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I say all of this as a thought experiment. But:

> Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't care.

I mean, if we're making mental jumps to wiping out billions of people - I'd argue that, does it even matter? Ie, in your example human life largely doesn't matter. Human survival maybe, but clearly not billions of lives. I'm not saying this negatively either, just acknowledging what topic we're discussing.

So if we're throwing away cultural norms on what we consider valuable, such as human life, why even care about nature? Our species? Other species? The planet?

It's an honest question. I imagine you could argue that human life is still the most important thing, but we simply can't exist with 7 billion people. Perhaps 6 Billion people need to die.

Regardless, I struggle to be emotionally invested in a situation where I decide 6 billion people die. 6 billion to save 1 billion? That's a tough pill to swallow. It's not like killing 1 person to save a million. Mentally I think I struggle at that thought so much that I'd almost rather choose inaction, passively killing 7 billion people, so I can't feel responsible for the decision to kill 6 billion people.

Interesting thought analysis nonetheless.

>So if we're throwing away cultural norms on what we consider valuable, such as human life, why even care about nature? Our species? Other species? The planet?

We have no issue eradicating mold that enters our homes, bacterial infections, viruses but people don't hesitate to create 800,000 something tons of plastic a day that mostly ends up in the trash, we don't mind pumping 40 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere, we don't mind over fishing, depleting soil, throwing out food that we couldn't be bothered to eat, buying electronics designed to be thrown away after 1-3 years, etc.

We're already wiping out billions of people. We're just making it slow and painful. Cancer rates are increasing decade after decade, climate change is a very real thing that is going to start getting noticeably worse, we're one decent crop failure away from sparking a regional or even world war.

I'm not advocating we gather up 9 out of every 10 people and euthanize them, but it would be more humane than the myriad of slow and miserable deaths we are setting ourselves up for.

The next several decades are going to be quite interesting, and almost certainly not in a good way.

As a species, we have to wake up. We have to get the majority to not only acknowledge the issues we immediately face but to actually try and work on slowing and ultimately reversing them.

We have freemium apps raking in millions and millions of dollars a day but we''re painfully under-funding attempts at renewable energy and carbon sequestration and sustainable manufacturing.

One of the results of "loss of god / religion" (I'm not religious, just saying) is that humans have replaced those myths with "science and nature".

So, its perfectly congruent for true believers to advocate the death of billions if their god is being threatened. No different then fire and brimstone of old testament.

Strangely many such people are proclaimed atheist who don't recognize they have just selected a different mythological system to follow.

In the movie Dr. Strangelove the president was very upset by the idea of choosing who lives and who dies, which is when Dr. Strangelove brightly exlaims "that could easily be done by a computer".

Decades later, Deep Impact doesn't bother with the qualms, and just has the president solemnly proclaim on TV that a computer will randomly select people, on top of a fixed pool of "VIP", and the people watching TV are all just... sad, and hope they get picked. Not one person goes "What? What did he just say?".

This "meme", that a catastrophy destroys all but a selection, is as old as the Bible, i.e. of Noah as well as the Book of Revelations. Flood myths in general are fascinating, some even have "the bad guys" surviving the flood they themselves caused.

edit: I tried to find the "bad guys surviving the flood" one, I'm 99% sure it was on here http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html

But I couldn't easily find it again, it's such a giant page. I think it involved lying to the gods about who caused the flood (or other issue), who then punish the wrong guys, while the actually guilty people survive. Could have been about two island peoples, one good one bad, but I'm not sure, it's been quite a while since I read that page.

> Regardless, I struggle to be emotionally invested in a situation where I decide 6 billion people die.

6 billion people will die. Heck, 7.5 billion will die. Everyone dies. The question is not when, but how, and how do they live their lives.

I think we should pursue a solution not of genocide, but one of mass sterilization. We should choose about 100 million people from all over the Earth that will represent the genome of the next generation of humanity and sterilize everyone else. And contrary to the closet racists' wet dream, this should be done in exactly the opposite way: we should strive to maximize genetic diversity and make sure that everyone has a pretty close relative represented. It would have to be massively automated, driven by genetic data, and highly, highly scientific.

That's the only non-morally-horrendous depopulation solution that I can think of. It would solve our population problem in ~60-70 years, naturally. Humanely I would say.

To some, it might be liberating even. The need to not ever worry about supporting children, or really, about the future at all. They don't have to live with a lower standard of living (by much). They don't have to figure out how to compete with 8, 9, 10 billion other people trying to claw their way up to the western standard of living. The childless could focus on bringing meaning to their lives in other ways, can invest in the next generation in other ways, and can transcend their biological destiny, which seems to be a cruel joke programmed into us from the very first bacterium.

It'd be like creating a living ark within humanity.

And the resources left over, designed to support 8 billion, need only support 100 million. There'd be a plethora of energy and real estate. A lot of the Earth could be turned back to wilderness. And humanity would take a smaller role. By choice. Instead of it being forced on us by the system collapsing on our heads.

Good luck sterilizing people against their will.

TBH I know it's a crackhead plan.

But then again I'm not sure this generation is all enthused about having kids. It costs a lot (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-raising-a-child-parents...), and if there were economic incentives that encouraged volunteering, that might actually get takers.

Jesus, absolutely not.

You don't think that a forced, mass sterilization is morally horrendous?

I am not a humanist. World population has doubled in my lifetime, and when you weigh the tremendous pain and destruction that has caused and will cause, 3 billion extra lives that will witness (or their very close descendants) an unprecedented mass extinction/collapse event due their own sheer weight, I'm not sure that rampant uncontrolled population growth is not the thing that is morally horrendous. Just look what humans have done to this planet in 30 years. Insect populations down 75%, mammals down 60%, the Great Barrier reef is half dead, extinction rates are 1000x normal, habitat loss, trash in the oceans, global warming, climate change, microplastics, mass pesticide use, fuck....it's hard not to view humanity (at least in relation to literally all other life on Earth) through a very, very dark lens.

Yeah, given all this I don't think it's morally horrendous that most people would not be allowed to have kids. They can do literally anything they want with the rest of their lives, but FFS don't have kids.

So you see humans through this dark lens, but advocate for these same humans to decide who gets sterilized, then carry it out forcefully?

I don't see how this happens at all. Dystopian military force? And if someone tried, it'd be a major conflict.

Is it more horrendous than what will happen if we just keep reproducing and using up the earth's resources?

File this under "Things still too radical to say in 2018."

Honestly, your proposed solution goes too counter to human nature to be viable, in my opinion. Not to say it wouldn't work if you could pull it off, just that there's too much going against it.

Human nature is selfish on a per-tribe basis. I think much of humanity's ills stem from our inability to effectively care about more than ~100-1k people. Even if you convinced the world to go along with this, including the inevitable rash of unrest by religious groups and murders/etc by people who feel they were unfairly sterilized, here are a couple questions I have with this plan:

1) Age distribution +30 years out from implementation? Developing nations with declining growth rates (most of them) are facing serious age-related care and resource issues as the largest section of population becomes elderly. The plethora of energy and real estate wouldn't kick in until the sterile group shuffles off, and the preceding ~10-20 years would be a really uncomfortable transition without some serious forced old-people-warehousing solutions. Even from just a "how many care nurses can we really get in here" point of view.

2) How to implement permanent, lasting cultural shift on wealth, growth, and sustainability? The mentality that led us here, that maximum growth and wealth is more important than sustainable growth, would have to be permanently squashed from the human psyche, otherwise it's only a matter of time before the "chosen ones" and their progeny get us right back where we started. I don't think anything is permanently squashable from the human psyche, especially things that lead necessarily to occasional "my tribe has to take a haircut so someone I've never met can improve," due to afore-mentioned tribal nature of humans.

There are more, but I don't have time to think of them. I would like to revisit this later, perhaps.

Personally, I think we need to re-organize society to be more in line with how humans are wired, then build-in rules and solutions for sustainable growth. Like designing society around many more, smaller towns, linked together by internet and services that make sense as national services (like risk pools, transportation networks, etc.) but are as close to self-sufficient as possible in terms of energy, food, and water. I don't know what that society would look like, or how to get there, though.

> Honestly, your proposed solution goes too counter to human nature to be viable, in my opinion.

I know it does. That's why we are well and truly screwed. But to be honest it's the only thing I can think of that would give us even a fighting chance, because a century of 7+ billion humans will absolutely suck this planet dry. BTW there is no such thing as "sustainable growth". It is a contradiction in terms.

I'll refer you to Al Bartlett. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3LryW47B_M

>I know it does. That's why we are well and truly screwed. But to be honest it's the only thing I can think of that would give us even a fighting chance

Agreed. We either have to kill 90%+ of the population or get a similar amount to agree to sterilize themselves.

I am NOT saying we need to start kicking down doors and shooting people or tranq darting them and snip-snip-snipping but unless an alien peacekeeping armada fills our skies with their ships and starts handing out free fusion plants and food replicators and machines to pull the carbon dioxide out of the air that manufactures inert carbon ingots... we're truly screwed.

Tech types are entirely too optimistic, they think just because we will need to figure something out that we will.

Ok, let's say fusion. Let's say someone got a fusion reactor online TOMORROW and that over the next 6 months they found ways to scale and mass produce it.

Now let's say they can start mass producing everything needed on multiple continents while construction companies set to work building all the facilities needed to replace the 60,000 something power plants on the planet. The construction of the buildings alone would take several decades purely to supply all the needed concrete (which itself creates absurd amounts of carbon dioxide).

So great, we create a solution to our energy problem which would let us drastically reduce our carbon emissions but under realistic conditions it takes us decades to convert fully to that energy, still spewing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year which would continue to worsen weather conditions, further acidify the oceans, likely lead to crop failures, kill more species that can't handle even modest temperature changes...

Sigh.

Only on HN can you find a thread discussing the merits of eugenics. These are not new ideas, in fact they were popular among 19th century intellectuals until those ideas culminated into some of the worst atrocities in recent human history in Nazi Germany.

There is no such thing as a "non morally horrendous solution," giving the power to decide who should procreate and who shouldn't to a single group or "algorithm" violates one of the most basic freedoms that we as humans have.

It's not gonna happen, most people still don't grasp the stakes at play nor how they are contributing in the worst ways possible.

On one side you have sometimes a bit too righteous vegans getting their third child, going "I'm saving the planet by teaching my children the right way to live!"

On the other side, you have nationalist sentiments going "I need to get as many children as possible or else our ancestry is dying out/our people are being replaced by foreigners!".

Throw in a good bit of religious anti-contraception and abortion sentiments, heavily propagandized among the poorer parts of the world, and the end result is still the same: Unchecked population growth due to large parts of humanity still seeing procreation as some kind of quantity contest where everybody wants to become the next Genghis Khan [0].

At this point, the only thing I'm unsure about is how far we gonna take it before nature is gonna cull the herd globally, but I seriously doubt we'll ever make it past the 10 billion before that's gonna happen.

[0] https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-ha...

If someone is determined to be an example of sustainable living, having extra kids might be productive, even very much so, as it helps the signal-to-noise ratio of good values spread faster in the population; think of it as a multiplier. The actual weight of having more people is a rounding error compared to all the extra people who on top of it have questionable ethics and morals all around (most people including or especially westerners. Sure, poor people in developing countries are hopeless, but people from rich countries have more leverage used to exploit others.)

> as it helps the signal-to-noise ratio of good values spread faster in the population

This only works if the "don't care" population doesn't outgrow them. You are pretty much betting on speeding up, outcompeting them, but that in itself is only contributing to the overall problem.

Especially considering that the "don't care" approach requires less effort, as in time and resources for the individual, thus is more likely to be practiced succeed and given on to the children, of which they very likely will have more.

Because even children are something that needs to be "invested in" to actually meaningfully contribute when they are adults, instead of being another "net negative" to the sustainability of humanity on this planet.

> We're ruining this planet multiple ways for not only ourselves but nearly all other species

Totally and absolutely agree here.

> Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't care.

Also totally agree here

And here's some real thought experiment stuff I've been doing. So basically, should we continue this (unchecked population, unsustainable resource depletion), something has to give right? That's an absolute fact. Our pace of reproduction and resource use simply can't go on forever, and that's where things will get interesting. Will later generations (think 1,000 years+) have adapted a bit better? (E.g., in the future polluting the ocean for example is a crime on the scale of kidnapping or something similar).

I mean the fact at the end of the day is, this can't be sustained. Something is going to have to give in the way we live, eat, have kids, etc (and by we I mean all earthlings, I'm aware that the US reproduces at a fraction of the rate of emerging/frontier countries).

