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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

My worry is that at some point rich countries will start increasing in population again.

In the past we thought that overpopulation is going to be a big global problem. It turned out that rich countries naturally ended up having fewer and fewer children. This stabilized their populations. And now we expect that this trend will continue.

But why? What's to say that some shift in society won't trigger another population growth in rich countries? Then what?

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A shift in society that triggers higher population growth is actually more likely than you might think due to evolution. Groups that have cultural norms that increase fertility rates will steadily increase as a fraction of the population. As long as those groups can pass down their beliefs to their children with high probability, evolution will see those groups eventually become dominant.

A good example of this would be the Amish population, which has very good retention and fertility rates leading to quite high population growth.

Why is that a worry? Half of the land on earth is a desert, and 70% of earth is covered by ocean, most of which is also a desert. If we had enough people in rich countries who would want to spend their money on moving to new places, we would already have floating cities and many more desalination plants, and those places simply by growing food for themselves, changing their local climate to a nicer one, and by contributing to science, would solve the climate problems we are going to face.

A couple of years ago, i myself would downvote my comment above, as it is a complete heresy from a standpoint of someone who believes that people are ruining everything they are touching, and the world was so much nicer before technology, and i thought that simply having less people would solve climate change issues.

But unfortunately that's a very naive view. Even if all people were removed, arctic have already started melting, and it will continue releasing more and more CO2 and methane from it's huge deposits.

Having orders of magnitude less people have been tried already, and that didn't help mammoths and all the other animals that were driven to extinction by small groups of people.

Having no people at all have been tried too, and that was not particularly helpful for dinosaurs, that got killed by a meteorite, which can be stopped by a larger civilization than what we currently have.

In short I am lucky that i understood, that the belief that it is possible to have too many people, technology is harmful, and that we should go "back to nature", is a harmful and unfounded idea. But i'll be happy to listen to arguments supporting it if you have any:

I don’t see anyone else in this thread arguing that we should abandon technology and go back to nature. That seems to be an argument you’re having with yourself.

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