Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

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?

Jesus, absolutely not.

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.

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