It's a really interesting problem with no clear solutions

> throw away enough spoiled food to feed every hungry mouth on the planet

In Somalia, we shipped containers full of rice and much of it was stolen by warlords. Yet, if we send troops, you'd scream anti-war. If we don't send troops, the rice gets stolen and people starve.

Perhaps inconsistently, you complain that there are too many people, but then decry us for not feeding all of those people. You complain about carbon footprints, yet somehow, excess food in San Francisco needs to be sent to people in Bangladesh. How does that happen? On a ship perhaps? Maybe sailboats? We'll need refrigeration. Solar? We could shanghai a battalion of fat people to row it across the ocean?

> 90% of us just need to immediately cease to exist

Other than mass murder, what do you propose we do? You're anti-war, so we can't use that to reduce the population. You complain about people starving, so clearly that isn't a means to handle the issue. I'm at a loss. Perhaps mass sterilization of undesirables? I think we tried that a while back and that didn't turn out too well. Birth control? Maybe, but most humans actually want to reproduce and have families.

> excess food in San Francisco needs to be sent to people in Bangladesh.

Most of that food in San Francisco is coming from other countries to start. The U.S. imports 50 percent of fresh fruits, 20 percent of fresh vegetables and 80 percent of seafood.

We EXPORTED 133 billion dollars of food in 2017, the bulk of that being soybeans, beef and poultry.

Neither of these practices are sustainable and the US isn't alone in this practice. People don't want a can of corn that was grown locally in the past year or two, they want a fresh cob grown in the past few weeks which has to be shipped from another hemisphere. They don't want frozen fruit, they want to go to the grocery and pick over visually appealing fresh fruit that just finished its trip from China to their local retailer in Bumsville, Idaho.

Did you know that in the U.S. alone the cattle we raise eat enough grain to feed a BILLION people? The average cow will eat EIGHTEEN TONS of feed per year. Don't get me wrong, I love a hamburger or some beef sausage on my pizza but...

If it cheers you up, the void doesn't care. None of this matters on cosmic scales. Or, depending on your philosophy of choice, you'll get a chance to go ahead and do this again eventually.

-your friendly neighborhood Nihilist.

I broadly agree, but I think you should drop the whole notion of killing any significant portion of the human race from your rant. It’s not going to happen and it only serves to distract from a necessary conversation.

losing 90% of humans still leaves 10% of humans. so 10% of problem. don't be that guy. be a guy who works toward a solution for the root-cause. i'd expect people in an it/hacker community to get that :D guess we're all 'those humans' after all eh :D

Well, there are things you can do.

Earth Strike is one such very recent phenomenon that has organized that directly addresses failures of capitalism that is and has caused environmental collapse. They have direct demands (unlike Occupy that had none). They have direct action days already organized (January 15, 2019 ; April 27, 2019 ; August 1, 2019 ; September 27, 2019).

The group already has international interest and collaboration. Noam Chomsky has also given his blessing ( https://mobile.twitter.com/FleshTurtle/status/10620656342158... ).

https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthStrike/

http://earth-strike.com/

https://discordapp.com/invite/JAqJ7tB

And what do you intend to do via your Direct Action? No clue in the links you've given.

This org was formed 2 weeks ago. Many of the things are still up in the air, along with what exactly to do and how to go about it.

However, actions are being considered as: marches, protests, strikes, walk-outs, and non-violent protest based actions.

I know a similar group Extinction Rebellion blocked all major 5 bridges in London, over the same goals of Environmentalism.

Direct action these days just means walking around with signs.

No one can be bothered to learn what the term means so it’s just become a buzzword.

You know what would be more depressing? Actually a pandemic which wipes of 90% of the humanity and by chance, leaving the current infrastructure of nuclear plants, armies, satellites at the hands of untrained or a very limited set of people. If you think we(humans) are the problems, just wait till one of these get out of control and destroy the locality in which it happens. It's depressing, yes but getting rid of humans actualy isnt the solution, not after all the "changes" we have made to the planet.

Which guy? Thanos?

Thanos was merciful by comparison since he only wanted to kill 50%...

You would cull 6.5 billion people because they like fashion and video games and are wasteful?

When it happens I hope you aren't swept up since we are going to need people who have the answers to everything.