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Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

True. What upsets me is that publicly accepted solution to this seems to be "lets breed more babies" as opposed to "lets change our way of thinking as we get older". WTF? I refuse to accept the idea that I'm predestined to get slower, dumber and more conservative as I get older.

I also believe that instead of overbreeding we should find ways to feed the existing 6 billion or/and shrink to a more sustainable number.

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Your medical expenses will grow as you get older, even if your thought processes don't ossify.

Sidenote: I don't think "conservative" is an appropriate term here; in fact, I don't like the word in almost any context. Desiring to enrich oneself and/or being careful with one's money do not correlate usefully with, for example, opposing abortion; libertarians and the CDU-type ideology opposed to libertarianism (Roosevelt, Chesterton, Dorothy Day, etc.) are both refutations of that.

As far as population goes, we are not close to the carrying capacity of the planet. The only starvation in the modern world is in extremely undeveloped countries governed by the likes of Robert Mugabe; I don't know what a fully-developed Earth's carrying capacity at American or at European levels of consumption would be, but I'm unwilling to guess, since I'd probably low-ball the number severely.

Malthus was right in one sense, and there are real examples of Malthusian crises in the late 18th century (that's probably where the French Revolution came from, in particular); but these days, land in the Malthusian sense is expanding faster than population is -- _much_ faster. And remember, too, the (very Y-Combinator-y) point that each new person brings a new mouth to feed, but also a new pair of hands...

As far as population goes, we are not close to the carrying capacity of the planet.

There is space available!? Well what other option could there be other than to fill it with people? I mean, clearly, the human race can't shout 'we win!' until we are unable to physically fit another person on the streets, right?

What I mean is not "physical room for people," it's "exploited versus un-exploited resources." It's not as if we're running out of room for farming -- and even if we were, it's not as if we're managing the oceans in anything that vaguely resembles a serious, competent fashion. Earth is much larger than we tend to think, and much more empty (remember how if the population of the Netherlands lived at New York density, everyone in the country would fit in the "dongle" of southern Limburg that borders on Belgium). In other words, we can afford to worry about more urgent things -- torture, for example. (Not just American; how about the Uzbek dictator who boils prisoners alive, or of course the Chinese?)

Additionally, there may be a difference in my values relative to yours: I believe that people are intrinsically valuable, and that therefore it is better to have more people in the world than fewer people in the world, all other things being equal.

But why should all the resources be exploited? Why not, you know, just use what we need? And why should the people in the Netherlands live at the same density that people in NYC do anymore than vice versa? I don't see what 'value' people have over anything else, say, fish, deer or even trees, mountains, etc -- I say we leave some room for the other things that occupy the earth and not just claim it all for ourselves because we can.

Then here we part company: as a Roman Catholic, I believe that human beings come first -- although we are to be stewards of the earth rather than masters of it.

> As far as population goes, we are not close to the carrying capacity of the planet.

Very debatable and, according to my definition of "carrying capacity", not true. As far as I know the planet can't even take the hit of every Chinese starting to eat as much meat and fish as his American counterpart.

And even at the current rate of consumption our non-replenishable resources are disappearing: starting from oil and going all the way to forests, fisheries and clean water. Seems like we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth.

On consumption of meat and fish: Americans overconsume meat anyways, IMHO, and the oceans at present are _severely_ depleted due to the use of trawler fishing and the complete disinterest of the world in responsible management of the oceans. I doubt that this would remain the case with better management -- although I neither have statistics in either direction here, nor have a lively interest in maintaining them.

On non-renewable resources: fish populations I mentioned above; forests are renewable by definition, being made up of plants capable of reproduction -- although there's a huge gulf between responsible forestry and slash-and-burn farming. If pure water was a non-renewable resource, the purity of the world's water supplies would not be capable of going up, only down; but water purity in the United States has increased since industries stopped dumping pollutants indiscriminately, and since the discontinuing of, for example, DDT use, so pure water is not a non-renewable resource.

Therefore, and continuing my point about uncultivated lands, unmanaged oceans, and starvation due to political and not economic problems, I do not see any reason to believe that we are at or close to the planet's carrying capacity.

Let me also add that oil is probably not biological in origin (otherwise, how could depleted oil reserves occasionally refill spontaneously?), and that it has no ecological role that I'm aware of to begin with, given that it's generally rather far underneath the biosphere.

And, if the Earth were already at or close to its carrying capacity, shouldn't we have begun to notice trouble with resource availability in situations other than terrible political regimes (and government-induced price bubbles like the reprehensible US maize-ethanol subsidy)?

> forests are renewable by definition, being made up of plants capable of reproduction

Ever heard of soil erosion/degradation? Check out what happened to Easter Island. It takes thousands of years to turn a desert into a jungle, so in practical terms forests are non-renewable.

> pure water is not a non-renewable resource.

Again, on a practical timeline clean fossil water is unreplenishable: where do you think it comes from? And what do you think happens to a lake near an abandoned gold mine?

Several of your points have nothing to do with the topic, i.e. having enough resources to sustain the ever growing population: what difference does it make either oil is biological in origin or not?

@old-gregg:

> "Ever heard of soil erosion/degradation? Check out what happened to Easter Island. It takes thousands of years to turn a desert into a jungle, so in practical terms forests are non-renewable."

On forests, my point was that a forest is not the same kind of thing as a coal mine: it can regrow as well as fade out. Incompetent forestry can destroy a forest, of course; but forests can be managed, as was done in Europe historically, or enriched.

Archaeologists and ecology-oriented companies have recently begun to popularize a soil-enrichment technique, "terra preta do índio," which was first practiced by the Amazon Basin civilization of South American Indians, and which uses charcoal and fertilizer (or any source of bioavailable carbon and nitrogen; the Amazonian Indians used fecal matter) to transform barren soil into a rich loam that regenerates at a rate of about a centimeter a year. This is a process that can be done very quickly -- especially with contemporary technology -- and the soil is usable in a more enriched form in about a year, requiring no further fertilizer or other forms of enrichment. See _1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus_ for details; its author goes so far as to argue that the Amazon forest as we think of it is a product of the now-lost Amazonian civilization, and is essentially an overgrown garden rather than a wilderness.

> "on a practical timeline clean fossil water is unreplenishable: where do you think it comes from? And what do you think happens to a lake near an abandoned gold mine?"

You had said "clean water," not "clean fossil water." I agree that fossil water is non-renewable, but water in general can be purified. Even sites like abandoned gold mines, and damaged bodies of water around them, can be cleaned up; I'd further add that if water is so cheap that it's not profitable to reclaim polluted lakes, we're not near the limits of the world's water supply.

> "Several of your points have nothing to do with the topic, i.e. having enough resources to sustain the ever growing population: what difference does it make either oil is biological in origin or not?"

My point on oil: if it's not biological in origin, there may be an awful lot more of it than we thought. (And even then, with nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and increasingly solar power, we can survive without oil; its merits are its abundance and its high energy density.)

* Also, for Easter Island, see a New Scientist article on the subject (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125621.100-easter-is...); Jared Diamond's account may not be accurate at all. I would also add that the people of Easter Island lost the ability to read their writing system (Rongorongo), which tends to predict a very large range of problems. Maya civilization collapsed shortly after losing the ability to read their script, too -- but it collapsed in an environment that did not have any ecological degradation.

Also, do you have anything to say about changes to brain chemistry and physical fitness as one ages?

> I refuse to accept the idea that I'm predestined to get slower, dumber and more conservative as I get older.

Do you also accept that magic fairies stop your brain from being physiologically affected at all by the process of aging?

I believe there is already a introductory video to this: Logan's Run.

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