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Resources and energy and the ability to meet basic human needs are, in fact, almost entirely NOT zero sum. Virtually every resource we have, whether oil, miner
by Robotbeat 6y ago
Resources and energy and the ability to meet basic human needs are, in fact, almost entirely NOT zero sum.
Virtually every resource we have, whether oil, minerals, food, shelter, entertainment, education, etc, is drastically expanded and in many cases is only possible by living in a society with many other people. There's vastly more oil, copper, food, shelter, entertainment, and education now than at any other time in history. That's because human ingenuity and economies of scale are fundamentally positive-sum.
Imagine you killed half of all people. Will your lot improve?
Let's say 99.9% of people are killed. I am certain that your life would rapidly become extremely difficult and would remain that way for the rest of your life.
There can be no industrial civilization without economies of scale. To pick a very Hacker News example, think about Moore's Law. It has only been able to be continued because the market for computing has continually expanded. If the revenue remains flat for semiconductors, there's not enough capital to be able to invest in the next generation of equipment that is yet more expensive. You need more people buying these chips in order to justify that greater investment.
- Frost1x 6y ago>Resources and energy and the ability to meet basic human needs are, in fact, almost entirely NOT zero sum. This is absolutely not true. Earth has a carrying capacity and we don't have technology currently to leave Earth for any reasonable time. Estimates vary as to the carrying capacity for humans but an upper estimate is around 16 billion. It could be significantly higher but there's definitely a limit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
- pnw_hazor 6y agoThe brightest minds (ala The Population Bomb) recently thought that the end times were supposed to happen 40-50 years ago.
- RealityVoid 6y agoI see you an a lot of other people in this thread arguing in two completely different frameworks. Your counter didn't address the parent's claim that economies of scale improved our life immensely, you just pointed out that there is a cutoff on how many people the earth can support. I think both points are true and in no way mutually exclusive. I will just highlight that while what your say is true, there _must_ be some upper bound where a high enough population will mean living on earth will become unsustainable, I would NOT use that as the most immediate threat seeing how: 1) We are still quite a bit off from the 16 billion figure you quoted. 2) The global trend is population shrinking, not population increase. 3) As proven in the past, technology does tend to allow us to greatly increase the carrying capacity of our environment.
- Robotbeat 6y agoI think that figure would be on the order of 100 billion to 1 trillion people on Earth itself. And I agree about population stagnation at about 10-12 billion for the foreseeable future.
- macinjosh 6y agoHumans have the unique ability and motivation to increase the carrying capacity of their environment. We can breed or genetically modify crops to grow faster and fuller. We can clean dirty water. We can make bricks and build houses to shelter from nature. So far, there has been no evidence we are anywhere close to Earth's carrying capacity. Quite the opposite, actually.