Except that cows are pretty environmentally-unfriendly too.
Sigh. There is no getting around the elephant in the living room: population. Either we control it, or the laws of physics will do it for us.
Sigh. There is no getting around the elephant in the living room: population. Either we control it, or the laws of physics will do it for us.
I expect food production to see a huge revolution in 10-20 years - think something like genetically modified simple organisms that are designed to produce specific nutrients - like specific protein or sugar or fat.
If you can design them to be energy efficient and work in low amount of space in a controlled environment (say a shallow pool of water + UV lamps or something like that) you can have huge factories that stack these "ponds" on top of each other working 24/7 pumping out nutrients.
Then it's just a matter of combining them in to food.
>"a system that produces pure nutrients at up to 220,000 pounds per acre per year (the global record for agriculture is 3,600) at less than 20 cents per pound, all while generating 99% fewer greenhouse gases than conventional farming means." ... "Berry and his team found these organisms. They gave them the ability to take in sunlight, CO2, water, a final ingredient that changes based on the end product, and the ability to secrete a pure nutrient when all these ingredients come together."
...
>there's a company called proterro[2], that's producing sugar, at the third of the price of current agricultural methods - AT 5 CENTS PER POUND!.And they make 30 times sugar per acre as regular agriculture. And at their website , they say they can also make aminoacids - which are the building blocks of protein , so maybe they could also make proteins. that kinda validates essentient's vision , furthermore , their system basically eats CO2 - which is great.
This stuff has to pass massive regulatory and protectionist hurdles. It will be fun to tell all the world's farmers their income will stop and their assets are wothless. Or fight against political groups that want to outlaw or heavily restrict artificial foods.
There are physical limits and laws of thermodynamics that no amount of innovation will be able to fix.
What is the point of continued population explosion? Satisfying some people's belief that reproduction is an inherent right?
People have been crying about overpopulation since forever - like the Pink Floyd song goes "And if you survive till two thousand and five I hope you're exceedingly thin" - we have the least poverty in history and the population is still growing. Sorry to burst your green bubble but we are nowhere near close to thermodynamical limits of sustainability on earth
>What is the point of continued population explosion? Satisfying some people's belief that reproduction is an inherent right?
Yes. This is the perverse reality that most of modern "environmentalist" arguments come down to "what I see as preserving nature is more valuable than people". Sorry buddy but if I had to chose between no more seals or not having children - well at least we have video footage of seals.
There's a classic puzzle that goes like this: you have a jar full of growth medium and a single bacterium of a species which divides twice an hour. One week later the jar is full of bacteria. At what point was the jar half full?
The classical answer is: 30 minutes before the end of the week. But the real answer is that this situation is impossible, because after a week of doubling every 30 minutes the population would be about 10^232 bacterial cells, which is more than the number of sub-atomic particles in the universe.
It's not about thermodynamics, it's about math: exponential growth cannot be sustained in a finite universe (let alone a finite planet). Sooner or later we will hit a limit. The only question is whether that limit will be imposed by the laws of physics or whether we will choose to become the masters of our own fate and impose it on ourselves. Personally I prefer the latter option because the former will almost certainly be very, very unpleasant.
Sooner or later sun will burn out, universe will expand in to nothingness, etc.
Those arguments are pointless - we won't reach those limits within our lifetime even with highest growth projections and who knows what happens after that.
But that's not what OP is arguing - baby seals - ie. "bio diversity" and "wildlife preservation" - is more important to the modern green movement than increasing the standard of living for a large part of human population and hence the enlightened ideas such as forbidding reproduction and limiting resource use.
Yes, in about 5 billion years.
> we won't reach those limits within our lifetime
Between "our lifetime" and 5 billion years there is still a very broad range of possibilities. Maybe you don't care what happens to the next N generations, but I do.
It's not about not caring - it's about not knowing what will and will not be relevant. As I've said before - people have been talking about population explosion since forever - we should be starving from 80s. All these people consistently ignore progress in their predictions.
