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Who is polluting the world ? Why are we breeding cattle which has modified genes for not sweating ? You say resources are plentiful but apploud (?) modified c

Who is polluting the world ? Why are we breeding cattle which has modified genes for not sweating ? You say resources are plentiful but apploud (?) modified cattle so they don't sweat, so they don't pollute and so we all can keep eating meat. You really don't see a flaw in that ? Of course we are too many people. Denying that is really naive.

yywwbbn 5y ago
And yet another the average person living in any developed country (also to a lesser but still significant degree in all of countries) is much better off, in almost every conceivable way, than his ancestors were when the total world population was only a few hundred million people. If you’re primary concern is the welfare of humans (not saying it should be) rather than wildlife and natural ecosystems there almost no evidence which would suggest that an increase in global population results in a lower QoL for an average person.
ben_w 5y ago
The number of humans that can live on this planet simultaneously is a function of technology. If we all lived like hunters and gatherers, the population limit would be a mere few tens of millions. Conversely, if we imagine arbitrary technology, the maximum population that can live simultaneously and sustainably on this world is somewhere in the trillions. Technology such as the stuff you’re trying to use as evidence there’s too many of us, is in fact the technology that allows there to be more of us.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  It's also a function of the finite resources available to us. You also need to factor in that we don't have arbitrary technology and never will. There will always be limits to our technology. I think the gist of the GP argument is something like: Our use of technology is using increasing amounts of our planets resources (e.g. land), and is often questionably ethical (exploiting the other creatures we share our planet with). At which point you have to ask the question: is an expanded human population worth that cost?
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Sure, and if I’m talking to someone who claims e.g. the economy can grow forever I’d make a similar point myself. But we don’t have trillions of people yet, and the difficulty of supporting the current population sustainably is more one of organisation than technological inability — much closer to irrigating and enclosing in greenhouses Nevada, Utah, and Arizona [0] than it is to colonising Mars. (I’m told greenhouses are way more productive than open air farms, just not cost effective in most cases; the example given by proponents is the Netherlands). > is an expanded human population worth that cost? To whom? I’m vegetarian and pushing myself in the direction of veganism, partly because of ethics. Ethics are however are relative, and many humans only care about other humans. Heck, given that the nature of the rich inner world often called “self-awareness” or “consciousness” is not yet sufficiently well defined to even be testable, such people may even be correct. I’m not even sure at what threshold to stop caring myself — lobster brains aren’t very complex, and bivalves (despite being animals) don’t even have brains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivalvia#Nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivalvia#Nervous_system [0] for illustration purposes only; this is almost certainly a suboptimal set of locations.

yywwbbn 5y ago

And yet another the average person living in any developed country (also to a lesser but still significant degree in all of countries) is much better off, in almost every conceivable way, than his ancestors were when the total world population was only a few hundred million people. If you’re primary concern is the welfare of humans (not saying it should be) rather than wildlife and natural ecosystems there almost no evidence which would suggest that an increase in global population results in a lower QoL for an average person.

ben_w 5y ago

The number of humans that can live on this planet simultaneously is a function of technology. If we all lived like hunters and gatherers, the population limit would be a mere few tens of millions. Conversely, if we imagine arbitrary technology, the maximum population that can live simultaneously and sustainably on this world is somewhere in the trillions. Technology such as the stuff you’re trying to use as evidence there’s too many of us, is in fact the technology that allows there to be more of us.

nicoburns 5y ago
It's also a function of the finite resources available to us. You also need to factor in that we don't have arbitrary technology and never will. There will always be limits to our technology. I think the gist of the GP argument is something like: Our use of technology is using increasing amounts of our planets resources (e.g. land), and is often questionably ethical (exploiting the other creatures we share our planet with). At which point you have to ask the question: is an expanded human population worth that cost?
- ben_w 5y ago
  Sure, and if I’m talking to someone who claims e.g. the economy can grow forever I’d make a similar point myself. But we don’t have trillions of people yet, and the difficulty of supporting the current population sustainably is more one of organisation than technological inability — much closer to irrigating and enclosing in greenhouses Nevada, Utah, and Arizona [0] than it is to colonising Mars. (I’m told greenhouses are way more productive than open air farms, just not cost effective in most cases; the example given by proponents is the Netherlands). > is an expanded human population worth that cost? To whom? I’m vegetarian and pushing myself in the direction of veganism, partly because of ethics. Ethics are however are relative, and many humans only care about other humans. Heck, given that the nature of the rich inner world often called “self-awareness” or “consciousness” is not yet sufficiently well defined to even be testable, such people may even be correct. I’m not even sure at what threshold to stop caring myself — lobster brains aren’t very complex, and bivalves (despite being animals) don’t even have brains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivalvia#Nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bivalvia#Nervous_system [0] for illustration purposes only; this is almost certainly a suboptimal set of locations.