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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> Such events are necessary to keep human population under a manageable number.

Is there any evidence for this assertion?

It's really more of a philosophical position, isn't it? That isn't to say it's correct, but what would "evidence" even mean in this context?

Philosophical positions that you can't defend are mental masterbation without a payoff at the end. They aren't worth the time required to post them on this site.

Ok, but what about philosophical positions that CAN be defended? For example, your statement is a philosophical position in itself, no? A position, I assume, you believe to be "defensible?"

The answer to 2+2 has an infinite number of wrong answers. Finding the correct way to answer the question gives us a tool in our tool box that we can use to add any 2 numbers.

Through defensible positions even if we ultimately believe the conclusion is wrong we learn new ways to reason about life and the world around us. New tools to inform our interaction with the world or at least new thought processes to communicate with our fellow humans.

The bald statement that 2+2 = 17 or even that 2+2=4 is worth nothing if you can't explain why you think its correct.

Well evidence would be something like "over time these countries have had reduced quality of life over the past decade, because of population growth".

But it seems like the opposite is true. Quality of life is still massively improving basically everywhere.

We are not running out of resources.

Which part, that the events are necessary or that we have to keep human population to a level that the planet can currently support?

The former. At our current consumption levels/technology, we are obviously above our planet's current carrying capacity.

This is not controversial. We are living on borrowed time - our civilization currently relies on the consumption of non-renewable resources, and the non-sustainable consumption of renewable resources.

Even if this is sustainable for 10, 20, or 100 years, it is not sustainable for longer time horizons.

It's worth pointing out that for developed economies like the US, UK, and Japan, the amount of per capita energy usage is the lowest it has been in decades:

https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/0784d9d63336606d4ca025...

This may be at least in part due to the shifting of energy-intensive industries to countries like China, but it does show that countries can continue to grow their GDP (per capita) while dropping their energy usage per capita, which bodes well for the future.

It's not a given that such events are necessary because human population growth has already slowed down and will continue doing so as more of the world becomes developed. Furthermore, technological advancement can increase the number of people the planet can support. So, while there is definitely some population strain, it's far from certain that human overpopulation will result in catastrophe without events like this.

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