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We very literally do not have the resources to lift up every human on this planet onto US living standards. There is not enough oil, not enough uranium, not eno

We very literally do not have the resources to lift up every human on this planet onto US living standards. There is not enough oil, not enough uranium, not enough rare earths that we know how to extract to provide the whole world with the glut of energy that the average American requires for their standard of living. I most certainly do NOT need to wish for bigger populations in order to increase the bottom-line standard of living.

alexey-salmin 2y ago
> I most certainly do NOT need to wish for bigger populations in order to increase the bottom-line standard of living. Well maybe, just maybe, try once looking at the historical data [1] to see how it works? Economy is not a zero-sum game where dividing resources among the smaller number of players gives you a win. Yes, with the current technology stack lifting everyone to the current US level is impossible, that's precisely why it's so important to keep pushing. Earth continuously receives 44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of solar energy on average it's more than plenty to have decent standards of living for everyone if captured. The problem is, development of technology is extremely expensive, effectively impossible unless you spread the cost among a huge number of end-consumers. If the population didn't grow like crazy in the past centuries we wouldn't have the technology we have today and the bottom-line standard of living would be way lower than what we have today. And so would be the US standard of living because US wouldn't be sitting on top of a 8-billion-people economic pyramid. Very lucky for the world's poorest (and for all of us) that we didn't listen to cries of de-growers in the 18th century. In principle not much have changed since then. Amount of energy at our disposal is still laughable, so the road ahead is longer than what we did so far. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo...

alexey-salmin 2y ago

> I most certainly do NOT need to wish for bigger populations in order to increase the bottom-line standard of living. Well maybe, just maybe, try once looking at the historical data [1] to see how it works? Economy is not a zero-sum game where dividing resources among the smaller number of players gives you a win. Yes, with the current technology stack lifting everyone to the current US level is impossible, that's precisely why it's so important to keep pushing. Earth continuously receives 44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of solar energy on average it's more than plenty to have decent standards of living for everyone if captured. The problem is, development of technology is extremely expensive, effectively impossible unless you spread the cost among a huge number of end-consumers. If the population didn't grow like crazy in the past centuries we wouldn't have the technology we have today and the bottom-line standard of living would be way lower than what we have today. And so would be the US standard of living because US wouldn't be sitting on top of a 8-billion-people economic pyramid. Very lucky for the world's poorest (and for all of us) that we didn't listen to cries of de-growers in the 18th century. In principle not much have changed since then. Amount of energy at our disposal is still laughable, so the road ahead is longer than what we did so far. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo...