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> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places. Wouldn't it be better, at least fo
by sheept 6mo ago
> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes.
The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.
- adrianN 6mo agoThat is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.
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- mlrtime 6mo agoNot everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.
- oblio 6mo agoThe amount of people that want truly rural environments is infinitesimal. Everyone wants a huge house with lots of land far from neighbors. But then they want the state of the art hospital to be close. They want to be able yo reach the closest airport in max 1 hour. They want their kids to play with other kids, ideally without being chauffeured around endlessly, etc, etc. What I've discovered is that humanity has mastered the ancestral art of "having the cake and eating it, too", also called delusion and/or hypocrisy :-)
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- satvikpendem 6mo agoTrue rural farming is still bad for nature because the land is cleared of biodiversity to make way for farm land. It is arguably worse than cities because a lot more land per person is cleared.
- vintermann 6mo agoThat depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
- vkou 6mo agoA very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life. The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.
- Terr_ 6mo agoThis only looks at land mammals rather than plant crops, but... https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
- oblio 6mo agoWe could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).
- t-3 6mo agoIt's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
- bwv848 6mo agoAnd the best way for Earth is we all migrate to Mars aboard Elon Musk's spaceship.
- gambiting 6mo agoIf you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it on Mars, except for the achievement.
- bwv848 6mo agoWhat's the difference? All have to live under central planning, all have to live with hubris of the rich and elites, at least Mars sounds way cooler than living in cities.
- oblio 6mo agoIf you think Musk doesn't want central planning, you're sorely misunderstanding his point of view. Musk wants to be a founding father. And just as the OG founding fathers, his problem isn't necessarily with the centralization part in general, but with the centralizing being done by others. There's a reason the original American voters were all white land owning men (and in some cases, slave owning men!).
- ErroneousBosh 6mo ago> Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans Where's the food going to come from?
- defrost 6mo agoFarms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now. It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots. eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpNMSSGWnOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpNMSSGWnOI
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoSo not really "fairly untouched", then. You're going to need more farms and more farmers, and no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
- defrost 6mo agoLet's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside. I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect. as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet. what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from Australia, United States, Canada, South America and Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central America and the Middle East. ( from: https://www.cbh.com.au/exports-overview https://www.cbh.com.au/exports-overview ) and there are other grain basins about the globe. The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines. That and making sure the front doesn't fall off.
- ssl-3 6mo agoWe've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time. We're humans. We do that stuff. And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
- mlrtime 6mo agoIt would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.
- somenameforme 6mo agoHere's a fun thought experiment for you. If you dug a 1 mile cubic square hole. How many humans could you fit into it? The answer is not only all of us but about around an order of magnitude more on top. I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases. Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.
- Johanx64 6mo ago> I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases. It emphasizes neither! What you've described is a mass grave. Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed! Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with. This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube) For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times. Now this actually says something about size of the earth! If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!) Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still! If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.
- somenameforme 6mo agoI think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of the population we're counting. Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating. And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.