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This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the ea

This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today. At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the world economy. But the unintended consequences were devastating. Resource extraction has been catastrophic, of course, as has the destruction of natural habitats that come from population explosion, the accelerated extinction of animals, and the potentially apocalyptic global warming that has resulted both directly and indirectly. Demographers predict a population collapse (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human-population-global-growth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YE0.lKLn.Y_nGJFimv4NH&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human...) that could see the world drop under 2 billion again, but without help, it will probably come too late to save the planet as we know it now. We should be doing everything possible to discourage birthrates and get the only habitable planet in our known universe back to a sustainable equilibrium.

naasking 3y ago
This idea that we should depopulate is the terrifying perspective. People have been crying that the sky is falling since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. There is no "saving the planet as we know it now". The planet is ever-changing, and has never been static. There are certainly dangers to the path we're on that we have to mitigate, but depopulation is not one of the solutions.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
  You can encourage lower reproduction with tax incentives. Nothing wrong with that.
  - naasking 3y ago
    We don't need to encourage it, birth control and capitalism have already produced a depopulation trend in all developed countries. It's not a good thing.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      It's not a good thing because???? I'll accept a well reasoned argument, but you've not presented any yet in this discussion and engaged in your own naturalistic fallacies. If you're using the reason that "Wanting to breed is natural" then surmise that you've never been involved in animal husbandry before. Nor have you studied mammal populations between species, especially those that have boom and bust cycles.
      - naasking 3y ago
        The article outlines plenty of good reasons, that's why we're discussing it. Most depopulation scenarios are nightmares (wars, famines, genocides), and even the good ones are very, very unpleasant (disproportionate resources must be directed towards caring for the aging population, leaving little labour for maintenance of existing infrastructure, let alone development).
- menacingly 3y ago
  depop is fine as long as we start with the depops
- 0xfaded 3y ago
  This argument is equating human perspectives of the world to physical realities. Ancient populations certainly left their mask, Romans deforested Europe for the sake of glass making. But that is nothing compared to the resource extraction and ndustrial waste that support the world 9 billion people. Willing it away with "the sky has always been falling" is denialism at best.
  - naasking 3y ago
    I acknowledged the real dangers like climate change in my original post. I simply don't agree that the other issues you mention are actual dangers. Your argument that these are problems is a naturalistic fallacy.
- anemoiac 3y ago
  It seems like you didn’t finish your response… Why is depopulation terrifying? And why shouldn’t we be concerned about resource constraints? Malthus being wrong implies nothing about the future.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Depopolating is just another word for genocid, that's why it is terrifying. Or at least should br, but then some people are just too edgy to get that.
    - naasking 3y ago
      Or it's a cute term for oppressing people to a degree that they don't want to follow natural instincts to procreate. For instance, developed nations economically penalize parenthood to such an extent that native birth rate is now below replacement in all of them with only a few exceptions.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        That birth rates go down withe conomic prosperity has nothing to do with government oppression... That talking point is utter BS, and close to the conspiracy theory of the great "replacement" ...
        naasking 3y ago
        Who said anything about government oppression?
      - aranelsurion 3y ago
