4 ms·
I don't have to be in the business or habit of making laughably naive or galaxy-brain futurist predictions to acknowledge that habitable square-footage of land
by HelloMcFly 3y ago
I don't have to be in the business or habit of making laughably naive or galaxy-brain futurist predictions to acknowledge that habitable square-footage of land available to occupy is for all intents and purposes fixed. I'm not making any predictions, just noting that if we're growing above replacement rate indefinitely we will eventually run out of space barring eventual expansions off the planet. Even if every city on earth became as dense as Tokyo, even if we created all food production in sunless underground bunkers or skyscraper food farms, even if all nutrition becomes paste from compostable tubes, a society that inherently requires population growth indefinitely to function effectively has to get off-planet at some point.
This is especially true if you value (as I certainly do) the ongoing existence of land not just for farming and habitation but for the diverse ecologies of flora and fauna to continue to exist. I'm certainly more pessimistic than optimistic about how the rest of the natural world would fare in the next 150 years if we continue on as we have been.
But honestly, this to me is a sideshow: given our ability to produce efficiently and often autonomously, we shouldn't require a reliance on constant population growth to function effectively. Maybe that's where I'm being laughably naive.