoSo it’s ok to have 10 kids because they’ll be smarter than you are and make the right choice? So 10 to the power of how many generations would that be exactly?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- torwayburger 6y agoAye. I think you wrote that question with salty intent, but you're getting real answers. Hope that frames the thinking behind it for ya.
- dragosmocrii 6y agoSee my comment one level up. If you're having 2 children, you're already helping. If no one's having kids at all then we'd go extinct lol
- searchableguy 6y agoIs it bad though? If there are no us, there is no one who cares about our existence. There is no sense of losing something if something doesn't exist.
- dragosmocrii 6y agoHaving 2 children to replace the parents is already enough to drive population down longterm (because statistically, there could be a lot of reasons that those kids might not reach a time to have their own offsprings).
- xeromal 6y agoYeah, equilibrium is 2.4 kids right?
- baddox 6y agoThere’s a very real chance that strategy would significantly increase the likelihood of human extinction in the medium to distant future. We need minds to solve problems. Of course, that’s not to say that it’s impossible to have too many people, or even that decreasing the likelihood of human extinction is necessarily one of the most important goals.
- torwayburger 6y agoSure - could it equally be argued that minds created the problems we need minds to solve? Seems circular.
- rxhernandez 6y agoNo, not equally argued. We didn't put asteroids into motion that can destroy the earth's ability to sustain human life. I'm sure you could infinitely fill a list of things we have no control over that could make humans extinct.
- torwayburger 6y agoAgreed. Those are non human events. I was literally referring to all the human activity that could end in extinction, though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- baddox 6y agoForced stagnation might be able to effectively eliminate human-caused extinction, but you still have to worry about the external extinction events (like changes in solar output, or asteroids, or supernovae). But without stagnation, yes, you have the human-caused problems to worry about, but you also have people working to solve those problems, as well as people working to solve the external problems.
- PeterStuer 6y ago
- dleslie 6y agoSadly, at this point it does seem like in order to significantly curb emissions it will take a catastrophy of biblical proportions which wipes out much of humanity. That, or an endless succession of airborne diseases that keeps the population isolating itself .
- whatshisface 6y agoWhatever genes make it possible for you to say that, even if they are as strongly selected for as the ability to write, are going to go away...
- eesmith 6y agoCan you point to the studies which suggest that the ability to write is a strongly selected genetic ability? Because that doesn't seem right to me. It's only been a few generations since we've had mass literacy. Genghis Khan and Francisco Pizarro are the few two very famous people I could think of who were illiterate a few hundred years ago. Even 100 years ago, I've read about successful businessmen who couldn't read. Historically of course, the rich and powerful would hire scribes to do the reading and writing for them. When I read "strongly selected" I expect something like lactase persistence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Genetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Genetics , where there the genetic correlations, down even to the allele level, have been identified. EDIT: I just remember. The Cherokee language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language turned a completely illiterate culture into one with more per capita readers than the recently introduced English culture. That's seems like a clear indication that there's no need for evolutionary selection specifically for literacy.
- whatshisface 6y ago>Can you point to the studies which suggest that the ability to write is a strongly selected genetic ability? You're confusing phenotype and genotype. The genes for the ability to write include the ones for the citric acid cycle, which I think we can all agree is selected for. Nobody knows what mutations would be necessary to stop antinatalism from catching on, but natural selection will probably be able to find them. If the answer was "humans are now too dumb to talk about antinatalism," then that would happen, although something else could happen as well. (Maybe "humans now love kids way more than previous generations thought possible.") >I just remember. The Cherokee language turned a completely illiterate culture into one with more per capita readers than the recently introduced English culture. Yeah, so obviously whatever genes give people the ability to write, from the citric acid cycle to the mysterious neurological stuff, are selected for strongly enough to be fixed in a population that was separated for a long time. You're not really disagreeing with me... I'm saying that "writing genes" are selected for, potentially because of benefits unrelated to writing, and you're saying that the behavior of writing isn't selected for. Those two statements do not contradict.
- Trasmatta 6y ago> No one says that Hmm, I feel like lots of people say that, because overpopulation has been a large topic of discussion and concern for like 40 years. 10% seems pretty extreme, though.
- hoorayimhelping 6y ago>No one says that Why do people who say we need fewer humans on the planet always say, "no one says this?" Literally every discussion about population, pollution, global warming, fusion, farming, or social sciences has some thread where someone says, "there are too many people and no one is talking about it." It's getting tiring reading this martyrdom, and I generally tend to agree with the viewpoint. But this is not some edgy take. The most populous country on earth enacted policies that seem to support this idea in the 70s.