        This seems to me only partially true. Sure if everyone had one-percenter level resources they'd be more inclined to procreate, though the cultural change and the shifted focus to individualism and one's own experience in life (YOLO thinking, if I may) probably has as much or even more effect on it. As an anecdata, most people I know are somewhere on the low-class to upper-mid class, and the ones who want kids seem to always have at least one, consequences be damned, and the ones who don't, often don't put a price tag on it and merely use it as an excuse if they feel pressured. Also the `natural instinct` may not be a given here, since up until recently the instinct to have sex and procreate meant the same results for humans just like other animals, which no longer holds true either.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  It’s not terrifying because it has been happening since the 1950s. One theory is that as countries industrialize, their males become less fertile over subsequent generations. (This theory accounts for socioeconomic changes like abortion and being too poor to afford children.) It’s not too surprising given chemicals like BPA aka synthetic estrogen is so pervasive that now it’s in clothes and paper receipts. Almost no country is safe except for a few in central Africa https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/25/world-population-increase-peak-chart-age-gender/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/25/world-popu... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/ageing-planet-the-new-demographic-timebomb https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/ageing-planet-...
  - hef19898 3y ago
    How can one look at those numbers, and take, after mixing it other issues like birth control, such a deeply wrong conclusion?
    - chaostheory 3y ago
      They account for socioeconomic changes like abortion and birth control ie these trends started long before the sexual revolution and long before abortion was even legal. It is not a “deeply wrong conclusion” unless no one bother to read any of it. Completely ignoring the endocrine disrupter pollution just shows you completely ignored my comment. The key is declining male fertility https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is-causing-a-male-fertility-crisis https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is...
      - hef19898 3y ago
        I know, declining male fertility is such a nice talking point, you know men being less manly and all that. Funny so, that while micro plastics and whatnot sure are ugly and cannot be ignored, all other studies do not mention male fertility as a root cause, but rather: - urbanization and changes in lifestyle - women pursuing a life other than being a mother - birth control (the reason why birth control reduces the number of kids per couple should be obvious...) - economic incentives change from large families (old style, labour intensive farming) to smaller families (industrial labour and office work in cities) - Covid source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-globally-why-matters/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-...
martindbp 3y ago
It's interesting how malthusians never take matters into their own hands. It's always too many of "others".
- Elinvynia 3y ago
  To be fair, suicide is illegal pretty much everywhere.
- nitwit005 3y ago
  If you ask people about how many children they plan to have, and why, they do list environmental concerns. So, "others", apparently includes their own chidren.
hef19898 3y ago
[flagged]
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
There’s a Delta flight that is flying exclusively for the pleasure of a tiny group of people who want to watch the eclipse for multiple hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447603 The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous We have a greed, fear and distribution problem, not a production problem Nobody needs a Ferrari when there’s still politically unstable regions of the world that could use the energy and care that went into creating such luxuries And yes work and energy are fungible, so every minute and joule spent creating an NFT could have been spent talking with a homeless person or taking someone in off the street for a night (often that’s all it takes). Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it
- pixl97 3y ago
  >Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it What kind of backwards ass thinking is this. I mean, stop and think for at least one second before typing things like this. If I'm living hand to mouth, as in if I stop farming my own food I'll quickly starve it would be stupid to, one, stop growing my own stuff because I'll starve otherwise, and two, not complain about the situation because it's a terrible place to be. By complaining someone with wealthy, time, and intelligence may be able to find a solution that I can implement into my life without causing a death spiral.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    How could you possibly interpret what I wrote as an exhortation against the poor? Should I specifically explicate the groups that this exhortation is targeted to? Use your judgement based on the content and context instead of requiring me to think for you and fully solve all of the questions you might have. Do you own a Ferrari? Are you taking the Delta flight? Can you extrapolate from those two examples of egregious veblen good luxuries (Veblen himself writkng a thourough exhortation himself!) to think of other ones which do or do not apply to you and then you determine whether that applies? Jfc