You don't know what the dominant method for food production will be in 20 years or what will be the dominant energy source - as someone linked above the things I'm talking about are already starting. How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years ? We should deal with problems coming in 10-20 years - we don't have the tools to deal with the longer term than that.
No, that's not true. Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay less than 200 years ago. The oldest human writings are only a few thousand years old. That's the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
> How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years?
Because I can do math. So I can understand that exponential growth cannot be sustained in a finite universe, let alone a finite planet. I can calculate how long we can continue at current (or historical) growth rates before we run into various limiting factors.
For example: the carbon biomass of earth is ~10^15 kg. The carbon mass of homo sapiens is about 10^11 kg. Our current doubling time is about 60 years. That works out to about 600 more years of growth at current rates before the biomass of earth consists entirely of homo sapiens. That's a hard upper bound on how long we have left if we don't slow our growth rate.
Honestly we have no idea how society will look like in 50 years with the advent of AI and such nobody knows what close future holds let alone 100 years - this "we're doing it to save the future" is like people talking how there's going to be unsustainable urban problems in 100 years with horses before the cars were invented - you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable - sorry but as far as problems go those are fairly straightforward on such a long timescale.
That won't help.
Suppose we manage to completely terraform Mars (extremely unlikely in just 600 years) and suppose that the biomass of Mars can be made equal to that of earth. It will only be one more doubling time (i.e. 60 years) before Mars is completely full as well. Then what?
> you think that limits you think matter (like biomass, or planet size, or w/e) are somehow intrinsically relevant and unsolvable
No. I don't know what the limiting factor will ultimately turn out to be. It may be that we will eventually succeed in transmuting matter and turning the entire mass of the universe into homo sapiens. You can do the math on that too. That will get you out to a couple of thousand years. After that we would need to find a way to get around the law of conservation of mass. You have to be a pretty extreme optimist to believe we'll have that figured out by then.
I'm not much in to that "native American wisdom" about how we should be one with nature and how we can't eat money - money = resources + capital + labor = solution to whatever problem you're facing given enough time. As far as I'm concerned we should be working on solutions to reduce our dependence on the ecosystem - climate change is just an a symptom of a bigger problem - the environment we depend on is fragile - the solution isn't praying that everything stays the same and maiming ourselves so we stay within some magical limit they think is going to "appease" the "balance of nature" - we should be working towards replacing it with a more robust systems (eg. like controlled/engineered food production instead of relying on weather, pesticides, herbicides, etc. and hoping all goes well). This is what I mean by regressive thinking - instead of focusing on how these eventual problems could be solved trough innovation their solution is "stop doing whatever we beleive might cause that and hope for the best".
Are you totally not able to comprehend that material gains in human living come at the cost of the extraction of resources from the ecosystem, and that said extraction is literally unsustainable?
Do you not understand that the exponential growth of the last century has had an impact on the planet greater than the rest of the entirety of human existence?
It is impossible to continue the resource extraction we have maintained for the last 20 years, for the simple reason that the climate is already starting to do number for us and this is just the beginning, consequence of said resource extraction.
Unless you like the idea of geoengineering the planet (and no one in their sane mind does) the idea that progress depends on human consumption has to stop.
You are the exact example of when psychologists say that people cannot really comprehend the exponential function.
You don't seem to be able to understand that reliance on the ecosystem is not a good thing - it's inherently unstable anyway - just because we were fortunate enough up to this point doesn't mean that a big event like a volcano, weather or biological catastrophe can't destroy the ecosystem and us with it.
Sea level only matters if we can't develop underwater construction in 100 years - As I've said it's unlikely that even in 20 years we will be using traditional farming as a food source - let alone in 100 years - just like we advanced from hunter gatherer -> farming - we adopted the environment to us - the next step is already happening.
You seem to be stuck in the mindset that just because we can't deal with something now it will be a problem in 100 years. If we had to deal with this issue in 10-20 years I would be worried (it would still be possible but it would require large scale dedicated effort) in 50-100 years it's practically guaranteed to be solved by standard progress.