- nindalf 6y agoFolks love to think they’re more controversial and brave than they actually are. Feels good to think you’re a firebrand who’s not afraid to “tell it like it is”, even though no one agrees with you. Some might even call it a “Thiel Truth”.
- coolspot 6y agoLooking at the number of angry responses to the parent comment, it looks like it is still edgy to say that.
- naringas 6y agoWhy 10%? Why not 5%? or 25%? Also, how would you chose who gets to stay? In any case I find it quite hard to justify a reduction of population based on being able to have better sights
- dragosmocrii 6y agoIthink the ratio was chosen randomly, and is not important. What's important is to get the population number down in the longterm. Or, in other words, make sure that longterm the population doesn't grow beyond control. If you're having 2 kids in your lifetime, you're helping to drive the population down. Having at most2 kids is fair, don't! ou think?
- brtkdotse 6y agoUp until less than a hundred years ago the only way to make sure any of your kids survived was to have seven or eight of them. This has change dramatically in the developed countries and is on the way every else as well as standards of living increase. Child births need to be at around 2.1 per woman if the population is to remain constant. Right now most developed countries are way below that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...
- flexie 6y agoAnd many underdeveloped too: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/356.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... 2 countries have less than 1 kid per woman 114 countries have less than 2 62 countries have less than 3 (20 of which are at less than 2.2) 21 countries have less than 4 18 countries have less than 5 11 countries have less than 6 Of the largest 6 (half the world's population): China has 1.6, India 2.3, US 1.8, Indonesia 2.0, Pakistan 3.6, Brazil 1.7.
- seanwilson 6y agoIf you view 7.5 billion humans as being too many people, what are your views on the 70 billion farm animals we have?
- trhway 6y agoisn't the 70B of farm animals just a part of the "7.5B humans" problem? Anyway, i think that it is a crying shame that we're still farming animals instead of growing artificial meat. Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings, i think that would result in a great leap in our conscience, empathy, etc. - it will unleash a great deal of human mental development with natural results in social and economic development.
- seanwilson 6y agoWe're consuming much more than we used to: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production "The world now produces more than four times the quantity of meat as it did fifty years ago" "The average person in the world consumed around 43 kilograms of meat in 2014. This ranges from over 100kg in the US and Australia to only 5kg in India." "Meat consumption increases as the world is getting richer." When the earth has finite resources, why not reduce the amount of resources used per person before talking about population control? Even with less people, you have to draw a limit somewhere on resource usage. > Anyway, i think that it is a crying shame that we're still farming animals instead of growing artificial meat. Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings, i think that would result in a great leap in our conscience, empathy, etc. - it will unleash a great deal of human mental development with natural results in social and economic development. Are there any realistic timelines on when lab grown meat will be available and affordable? How about lab grown steaks, whole ducks and whole salmon? At what stage do you think people who won't switch to alternatives now would switch?
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoI suspect the alternatives will never be compelling to the masses (in, say, the US). To move the dial here, the price needs to reflect the cost.
- akira2501 6y ago> But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. I can't imagine maintaining that in anything other than a brutal and arbitrary way. It's very difficult to separate humans from their humanity, and even in countries where birth limits have been tried, we know that it is an ineffective policy and is ultimately cruel. > Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway. Just take your ideas one step further. Earth is not a home for humans, it is a crucible that seeks to find the most suitable form of life. There's no reason we should expect to succeed, and if we can't, half-measures that only prolong suffering and the failure of our biology are illogical.
- thret 6y agoNot at all, just increase tax per child per household. 0-2 children at a normal rate, and increasing per extra child.
- Thiez 6y agoSo if your first pregnancy is triplets you're fucked?
- icebraining 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_birth#Selective_reduction_(procedure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_birth#Selective_reduc...
- klmadfejno 6y agoAh, great, just be rich. Or be poor and don't register your kids anywhere. Let's not either forget single moms, missing dads, widows, disabled kids, not hitting replacement levels, etc. A growing population leads to numerous economic, militaristic, and scientific advantages. Why would any country willingly shackle themselves to their detriment
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoWe’re going to have a brutal and arbitrary reduction of our population no matter what. It is surely already too late for birth reduction to be the instrument. Ecological collapse is upon us.
- tozeur 6y agoThanos is that you?
- vnchr 6y agoI’m not sure how to interpret your directive (“we need less humans...” “10% of our current population”) without deep disgust. Your critique of others’ presumption of rights as humans clashes with your ideal where 90% of humans lack even the right to live. Most appalling is that this world view might be treated as anything less than macabre.
