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...) 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
That’s a moot point. Yes, socioeconomic factors do negatively affect birth rates, but what you don't understand is that even before those socioeconomic factors were in play, male fertility was already on the decline. A good example is Canada. Before contraceptives were popular, before abortion was legal, and before economic incentives for having nuclear families disappeared; they already lost the ability to replenish their population in 1972 (birthrates fell below 2.1), meaning their birthrates were already declining during decades of an optimal socioeconomic environment. ie that’s what it means when the male infertility studies accounted for socioeconomic factors.
1972? So, after the sexual revolution, the pill, emancipaction, the beginning of urbanization (which really started in the early 60s), the rise of automated agriculture, the beginning of women having real career opportunities as part of the work force and both, a rise of the industrial and service sectors of the economy.
All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down. But sure, it was male fertility that caused all of that...
Thats when the sexual revolution happened in the US. As I’ve already mentioned in my previous comment, in Canada it started later than 1972. Even then, the effects of the sexual revolution shouldn’t be immediate, so it’s obvious that something else was at play since birthrates actually started to go down in the early 1950s. It just came to an irreversible head in 1972
> All of which, across the globe, drive birth rates down.
There are still a lot of places where abortion and contraception are both frowned upon and aren’t even legal, yet they still experienced lower birth rates. Again, socioeconomic factors have been accounted for
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>Sure if everyone had one-percenter level resources they'd be more inclined to procreate
When we look at actual billionaires, we don't see huge fertility levels. Maybe on average a bit higher than the average couple today, but nothing really significant. It's not like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have been trying to compete with the Duggars.
The only thing more resources do is allow people to have the number of kids they truly would like to have. Most women really don't want to squeeze 15 kids out of their vaginas, and are generally happy with 2 or maybe 3.
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" ...
Wouldn't most of the so-called "West" already be in the process of depopulation, based on current birthrates, if not for immigration from other regions?
Long term? Yes. Long term as in "by 2100". Until then, the more immediate issue is the aging population, making everything from health care to retirement financing (the public, European-style models), in the current form difficult. This was a topic already discussed in the late 80s to a degree to be part of classes when I was in my very early teens.
Migration helped to mitigate that. Regarding fertility rates so, the developed West is just ahead of the curve. With economic growth and stability, the rest of the world is following the same curve Europe and the US do for quite a while.
I think, that ultimately, global population will stabilize, including individual countries. There will be dips and spikes, as usual, overall so we should be fine as a species.
How to support the elderly in a world where the same GDP is produced by less and less working age people is a question so: using salaries as a basis for social securoty and public health care won't really work as well anymore. Taxing corporations and wealth (as in really wealthy, being a paper millionaire just because you happen to own a house does not qualify) is one option.
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
>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.
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?
No, “Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you are actively fixing it” is _explicitly_ excluding everyone who isn’t wealthy enough to do so.
Try reading your own words once in a while rather than pretending that you intended something all along and everyone else should have the same context in your head.
Sure, there's plenty of inequality and bad[1] resource allocation throughout the planet.
>The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous
We definitely are beyond the carrying capacity of the world, if we want to guarantee a high standard of life for everybody here. 99.9999% of humans will lack the chance of being able to experience the upcoming eclipse from a plane, would you argue that's an unfair scenario?
>Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it.
I absolutely like this comment because that's the way I also go through life, since if one doesn't practice what they preach, one would be just another meek hypocrite, of which we already have an overpopulation of. I can presume, then, that you are doing your part to solve the "greed, fear and distribution" problem you mention, by lowering the amount of resources you consume to one that is typical of what the vast majority of the planet lives on?
Nobody needs drones and a robot pet when there’s still politically unstable regions of the world that could use the energy and care that went into creating such luxuries. [2]
What I'm saying between lines is that almost nobody with a high standard of life would be willing to give up on whatever luxuries they enjoy to give a chance to "some other people in a remote place" which is a very abstract concept and quite detached from one's own reality.
You like drones and robots, right? That's good, not an issue with that on itself. Now give 8 billion people drones and robots, that's where your logic comes down. If we only had drones and robots for 0.1% of the total population, who should get to enjoy them? Then this whole thing gets hairy. And bringing more people into the equation will not alleviate that problem, it would only make it worse.
Unfortunately you keep making it a "you" thing with your argument and are ignorant of the situation. These are robots I use for work that I keep in my house.
There is nothing wrong with that Delta eclipse viewing flight so long as they had mandated direct air carbon capture offsets to offset the flight. The fact that they haven't is the problem, not the flight itself. Take issue with the externalities dumped elsewhere, not on the activity. If you pay the fully loaded costs, by all means, partake in your CO2 emission activity (beef, air travel, etc). Current DAC cost is ~$800-1300/ton of CO2 sequestered. That is the cost of these activities. The fact that people don't want to pay that for luxury activities is the greed, not the activity itself.
Humanity has been living on credit by way of not paying fully loaded costs, in a variety of ways (entitlement programs and economic systems depending on never ending growth, CO2 emissions and cheap energy, plastics, and so on). The bill is coming due, and there will be sadness.
> Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it
I am sure it is highly variable, but I wonder what the cost of negative soil CO2 sequestration techniques like biochar, is these days? Or even just land use improvements to sequester more CO2, seems like lower hanging fruit than DAC.
May be so, since humans are humans and do human lies.
I think in a perfect world that land rehabilitation and land CO2 sequestration projects coupled with solar+wind+nuclear+geo+friends energy would get us to carbon neutral much faster than DAC, but hopefully I am wrong and DAC can be scaled up without exorbitantly high costs.
Often all it takes to get someone into a better life position is listening to their story and finding the space to help as much as you can.
I helped my friend J get out of the woods two years ago, and I’m currently working with my new friends “R” and “M” and “D” (not going to out them) to get them permanent housing or vehicles.
All from just a simple conversation seeing how they were living and taking them through what they need to get back on their feet.
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.
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).
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...) 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.