People have been screaming about overpopulation exponential growth, etc. since forever[1], and it's yet to show any signs of being reality.
The solution isn't running back to the caves and wishing everything stays as it was if we stop burning stuff and stop having children so we can enjoy the views - it's to take control of environment and reduce dependency on inherently unstable factors.
In general this entire mindset that there is "limited resources that we can't go beyond" is completely bogus and proven false over and over again - resources are just things that our knowledge/technology allows us to use to solve particular problems as we create new technology we grow potential resources.
Oil was used as a folk remedy until we learned how to refine it.
Earth becomes physically overpopulated - that's so far in to the future that you can count on realistically colonizing space by then.
A realistic concern is if we can reach innovation fast enough to avoid "rough patches" but long term it's incredibly unlikely that we can't solve technical problems.
Look at any satellite images of the amount of land that is being used by farming in the world. Those places used to be natural ecosystems that no longer exist.
We have already started a mass extinction event from which the level of biodiversity we used to have is essentially unrecoverable.
We are not separate from said ecosystems. Also, what makes you think people's desire to have children trumps the health of the systems we depend on for survival?
Having studied environmental and social science for 11 years, published and achieved multiple "degrees of knowledge" for a solid career base; it was so very sad and frustrating that everyone seemingly persisted to "talk" around the elephant.
It drove me bonkers and was labelled a pessimist by my peers. I left academia 3 years ago and now travel the world, programming and documenting tropical flora and fauna. Best decision I ever made, pity it cost me £20,000 to arrive at it though.
That is damned cool. Tell us more.
I do have to remind myself that it is indeed cool, as some days I just want to pack it all in as I often feel out of my depth. A few months ago I was pulling 20-hour days to "get shit done". I'm not adverse to partnering with the right person to take the strain, in fact I'd welcome it now, alas I'm yet to find someone with similar passions who's also comfortable slumming it in tropics and is confident in high-risk foreign areas.
Waking up to a Tapir in a tropical monsoon is cool, gettin robbed at gun point by narcos whilst rebooting your VM, less so.
Tequila and some venezuelan narcos, those were some good times.
You do now :-)
Links please?
Well, you can milk anything with nipples.
I am genuinely curious.
Was it an attempt at humor? Did you think it would be well received in a forum where conversation tends to be more serious and informative?
Are you aware of the rules and just don't care? Or did you think this comment was especially funny and warranted an exception?
Not trying to troll, and I know I'm putting you on the spot so to speak, but figured if it would be worth it if you answered the question seriously.
And yes, I am aware of the irony that my post isn't especially contributing either.
Yes, I guess I thought my light-hearted comment might be received the way it was intended. Even in a serious/informative setting it's OK to inject a little humor here or there. I really don't think HN is on the brink of devolving into pun threads if that's your concern. If people think a comment is an unwelcome addition to the conversation, downvotes will certainly get that point across.
> Are you aware of the rules and just don't care?
Yes, I'm familiar with the comment guidelines (which certainly don't ban humor) and I'm aware of the "unwritten" rule that HN will usually tolerate only a small amount of levity in comments.
I understand where the pearl-clutching is coming from but I think you've overreacted to the word "nipple."
Fine, lets not talk around it. Bluntly, experience has shown that "population control" boils down to one of two things:
(1) Strong and effective social security networks, which shift incentives and produce declines (often to negative levels) in natural population increase, or
(2) Brutal authoritarian repression, extending (among other things) to either including or incentivizing outright slaughter.
How does social security reduce population? Citation very needed. I think you mean to say first world countries empirically grow slower.
And why does population control need to be brutal? You don't need to kill living people, just don't birth unborn people. Have tax paid contraceptives, tax paid abortion for those that mess up, and tax/fine/jail people that have 3+ babies (having 2 babies per couple is sustainable). Maybe also have a baby making approval process. My home remodel needs to be approved, but I can make a new person without any approval whatsoever? That does't make sense.
If you ignore the law, you go to jail. Your child will be adopted or raised in a foster home. Not killed.