snewman 3y ago
What is your source for the planet only being able to support one billion people? That's a very bold statement, given that we are currently at eight billion and have fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability. Of course sustainability is not a guaranteed outcome, it will require making good decisions, but I'm sure that a "mere" one billion people would also be unsustainable with sufficiently poor decisions.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  The estimates are all over the place, but the idea is that resources are finite including space. This is one of the reasons that there is a growing trend of anti immigration even among the left. (Not my opinion since I was an immigrant.) https://www.issuesofsustainability.org/helpndoc-content/ClubofRomeLimitstoGrowth1972.html https://www.issuesofsustainability.org/helpndoc-content/Club... https://theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich https://theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-popula... https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-overpopulated https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-ove...
- jaysonelliot 3y ago
  We don't have "fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability." We're in the middle of the Holocene Extinction, that some call the Anthropocene Extinction - the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth, and the first to be caused by a single species. Global warming has long since passed its tipping point, we're simply in a harm reduction phase right now and it's a race to see if we can even avoid the eventual collapse of the entire food chain. The world population didn't reach one billion people until about the year 1800, and two billion by the 1920s. When I say that it can only support one billion people, I'm referring to what was possible before the Haber-Bosch process revolutionized farming and made it possible to grow enough food for 8 billion today. I'll concede that the number might even be as high as 2 billion or so. Beyond that, we have to employ technologies that upset the ecological balance of the planet, leading to mass extinctions, loss of natural habitat, carbon emissions, and other harmful activities at a planetary scale.
keenmaster 3y ago
In my opinion, this thinking is wholesale incorrect and actually terrifies me more. Yes, there is global warming. Yes, it is extremely concerning, and leads to countless endangerment, extinction, and coastal/island loss etc…it will cost untold billions to mitigate its effects in even a handful of cities like Miami, Venice, etc… But, exactly why should people have fewer kids? It’s the large, sweeping, gubernatorial and industrial changes and innovations that drive meaningful shifts in sustainability (with downstream effects on consumer sustainability i.e. cheaper EVs heat pumps and solar panels = greener consumer behavior). If we have fewer kids, that’ll just add to our problems - we’ll have climate change and accelerated economic collapse. If you survey people from developing countries on the anti-natal perspective, who emit a fraction of the C02 that people in developed countries do, they might find it borderline pathological. Malthus was dead wrong, and his intellectual successors continue to be wrong, just with more cope. I have no reason to believe that will change. Anyway, people who think that having fewer kids is as much of a disaster as climate change will continue to have kids. People who think that they should go against their core reproductive instinct in order to save the planet (???) will not have successors, if their behavior is consistent with their ideology. It is only the children of the former who’ll be able to evaluate the outcome. I assume they’ll be generally thankful that they’re alive to evaluate anything in the first place. I also assume that they won’t be living in a literal hellscape - point me to any credible literature which portends that for people living in the United States in 2100 (because that’s where most people on HN live - there are people today that live in a hellscape, they don’t even have to wait for 2100, but it’s not predominately due to overpopulation).
toss1 3y ago
Yup. This is absolutely, mind-bogglingly, stupid. Start with his firs real argument: "More Geniuses" and the resultant more good inventions, etc. Then consider the corollary is more stupidity, adn the quote attrib to Einstein: >> "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe!" The damage wreaked by more stupid people can, and historically has repeatedly overcome the good done by geniuses. The author also overlooks the ability of current and emerging technology to magnify the effect of genius, starting with Steve Jobs' 'computers are bicycles for the mind' analogy. No need to continue with the rest of this shallow drivel arguing to create a disaster. Wow.
x86x87 3y ago
Lol. Save the planet? The planet is going to be fine. We need to save ourselves! How should we do this? Less people of course /s

