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So your plan is endless growth? When is the population high enough to stop doing that? How is that supposed to work logistically? In what scenario does that not

by dangus 9mo ago

So your plan is endless growth? When is the population high enough to stop doing that? How is that supposed to work logistically? In what scenario does that not result in societal collapse within a short few lifetimes? Endless growth and the inevitable planetary destruction/exhaustion from that process isn’t good for anyone, either. It’s easier to adapt to a shrinking population than one that is too large to sustain with food and energy. I hate to say it but tossing bible versus around isn’t going to make your case very well. If we want to talk about things that are grounded in reality maybe let’s not cite a book that says god sent bears to kill children who made fun of a guy for being bald (2 Kings 2:23-24). Let’s be real: the Christian plan is to trash the earth (Genesis 1:26) until rapture comes around to bail out believers who have been dutifully praying and fucking. Any day now!

somenameforme 9mo ago
You're creating a false dichotomy since there's always the obvious option of sustainability which is a fertility rate of around 2.1. And declining populations will likely create a far less sustainable world than increasing would. I described in a peer thread how fertility rates directly lead to the age ratios in society. Low fertility rates means you're going to have a low number of working age people for a large number of elderly people. On top of this, positive fertility rates mean that economies naturally increase in size even if you do absolutely nothing - negative growth rates mean that economies will naturally shrink. We're nowhere even remotely near our production capacity for food, water, or energy - but we're already facing labor issues in achieving such. And in a low-growth future, which is our future, these labor issues will magnify exponentially. And it's not like you can just pay people more and everybody lives happily ever after - there simply won't be enough people to do everything that needs to be done, even if everybody's willing to work themselves to death. The expectations for what a society can provide will begin to unravel. And I see no reason not to go sci-fi here because there's every reason to believe it's our future. Earth will not be humanity's only domain. It's practically inconceivable that we won't have thriving off-planet civilizations within a century and realistically - far sooner. And a century of unsustainable growth would be vastly less damaging to society than a century of unsustainable decline.
- dangus 9mo ago
  The global total fertility rate is already just above your stated ideal rate of 2.1, it's currently at 2.35, so I am really confused at why the comment I originally responded to thought we should all shack up and fuck during the pandemic.
  - somenameforme 9mo ago
    I don't think you're discussing in good faith there. Obviously what happens in Chad, Nigeria, and so on has relatively little consequence on what happens in America and the Western world in general.
    - dangus 9mo ago
      Please don’t confuse disagreement with discussion in bad faith. I promise you I’m making a serious argument. It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates. Country boundaries are arbitrary.
      - somenameforme 9mo ago
        Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size. And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.
        dangus 9mo ago
        Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria. The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before. The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.
hattmall 9mo ago
>I hate to say it but tossing bible versus around isn’t going to make your case very well Not if you actually read the verse, it's a relevant, experience driven philosophical statement.
- dangus 9mo ago
  Are we reading the same verse? I read it and it doesn’t seem relevant at all. It almost looks like the commenter pasted the wrong book/chapter/verse.
  - hattmall 9mo ago
    I don't know. I thought it made sense in that the previous commenter was lamenting the "boomers" and how everything will be better when they are gone. Without actually realizing that their isn't anything inherently problematic with boomers, it's just that they are the first generation that didn't reproduce at a replacement level. Making the aged a larger demographic than than the youth. That problem, however isn't going away, and is in fact magnified in each subsequent current generation.
  - Der_Einzige 9mo ago
    You have to read the correct translation. The one that specifically references why it's good to die young
    - dangus 9mo ago
      Well, that’s stupid. It’s not admirable to die young. My grandma lived 96 years of a happy, healthy, enriching life. She got her college degree at age 60. She had a beaming smile when she played with her great grandchildren. She enjoyed the company of her husband well into her 90s. She lived independently until the last month of her life. And there we go with the bible, you gotta read the correct telephone game translation of it and interpret the right way for it to make any bit of sense. Nobody can just accept that it was written in a human developmental era that most of us wouldn’t relate with in any way. For example, it was considered a blessing to die young and “go to heaven” in an era before surgical anesthesia. Better than living a long life with ailments that a modern doctor can treat in an afternoon. We didn’t even get basic antibiotics until less than 200 years ago.
627467 9mo ago
> not result in societal collapse within a short few lifetimes? Seems like you're more conditioned by apocalyptical Christian logic than you think
- dangus 9mo ago
  No? That's the opposite. Christian logic dictates that we don't have to care about societal collapse, because it's prophesied and it's actually a good thing because that's when believers are raptured into heaven. There are accelerationists who actually hope this happens faster. The population went from 1 billion to 8 billion in the last 226 years. So my question to you is: how many more billions do you really think our planet can support? How long can we support 8 billion? According to the MAHB, the world's oil reserves will run out by 2052, natural gas by 2060 and coal by 2090. Maybe those estimates are sooner than reality, but still, I'd love to hear about how a solution to running out of fossil fuel energy abundance in the next 25-200 years involves growing the population.
philwelch 9mo ago
We have a whole damn solar system we’re barely even using. Overpopulation is a fake bugbear of small minded bucket crabs.
- dangus 9mo ago
  I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress? Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?
  - somenameforme 9mo ago
    Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400 per kg. This is still quite a lot but it can be contrasted against the ~$54,000 per kg from Space Shuttle to understand why the 'hype' around Starship is justified, with the big goal there being to drop another couple of orders of magnitude off the price. At that point costs will be low enough that the door to space will finally be open to full commercial exploitation.
    - dangus 9mo ago
      I’ll buy your argument for the sake of it. We are killing two orders of magnitude of cost. $14 per kg to get something to space. Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US. So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg). Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are. Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates. Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.

