4 ms·

This makes no sense. The evidence (we still survive and population keeps growing) suggests that we a living well within the carrying capacity of the earth. Tech

This makes no sense. The evidence (we still survive and population keeps growing) suggests that we a living well within the carrying capacity of the earth. Technology, invention, social adaptation all help to increase that carrying capacity, making more efficient use of available resources. That may not continue indefinitely, but also population growth may not continue indefinitely. We are not a virus.

gonvaled 11y ago
We have been losing population to starvation since forever. We keep losing population to starvation. We are not able to feed the population of the Earth. We are living above carrying capacity. Worse: we can not change this. It is part of our human nature, probably a defining characteristic of life, at least as evolved here on Earth. A species prefers to produce more offspring and lose some, guaranteeing that at least some of that offspring is going to be passing genes down the genealogical tree. What makes this specially worrisome in the case of the human species is that we have gotten so efficient at extracting resources, that we have been able to fuel an exponential growth without precedent in the history of life on the planet - with the exception of some micro-organisms, which actually are what we are most similar to. Having become so good at extracting resources, and having grown so much in numbers, means that whenever a resource problem arises, the population collapse is going to be fast and furious. I doubt we will be able to keep our technology running in such a catastrophic scenario.
- dagw 11y ago
  We have been losing population to starvation since forever. We keep losing population to starvation. But that is purely down to distribution problems, not capacity problems. There exists enough food on planet, we're just not very good at getting to the people who need it.
  - gonvaled 11y ago
    That is the point: we do not care, we just reproduce. We have been doing that (reproducing over the real carrying capacity, which is what the local environment can sustain) forever. You can argue that we'll get soon better at distributing food, but that is just wishful thinking. And, human nature being what it is, improving food distribution will just lead us to a bigger population increase, keeping us above carrying capacity. There is no period of human history when humanity has managed to sustainable restrain its growth. We go wherever technology can bring us, but always a little bit farther. It is simply not how life works: life overproduces to guarantee delivery. For that scenario that you are proposing to become reality we need to reign on very strong instincts acquired during millions of years of evolution. I am not saying that it can not be done, just that we are not there, that we are not getting anywhere near, and that I think the chances of bringing about that utopia are really slim. Mad Max is way more probable.
    - eru 11y ago
      Please have a look at eg the UN's population growth forecasts. Fertility rates are falling in nearly all countries (or already at sub-replacement levels).
      - gonvaled 11y ago
        Irrelevant. If population drecreases, and you still lose people to starvation, you are living above carrying capacity. Even if that only happens in certain regions. The world is losing lots of people to starvation. We are not able to reign on our instintcs.
        dagw 11y ago
        you still lose people to starvation, you are living above carrying capacity. By that definition the carrying capacity of earth is zero. No matter how few people there are on earth there will always be some scenario where some guy starves to death because he couldn't get to the other side of the valley where the food was.
        gonvaled 11y ago
        We are losing about 10 million people per year to starvation, and there are close to 800 million undernourished people in the world. I am not talking about a random guy not finding his way to an opulent dinner, but about a systemic proplem.
        dagw 11y ago
        Yes, and that systemic problem is completely unrelated to global food production. We could double production or half the population and people would still starve to death and be undernourished because we are incapable of distributing the food we have to all the people who need it.