naasking 3y ago

This idea that we should depopulate is the terrifying perspective. People have been crying that the sky is falling since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. There is no "saving the planet as we know it now". The planet is ever-changing, and has never been static. There are certainly dangers to the path we're on that we have to mitigate, but depopulation is not one of the solutions.

zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
You can encourage lower reproduction with tax incentives. Nothing wrong with that.
- naasking 3y ago
  We don't need to encourage it, birth control and capitalism have already produced a depopulation trend in all developed countries. It's not a good thing.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    It's not a good thing because???? I'll accept a well reasoned argument, but you've not presented any yet in this discussion and engaged in your own naturalistic fallacies. If you're using the reason that "Wanting to breed is natural" then surmise that you've never been involved in animal husbandry before. Nor have you studied mammal populations between species, especially those that have boom and bust cycles.
    - naasking 3y ago
      The article outlines plenty of good reasons, that's why we're discussing it. Most depopulation scenarios are nightmares (wars, famines, genocides), and even the good ones are very, very unpleasant (disproportionate resources must be directed towards caring for the aging population, leaving little labour for maintenance of existing infrastructure, let alone development).
menacingly 3y ago
depop is fine as long as we start with the depops
0xfaded 3y ago
This argument is equating human perspectives of the world to physical realities. Ancient populations certainly left their mask, Romans deforested Europe for the sake of glass making. But that is nothing compared to the resource extraction and ndustrial waste that support the world 9 billion people. Willing it away with "the sky has always been falling" is denialism at best.
- naasking 3y ago
  I acknowledged the real dangers like climate change in my original post. I simply don't agree that the other issues you mention are actual dangers. Your argument that these are problems is a naturalistic fallacy.
anemoiac 3y ago
It seems like you didn’t finish your response… Why is depopulation terrifying? And why shouldn’t we be concerned about resource constraints? Malthus being wrong implies nothing about the future.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Depopolating is just another word for genocid, that's why it is terrifying. Or at least should br, but then some people are just too edgy to get that.
  - naasking 3y ago
    Or it's a cute term for oppressing people to a degree that they don't want to follow natural instincts to procreate. For instance, developed nations economically penalize parenthood to such an extent that native birth rate is now below replacement in all of them with only a few exceptions.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      That birth rates go down withe conomic prosperity has nothing to do with government oppression... That talking point is utter BS, and close to the conspiracy theory of the great "replacement" ...
      - naasking 3y ago
        Who said anything about government oppression?
    - aranelsurion 3y ago
      This seems to me only partially true. Sure if everyone had one-percenter level resources they'd be more inclined to procreate, though the cultural change and the shifted focus to individualism and one's own experience in life (YOLO thinking, if I may) probably has as much or even more effect on it. As an anecdata, most people I know are somewhere on the low-class to upper-mid class, and the ones who want kids seem to always have at least one, consequences be damned, and the ones who don't, often don't put a price tag on it and merely use it as an excuse if they feel pressured. Also the `natural instinct` may not be a given here, since up until recently the instinct to have sex and procreate meant the same results for humans just like other animals, which no longer holds true either.
chaostheory 3y ago
It’s not terrifying because it has been happening since the 1950s. One theory is that as countries industrialize, their males become less fertile over subsequent generations. (This theory accounts for socioeconomic changes like abortion and being too poor to afford children.) It’s not too surprising given chemicals like BPA aka synthetic estrogen is so pervasive that now it’s in clothes and paper receipts. Almost no country is safe except for a few in central Africa https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/25/world-population-increase-peak-chart-age-gender/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/25/world-popu... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/ageing-planet-the-new-demographic-timebomb https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/ageing-planet-...
- hef19898 3y ago
  How can one look at those numbers, and take, after mixing it other issues like birth control, such a deeply wrong conclusion?
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    They account for socioeconomic changes like abortion and birth control ie these trends started long before the sexual revolution and long before abortion was even legal. It is not a “deeply wrong conclusion” unless no one bother to read any of it. Completely ignoring the endocrine disrupter pollution just shows you completely ignored my comment. The key is declining male fertility https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is-causing-a-male-fertility-crisis https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is...
    - hef19898 3y ago
      I know, declining male fertility is such a nice talking point, you know men being less manly and all that. Funny so, that while micro plastics and whatnot sure are ugly and cannot be ignored, all other studies do not mention male fertility as a root cause, but rather: - urbanization and changes in lifestyle - women pursuing a life other than being a mother - birth control (the reason why birth control reduces the number of kids per couple should be obvious...) - economic incentives change from large families (old style, labour intensive farming) to smaller families (industrial labour and office work in cities) - Covid source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-globally-why-matters/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-...

martindbp 3y ago

It's interesting how malthusians never take matters into their own hands. It's always too many of "others".

Elinvynia 3y ago
To be fair, suicide is illegal pretty much everywhere.
nitwit005 3y ago
If you ask people about how many children they plan to have, and why, they do list environmental concerns. So, "others", apparently includes their own chidren.

hef19898 3y ago

[flagged]

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

There’s a Delta flight that is flying exclusively for the pleasure of a tiny group of people who want to watch the eclipse for multiple hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447603 The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous We have a greed, fear and distribution problem, not a production problem Nobody needs a Ferrari when there’s still politically unstable regions of the world that could use the energy and care that went into creating such luxuries And yes work and energy are fungible, so every minute and joule spent creating an NFT could have been spent talking with a homeless person or taking someone in off the street for a night (often that’s all it takes). Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it

pixl97 3y ago
>Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it What kind of backwards ass thinking is this. I mean, stop and think for at least one second before typing things like this. If I'm living hand to mouth, as in if I stop farming my own food I'll quickly starve it would be stupid to, one, stop growing my own stuff because I'll starve otherwise, and two, not complain about the situation because it's a terrible place to be. By complaining someone with wealthy, time, and intelligence may be able to find a solution that I can implement into my life without causing a death spiral.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  How could you possibly interpret what I wrote as an exhortation against the poor? Should I specifically explicate the groups that this exhortation is targeted to? Use your judgement based on the content and context instead of requiring me to think for you and fully solve all of the questions you might have. Do you own a Ferrari? Are you taking the Delta flight? Can you extrapolate from those two examples of egregious veblen good luxuries (Veblen himself writkng a thourough exhortation himself!) to think of other ones which do or do not apply to you and then you determine whether that applies? Jfc