- kruczek 6y agoI see no macabre at all in these statements. I don't think anyone was talking about taking away the right to live from 90% of population. It is enough to limit number of children born and population will naturally decrease.
- ohyeshedid 6y agoBirth rates, at least in the US, have been on the decline without needing to enact laws limiting reproduction. I'm curious what the people suggesting such thought about it when China did it.
- knolax 6y agoAfter you.
- axaxs 6y agoFewer humans is a cop out. We need humans who won't pollute the earth to death. We need borderline Authoritarianism that protects the environment. 90 or so percent of humans just want to survive. If society tells them they need a carbon emitting vehicle to survive, they do that. Humans aren't the problem, our society is.
- icebraining 6y agoAll vehicles are carbon emitting, some just less than others. The question is whether efficiency is enough to maintain a reasonable quality of life for 10 billion people with zero net carbon (and other pollution). If the price is authoritarianism, I'd rather avoid having children, thanks.
- ponker 6y agoAre you volunteering to go first?
- kenneth 6y agoYou don't need genocide to reduce population, just birth rate policies. Most developed nations already have declining native populations (sometimes the overall population grows only through immigration). China had a one-child policy for a while. I think the world would be much better if other countries would restrict the reproduction of humans in a sensible way. Only those who can afford to bring up children with a minimum quality of life should be allowed to.
- ohyeshedid 6y agoLaws don't prevent crime. So, then, are you advocating for forced abortions or forced birth control? What would the penalties be for reproducing without approval?
- kenneth 6y agoThat's a solved problem. It worked in China without forced sterilizations. Just like how we have laws against theft… doesn't mean theft won't exist, but the law and appropriate punishment does reduce it to manageable levels.
- ohyeshedid 6y agoThat's what they did.[1] Also, you didn't answer my question about punishment. [1] https://nypost.com/2016/01/03/how-chinas-pregnancy-police-brutally-enforced-the-one-child-policy/ https://nypost.com/2016/01/03/how-chinas-pregnancy-police-br...
- dang 6y agoWould you please not start posting flamebait like this (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23255098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23255098) to HN again, so we don't have to keep banning you? Your other comments with this account seem great.
- newyankee 6y agoI can definitely say that the statement 'Have as many kids as you want' is not considered a basic human right in a resource constrained place in India where a lot of discussions among educated public was the ill effects of population and the competition for scarce resources it generates. It is a privileged first world view where education, development and high standard of living led to falling birth rates. On a second level it is to do with religious ideologies like Catholicism, Mormonism and Islam where even educated people have 3+ kids many times. Also it was a norm in societies with high infant mortality rate and lack of education (Africa, India of the 50s to 80s etc.) I feel a replacement level fertility of 2 kids should be the norm personally and Govt should never provide any future assistance like UBI to people with more kids. Any ways this assumes that the world resources (land, water, minerals, technology ) are divided fairly in the population. This is definitely not true and the people who managed to conquered distant lands have much more of this available per person. Simply compare per capita stats of Canada v Bangladesh and the answer becomes clear.
- tarkin2 6y agoHumans emit different levels of pollution. Your rich cheap-airline flying, consumerist car owner will emit far more than many families in the developing world.
- hoseja 6y agoAnd neither will even approach within several orders of magnitude of Chinese shipping and factories.
- tarkin2 6y agoWho supplies the demand for the shipping and manufacture?
- onion2k 6y agoTo be fair, mmaunder didn't say which 10% he thinks should be allowed to live. He may be in favour of eliminating the rich cheap-airline flying, consumerist car owners first.
- tarkin2 6y ago"Because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right" The birth rate is falling in the West. Seems thinly veiled to me!
- icebraining 6y agoThe birth rate is falling everywhere: https://www.populationconnection.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Trends_in_TFR_1950-2050.png https://www.populationconnection.org/wp-content/uploads/2018...
- nikanj 6y agoWhich ones of your friends and family members should be culled? You get to keep 10%. Usually this argument boils down to "everyone I know and like should still be allowed to live, but we should totally get rid of billions of anonymous (poor) people"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cco 6y agoThis is pretty bad faith. It is very unlikely that you're responding to Hitler, of course no one is suggesting we murder 90% of the world's population, that is unspeakably evil. But, with magic, imagine we had every technology we have now but with only 10% of the world's population. It _would_ be incredible, you could fly all over the world to your heart's content, your neighbor could buy a big diesel truck, and your friend could all the sushi they could ever want, and the world wouldn't notice. There would be immense open spaces, untouched, able to be enjoyed and the permanent residents, the plants and animals, wouldn't be perturbed. That sounds pretty appealing to me, maybe it doesn't to you, but that is what someone is talking about, they aren't gleefully suggesting genocide. Now, how would we get there without magic? If I were king the first thing on my list would be educating children, specifically educated girls have many fewer and later children. Other things that drive birth rates down? Increasing quality of life, access to healthcare, and a strong social safety net, none of those things smells like bad things. I hope the next time someone suggests that you assume they mean doing those things over murder.
