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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It always amazes me that people take the predictions about one trajectory of human population as crazy/fring
by foobiekr 6y ago
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It always amazes me that people take the predictions about one trajectory of human population as crazy/fringe but the other prediction as some kind of scientific law.
In addition, we are well past the viable population for even a moderate footprint lifestyle. We got to neatly 8B by keeping half the world at 1/10th or less the resource and environmental footprint of the rest. It’s like a king in a massively overpopulated nation of relentlessly constrained citizens looking out at his gardens and saying, “see? No problems, and those fools predicted the country would collapse.”
- thu2111 6y agoNobody "kept" half the world poor, they did that to themselves. Look at the vast amounts of aid that's been sent to nearly every poor country over the decades. Huge sums. In the end the big success is China, which didn't need such aid. They solved their own problems (well, sort of, economically at least). The poor parts of the world are still poor because they make a lot of bad decisions, it's terrible but when you drill in and study what goes on in those places it's plain to see. The poorer parts of the world would stop having so many babies as they got richer anyway, it seems.
- fallingfrog 6y agoTrue, there’s a survivorship bias too especially in the case of nuclear war where we probably got through the Cold War more by dumb luck than anything else, but people assume there was no other way that could have turned out. The human population is expected to peak at around 11 billion; I have no idea whether the earth can support that many, certainly not with the way our civilization works right now.