snewman 3y ago

What is your source for the planet only being able to support one billion people? That's a very bold statement, given that we are currently at eight billion and have fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability. Of course sustainability is not a guaranteed outcome, it will require making good decisions, but I'm sure that a "mere" one billion people would also be unsustainable with sufficiently poor decisions.

chaostheory 3y ago
The estimates are all over the place, but the idea is that resources are finite including space. This is one of the reasons that there is a growing trend of anti immigration even among the left. (Not my opinion since I was an immigrant.) https://www.issuesofsustainability.org/helpndoc-content/ClubofRomeLimitstoGrowth1972.html https://www.issuesofsustainability.org/helpndoc-content/Club... https://theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich https://theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-popula... https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-overpopulated https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-ove...
jaysonelliot 3y ago
We don't have "fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability." We're in the middle of the Holocene Extinction, that some call the Anthropocene Extinction - the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth, and the first to be caused by a single species. Global warming has long since passed its tipping point, we're simply in a harm reduction phase right now and it's a race to see if we can even avoid the eventual collapse of the entire food chain. The world population didn't reach one billion people until about the year 1800, and two billion by the 1920s. When I say that it can only support one billion people, I'm referring to what was possible before the Haber-Bosch process revolutionized farming and made it possible to grow enough food for 8 billion today. I'll concede that the number might even be as high as 2 billion or so. Beyond that, we have to employ technologies that upset the ecological balance of the planet, leading to mass extinctions, loss of natural habitat, carbon emissions, and other harmful activities at a planetary scale.

keenmaster 3y ago

In my opinion, this thinking is wholesale incorrect and actually terrifies me more. Yes, there is global warming. Yes, it is extremely concerning, and leads to countless endangerment, extinction, and coastal/island loss etc…it will cost untold billions to mitigate its effects in even a handful of cities like Miami, Venice, etc… But, exactly why should people have fewer kids? It’s the large, sweeping, gubernatorial and industrial changes and innovations that drive meaningful shifts in sustainability (with downstream effects on consumer sustainability i.e. cheaper EVs heat pumps and solar panels = greener consumer behavior). If we have fewer kids, that’ll just add to our problems - we’ll have climate change and accelerated economic collapse. If you survey people from developing countries on the anti-natal perspective, who emit a fraction of the C02 that people in developed countries do, they might find it borderline pathological. Malthus was dead wrong, and his intellectual successors continue to be wrong, just with more cope. I have no reason to believe that will change. Anyway, people who think that having fewer kids is as much of a disaster as climate change will continue to have kids. People who think that they should go against their core reproductive instinct in order to save the planet (???) will not have successors, if their behavior is consistent with their ideology. It is only the children of the former who’ll be able to evaluate the outcome. I assume they’ll be generally thankful that they’re alive to evaluate anything in the first place. I also assume that they won’t be living in a literal hellscape - point me to any credible literature which portends that for people living in the United States in 2100 (because that’s where most people on HN live - there are people today that live in a hellscape, they don’t even have to wait for 2100, but it’s not predominately due to overpopulation).

toss1 3y ago

Yup. This is absolutely, mind-bogglingly, stupid. Start with his firs real argument: "More Geniuses" and the resultant more good inventions, etc. Then consider the corollary is more stupidity, adn the quote attrib to Einstein: >> "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe!" The damage wreaked by more stupid people can, and historically has repeatedly overcome the good done by geniuses. The author also overlooks the ability of current and emerging technology to magnify the effect of genius, starting with Steve Jobs' 'computers are bicycles for the mind' analogy. No need to continue with the rest of this shallow drivel arguing to create a disaster. Wow.

x86x87 3y ago

Lol. Save the planet? The planet is going to be fine. We need to save ourselves! How should we do this? Less people of course /s