- ohyeshedid 6y ago>Increasing quality of life, access to healthcare, and a strong social safety net... I would wager that would increase the amount of people having children.
- cco 6y agoIt actually trends down, likely because children have historically been used as a retirement plan of sorts, and of course you'd never be sure how many of your ten made it to adulthood. Financially comfortable and well educated families tend to have less children, this is a pattern that has been repeated many times across country and cultural borders.
- lostlogin 6y agoWe have just shown we can do it with our current population. It hasn’t been done in a sustainable manner, but it’s a decent start.
- akg_67 6y agoNature will take care of itself in the long run. It is adopting to reality and designing vehicles (ex: virus) that is getting closer and closer to optimal level of lethality to humans and it’s own survivability. Cold/flu viruses were not lethal enough anymore, Ebola was too lethal, SARS/MERS were with little more lethality, SARS2 with little more own survivability (likely, still to be known).
- onion2k 6y agoUnless you're advocating some sort of genocidal cull of the population, which would be quite extreme, population reduction isn't going to work fast enough to solve the climate problem. Even if you could globally enforce that every couple could only have one child it would take 6 or 7 generations to reduce the population to ~10%. We don't have the 100+ years that would take. It needs fixing now.
- lorthemar 6y agoI don't think that would fix the issue. The majority of the pollution used to come from developed countries, now it comes from developing countries and their products are used by only the minority of the total population. Reducing the population would only make the surviving ones more lavish. I don't believe in humanity enough to see that work.
- alehander42 6y agowell, yes, it is a basic human right, obviously
- cryptonector 6y ago> No one says that, ... Malthusians do, and have, for more than 200 years. Two hundred years. Now, if we keep growing our population, then yes, eventually the Malthusians must and will be right. And perhaps that eventually is now. It's worth exploring that, even if Malthusians are like the boy who cried wolf. But I'm skeptical that we're finally at our and the planet's limit for the simple reason that population is already predicted to go flat and then begin declining very soon. Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, Russia, China, India, Iran -- all of these are below replacement rate fertility now or nearly there and getting there fast. Much of Latin America is well on its way there too. That leaves places like Nigeria, for example, as having high fertility rates, but even there it's a pretty safe prediction that fertility will eventually go down. Decreasing fertility correlates very well with GDP per capita, and it's understood how wealth has caused low fertility rates. That dynamic need not be universal, but it's a pretty safe bet. Meanwhile, Malthusians have been perennially wrong not only because they've failed to predict or accept the reality of low and declining fertility rates, but also because they've consistently failed to predict or accept the market's ability to adjust to demand growth. So far we've always found ways to produce more food and so on -- no, there's no guarantee that we will continue to be able to, but the fact that total population will peak soon then begin declining means we probably won't need too much more in the way of food production revolutions. Malthusian also complain about pollution but don't seem to understand that more wealth == cleaner environment -- not at first, maybe, but certainly at some point. Just look at Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic: Haitians are so poor that they cut down their tree for firewood, while Dominicans are wealthy enough that they do not -- same island, same climate, different stories. Or look at the U.S.! In the 1930s river fires were so commonplace as to not be news. In the late 40s river fires were rare enough that they made Time magazine's cover. Now they're even rarer. Those are just some examples. Of course, most Americans have no idea how clean the U.S. is because they've not been to, e.g., Beijing, but that's good anyways: we can always get cleaner. > ... because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population. If some family wants to have six children, in a country that has below-replacement fertility rates, that won't move the needle. These are macro trends. What you write comes across as rather ominous: a threat to impose Chinese-style family planning rules. Not only is it a very bad idea (ask China!) but it's also quite tyrannical, and completely unnecessary given the macro fertility trends. How do you imagine we'll get to 10% of the current population anyways? War? Draconian family planning? Something worse? How much time do you think we can afford to let pass before we reach that 10%? Centuries? Decades?? If you say "centuries", it might happen naturally. Saying "decades" would strongly imply that you must have some truly awful ideas for how to make it happen.