  - facepalm 11y ago
    "But that is purely down to distribution problems, not capacity problems." Are you sure? There may be or have been superproductive farming areas in the world, but do they last forever? In the US there seems to be a water shortage. The Ural sea is all but dried up. Can you point me to one location where farming is going on in a sustainable way?
    - dagw 11y ago
      The water shortage in the US is caused by a combination of 'wasting' too much water on things not related to farming and insisting on farming unsuitable crops on unsuitable land. On the other hand countries like Argentina and India will likely have above average crops this year. And that's kind of the point. Sure at any given time you can find areas doing way below their average when it comes to agriculture, and there may very well be areas that are farmed today that won't be farmed in the future, but at the same time you'll find completely different areas doing above average, and new technology will let us grow crops in places where it wasn't profitable to do so before. As I said it's a distribution problem. As to water, it essentially reduces to an electricity production problem. As soon as electricity gets cheap enough relative to the price of water, you can start firing up the desalination plants and get as much water as you want.
      - facepalm 11y ago
        Except, as I said, some previously productive regions were eventually destroyed for good. As I also said, we have only been doing this (modern way of farming) for a miniscule time span. We have no indication whatsoever that it can go on indefinitely. Starvation has happened in the past, so you are simply fooled by your even more miniscule life span in which you didn't experience war or starvation into an unwarranted optimism. It's also not a given that we will have unlimited energy - that science fiction novels exist with that scenario is not proof. Even desalination might have issues, apparently atm they also cause environmental issues. And water is not the only resource needed for farming. Obviously with unlimited energy you could produce lots of food (for example underground or where ever). But we don't have that.
facepalm 11y ago
There have been occurences mass starvation throughout history, so human ingenuity does not always find a way out. I think many Irish people live in the US today because of one of those starvation events not that long ago. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" lists several civilizations that only went down after hundreds of years, sometimes thousands. Our current practices are in effect for less than 100 years, so we really have no idea yet how it will all play out. Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. So we don't know how that will play out in the long run, either. Meanwhile, as you know, world population has exploded. So if our current way of producing food might turn out to be unsustainable, even more people could die.
- eru 11y ago
  > Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. [...] If we were ever to hurt for cheap energy really badly, we could just opt for nuclear. At the moment politics prevents nuclear, but that's not an immutable fact of physics.
  - facepalm 11y ago
    Afaik nuclear is also a limited resource.
    - eru 11y ago
      Not very limited with fast breeders and/or Thorium reactors. See http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_166.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_166.shtml
  - gonvaled 11y ago
    The balancing act that we have to pull whenever free energy (in the form of petrol) starts to show signs of depletion will have to be played not at the pre-industrial 1000 million people level, but at the current 8000 million. That is a very difficult act to pull - specially without the jackpot that petrol has meant for humankind. Can you make the transition to nuclear or to another energy source? Maybe, but that's far from sure. We do not even know if nuclear (or any other energy source) is a good enough substitute for petrol at the global level, not even clear that it is an energy source (it has a much lower eroei than petrol, maybe even negative if you account for disposal costs). Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but that seems far-fetched. And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics problem, meaning it has just been kicked down the road for another while.