by dangus 9mo ago

somenameforme 9mo ago

You're creating a false dichotomy since there's always the obvious option of sustainability which is a fertility rate of around 2.1. And declining populations will likely create a far less sustainable world than increasing would. I described in a peer thread how fertility rates directly lead to the age ratios in society. Low fertility rates means you're going to have a low number of working age people for a large number of elderly people. On top of this, positive fertility rates mean that economies naturally increase in size even if you do absolutely nothing - negative growth rates mean that economies will naturally shrink. We're nowhere even remotely near our production capacity for food, water, or energy - but we're already facing labor issues in achieving such. And in a low-growth future, which is our future, these labor issues will magnify exponentially. And it's not like you can just pay people more and everybody lives happily ever after - there simply won't be enough people to do everything that needs to be done, even if everybody's willing to work themselves to death. The expectations for what a society can provide will begin to unravel. And I see no reason not to go sci-fi here because there's every reason to believe it's our future. Earth will not be humanity's only domain. It's practically inconceivable that we won't have thriving off-planet civilizations within a century and realistically - far sooner. And a century of unsustainable growth would be vastly less damaging to society than a century of unsustainable decline.

dangus 9mo ago
The global total fertility rate is already just above your stated ideal rate of 2.1, it's currently at 2.35, so I am really confused at why the comment I originally responded to thought we should all shack up and fuck during the pandemic.
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  I don't think you're discussing in good faith there. Obviously what happens in Chad, Nigeria, and so on has relatively little consequence on what happens in America and the Western world in general.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    Please don’t confuse disagreement with discussion in bad faith. I promise you I’m making a serious argument. It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates. Country boundaries are arbitrary.
    - somenameforme 9mo ago
      Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size. And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.
      - dangus 9mo ago
        Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria. The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before. The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.

hattmall 9mo ago

>I hate to say it but tossing bible versus around isn’t going to make your case very well Not if you actually read the verse, it's a relevant, experience driven philosophical statement.

dangus 9mo ago
Are we reading the same verse? I read it and it doesn’t seem relevant at all. It almost looks like the commenter pasted the wrong book/chapter/verse.
- hattmall 9mo ago
  I don't know. I thought it made sense in that the previous commenter was lamenting the "boomers" and how everything will be better when they are gone. Without actually realizing that their isn't anything inherently problematic with boomers, it's just that they are the first generation that didn't reproduce at a replacement level. Making the aged a larger demographic than than the youth. That problem, however isn't going away, and is in fact magnified in each subsequent current generation.
- Der_Einzige 9mo ago
  You have to read the correct translation. The one that specifically references why it's good to die young
  - dangus 9mo ago
    Well, that’s stupid. It’s not admirable to die young. My grandma lived 96 years of a happy, healthy, enriching life. She got her college degree at age 60. She had a beaming smile when she played with her great grandchildren. She enjoyed the company of her husband well into her 90s. She lived independently until the last month of her life. And there we go with the bible, you gotta read the correct telephone game translation of it and interpret the right way for it to make any bit of sense. Nobody can just accept that it was written in a human developmental era that most of us wouldn’t relate with in any way. For example, it was considered a blessing to die young and “go to heaven” in an era before surgical anesthesia. Better than living a long life with ailments that a modern doctor can treat in an afternoon. We didn’t even get basic antibiotics until less than 200 years ago.

627467 9mo ago

> not result in societal collapse within a short few lifetimes? Seems like you're more conditioned by apocalyptical Christian logic than you think

dangus 9mo ago
No? That's the opposite. Christian logic dictates that we don't have to care about societal collapse, because it's prophesied and it's actually a good thing because that's when believers are raptured into heaven. There are accelerationists who actually hope this happens faster. The population went from 1 billion to 8 billion in the last 226 years. So my question to you is: how many more billions do you really think our planet can support? How long can we support 8 billion? According to the MAHB, the world's oil reserves will run out by 2052, natural gas by 2060 and coal by 2090. Maybe those estimates are sooner than reality, but still, I'd love to hear about how a solution to running out of fossil fuel energy abundance in the next 25-200 years involves growing the population.

philwelch 9mo ago

We have a whole damn solar system we’re barely even using. Overpopulation is a fake bugbear of small minded bucket crabs.

dangus 9mo ago
I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress? Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400 per kg. This is still quite a lot but it can be contrasted against the ~$54,000 per kg from Space Shuttle to understand why the 'hype' around Starship is justified, with the big goal there being to drop another couple of orders of magnitude off the price. At that point costs will be low enough that the door to space will finally be open to full commercial exploitation.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    I’ll buy your argument for the sake of it. We are killing two orders of magnitude of cost. $14 per kg to get something to space. Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US. So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg). Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are. Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates. Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.