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I think there are a couple of points that the article skips over: 1) The planet's human population is much greater than it was even 50 years ago (http://www.go
by danparsonson 15y ago
I think there are a couple of points that the article skips over:
1) The planet's human population is much greater than it was even 50 years ago (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=sp_pop_totl&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=population+of+earth http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=sp_pop_...) and continues to rise
2) We still don't fully understand the impact of widespread habit and species loss
1) is important because each person requires a minimum amount of energy, in whatever form, to sustain them, so we need to improve our technology year-on-year just to stay at the same level of 'resource drain'.
2) is important because the idea that the natural world will recuperate once we've developed more sympathetic ways of existing with it may actually be flawed. There is some evidence to suggest that the biosphere is a self-regulating system of which we are now breaking or removing many parts. Any such system, however resilient, can only stand so much of that before it collapses.
Of course technological development is crucial to our long term survival, but in my opinion this doesn't make short term fixes irrelevant.
- hkolek 15y agoad 1: http://overpopulationisamyth.com http://overpopulationisamyth.com
- bjelkeman-again 15y agoThat is a very shallow set of arguments from a self confessed pro-life group. A better place to start understanding the complexities and impact on environment from a large population is probably Nature’s special on planetary boundaries. http://www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/index.html http://www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/inde...
- danparsonson 15y agoThat discusses the effect of population growth on poverty - where does it talk about the effect of population growth on the environment?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- iaskwhy 15y agoAccording to Hans Rosling on a TED talk, overpopulation is not really a problem: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y... In short: as soon as the economy of a country improves, its population growth stabilizes (and sometimes it even decreases like in Europe).
- danparsonson 15y agoThat was very interesting, thanks, but it says nothing directly about planet-wide population growth; only that family sizes tend to get smaller and infant mortality rates to decrease as a societies get richer - less people are born but they tend to live longer. My original point is that if the population is increasing at all, that will at least partially offset gains in efficiency brought about by newer technologies, and since population growth compounds over time, we'll need to make bigger and bigger gains just to maintain the status quo in terms of absolute energy and resource usage.
- iaskwhy 15y agoI do agree, I was just trying to show world population might not continue growing like we are used to in the upcoming decades/centuries. (Still it does say something about it, my country's population (small European country) is decreasing, around 10% less people in the last ten years even with all the immigration.)
- xiaoma 15y agoTechnological growth compounds over time, too. Just look at the progress of just about any large scale research project such as sequencing the human genome or making an AI capable of beating a chess grandmaster. The progress starts out unbearably slow, and then most of the gains happen in the last 20% of the time spent researching. One reason for this is that as our technology increases, so does the power of the tools we use for creating more technology. Not only are computers getting better performance/price at an exponential rate, but those gains are fueling research into materials sciences, bioinformatics, and other emerging fields.
- 15y ago