gonvaled 11y ago

We have been losing population to starvation since forever. We keep losing population to starvation. We are not able to feed the population of the Earth. We are living above carrying capacity. Worse: we can not change this. It is part of our human nature, probably a defining characteristic of life, at least as evolved here on Earth. A species prefers to produce more offspring and lose some, guaranteeing that at least some of that offspring is going to be passing genes down the genealogical tree. What makes this specially worrisome in the case of the human species is that we have gotten so efficient at extracting resources, that we have been able to fuel an exponential growth without precedent in the history of life on the planet - with the exception of some micro-organisms, which actually are what we are most similar to. Having become so good at extracting resources, and having grown so much in numbers, means that whenever a resource problem arises, the population collapse is going to be fast and furious. I doubt we will be able to keep our technology running in such a catastrophic scenario.

dagw 11y ago
We have been losing population to starvation since forever. We keep losing population to starvation. But that is purely down to distribution problems, not capacity problems. There exists enough food on planet, we're just not very good at getting to the people who need it.
- gonvaled 11y ago
  That is the point: we do not care, we just reproduce. We have been doing that (reproducing over the real carrying capacity, which is what the local environment can sustain) forever. You can argue that we'll get soon better at distributing food, but that is just wishful thinking. And, human nature being what it is, improving food distribution will just lead us to a bigger population increase, keeping us above carrying capacity. There is no period of human history when humanity has managed to sustainable restrain its growth. We go wherever technology can bring us, but always a little bit farther. It is simply not how life works: life overproduces to guarantee delivery. For that scenario that you are proposing to become reality we need to reign on very strong instincts acquired during millions of years of evolution. I am not saying that it can not be done, just that we are not there, that we are not getting anywhere near, and that I think the chances of bringing about that utopia are really slim. Mad Max is way more probable.
  - eru 11y ago
    Please have a look at eg the UN's population growth forecasts. Fertility rates are falling in nearly all countries (or already at sub-replacement levels).
    - gonvaled 11y ago
      Irrelevant. If population drecreases, and you still lose people to starvation, you are living above carrying capacity. Even if that only happens in certain regions. The world is losing lots of people to starvation. We are not able to reign on our instintcs.
      - dagw 11y ago
        you still lose people to starvation, you are living above carrying capacity. By that definition the carrying capacity of earth is zero. No matter how few people there are on earth there will always be some scenario where some guy starves to death because he couldn't get to the other side of the valley where the food was.
        gonvaled 11y ago
        We are losing about 10 million people per year to starvation, and there are close to 800 million undernourished people in the world. I am not talking about a random guy not finding his way to an opulent dinner, but about a systemic proplem.
        dagw 11y ago
        Yes, and that systemic problem is completely unrelated to global food production. We could double production or half the population and people would still starve to death and be undernourished because we are incapable of distributing the food we have to all the people who need it.
- facepalm 11y ago
  "But that is purely down to distribution problems, not capacity problems." Are you sure? There may be or have been superproductive farming areas in the world, but do they last forever? In the US there seems to be a water shortage. The Ural sea is all but dried up. Can you point me to one location where farming is going on in a sustainable way?
  - dagw 11y ago
    The water shortage in the US is caused by a combination of 'wasting' too much water on things not related to farming and insisting on farming unsuitable crops on unsuitable land. On the other hand countries like Argentina and India will likely have above average crops this year. And that's kind of the point. Sure at any given time you can find areas doing way below their average when it comes to agriculture, and there may very well be areas that are farmed today that won't be farmed in the future, but at the same time you'll find completely different areas doing above average, and new technology will let us grow crops in places where it wasn't profitable to do so before. As I said it's a distribution problem. As to water, it essentially reduces to an electricity production problem. As soon as electricity gets cheap enough relative to the price of water, you can start firing up the desalination plants and get as much water as you want.
    - facepalm 11y ago
      Except, as I said, some previously productive regions were eventually destroyed for good. As I also said, we have only been doing this (modern way of farming) for a miniscule time span. We have no indication whatsoever that it can go on indefinitely. Starvation has happened in the past, so you are simply fooled by your even more miniscule life span in which you didn't experience war or starvation into an unwarranted optimism. It's also not a given that we will have unlimited energy - that science fiction novels exist with that scenario is not proof. Even desalination might have issues, apparently atm they also cause environmental issues. And water is not the only resource needed for farming. Obviously with unlimited energy you could produce lots of food (for example underground or where ever). But we don't have that.

facepalm 11y ago

There have been occurences mass starvation throughout history, so human ingenuity does not always find a way out. I think many Irish people live in the US today because of one of those starvation events not that long ago. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" lists several civilizations that only went down after hundreds of years, sometimes thousands. Our current practices are in effect for less than 100 years, so we really have no idea yet how it will all play out. Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. So we don't know how that will play out in the long run, either. Meanwhile, as you know, world population has exploded. So if our current way of producing food might turn out to be unsustainable, even more people could die.

eru 11y ago
> Currently we reap the rewards of the "green revolution", but that is not a sustainable way of farming - it depends on extra energy sources. [...] If we were ever to hurt for cheap energy really badly, we could just opt for nuclear. At the moment politics prevents nuclear, but that's not an immutable fact of physics.
- facepalm 11y ago
  Afaik nuclear is also a limited resource.
  - eru 11y ago
    Not very limited with fast breeders and/or Thorium reactors. See http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_166.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_166.shtml
- gonvaled 11y ago
  The balancing act that we have to pull whenever free energy (in the form of petrol) starts to show signs of depletion will have to be played not at the pre-industrial 1000 million people level, but at the current 8000 million. That is a very difficult act to pull - specially without the jackpot that petrol has meant for humankind. Can you make the transition to nuclear or to another energy source? Maybe, but that's far from sure. We do not even know if nuclear (or any other energy source) is a good enough substitute for petrol at the global level, not even clear that it is an energy source (it has a much lower eroei than petrol, maybe even negative if you account for disposal costs). Maybe everything plays out well and in some decades we are flying our tesla-jets with rechargeable batteries powered by clean australian uranium, but that seems far-fetched. And even then we might have not yet solved the demographics problem, meaning it has just been kicked down the road for another while.