Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

World isn't overpopulated. I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

    >You can't just extrapolate a trend at any given moment indefinitely.

I assume the model probably looks at chances that offspring of Muslim parents share parents religion.

    > fertility rate of 1.7 isn't the same as 'not reproducing' and doesn't imply 'going extinct'.

When you have countries with median age 40+, you know their health care and other systems are also struggling. The lower your fertility the older your society, the older your society, the lower your fertility. Can't attract immigrants? You are fucked basically.

View on HN

> I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

We have around 7 billion people now. At the current growth rate of about 1%/yr the biomass of human beings will exceed the current weight of the planet Earth around the year 7200.

Not long after that this hypothetical growing humanity would collapse into a black hole under its own weight.

It'll already be quite cramped in the year 5400 with 1% growth. We'll have 5 people for every square meter of the surface of Earth (we have 510.1 trillion m^2). That's about the density near the front-row of a standing concert.

So you agree, no hard limits?

it's a joke people.

Placing the people isn’t the problem. Feeding them is.

My main concern with overpopulation isn't how many people the world could support as a maximum, I'm sure it's very high, it's how many it can support without dramatically degrading the environment.

An ageing population has negative consequences, sure, we'll just have to manage them. Allowing the population to increase indefinitely isn't a solution though, it's just kicking the can down the road until you do hit a hard limit, and then you're in _real_ trouble.

All the good land is now dedicated to farming. What's left is the stuff that is hard to grow on; too rocky, too cold, too north for any light, too dry.

It turns out the oceans are the opposite of robust, for how large they are.

The economy of N. America depends on building cheap housing, to attract more immigrants, so they can work building housing, to sell to new immigrants. I have nothing against immigrants. Just pointing out how the economy really works, despite what a small handful of people in a booming (but slowing) tech sector feel about what drives the economy - it's the housing market.

That's a humongous assertion about the US economy and not at all in line with the data. Construction is only 4.0% of the GDP, and the lump of finance and real estate (renting, reselling mixed in with the entire stock market) is 20%.

>The economy of N. America depends on building cheap housing, to attract more immigrants, so they can work building housing, to sell to new immigrants.

As described, that would fall into the 4%.

https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gdp-industry

The housing market is not really what drives the economy. It is where a massive amount of credit has been funnelled in the last few decades, though. We do need to change how our macro-economy functions, but unfortunately politicians and most of the economists advising them are oblivious to the critical role that credit plays.

>World isn't overpopulated. I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

Yes there most certainly is a hard limit on how many people this plant can support. We have increased it, and continue to increase that limit with technology at a faster rate than reproduction but there are social trends that are seeing that progress rolled back.

Anti-GMO, Organic, and several other social trends in food production means the amount of land, water, and other supplied needed to a feed a person is growing not reducing. With out Advanced Farming, pesticides, GMO Crops and other advancements we would have exceeded the planets ability to provide long ago.

Now that there is a strong incentive to produce organic non gmo food, technologies will be developed to increase crop yield given those constraints (in addition to existing permissible technologies in organic farming such as drip irrigation, tractors and: https://interestingengineering.com/video/this-flamethrowing-...). Sure, yields would always be higher if gmo and chemical pesticides were allowed, but in the long run we can still expect yields to increase.

GMO is not just about increasing yields but also getting crops to grow in wider more diverse climates, something we may very well need with Global Warming

Take for example the Semi-dwarf wheat that has been claimed to save billions of people and makes up pretty much all wheat grown today.

This adversion of GMO is not based in science but rather F.U.D. I find it amusing that many people that are Anti-GMO are also very very concerned with Climate Change, and laugh a people that question climate change for being "anti-science" then then spread all kinds of lies and misinformation about GMO...

> I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

Humans through our metabolic process generate waste heat and Earth can only radiate so much so that does put a hard cap, albeit one much higher than people generally image, but a cap nonetheless. If we assume only the heat generated by our metabolic process that puts the limit over 250 trillion[0] but if we account for energy for food and industrial purposes that puts the limit closer to 10 trillion[1].

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19441/what...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA

The world is overpopulated. Humans have already eliminated as many species as other great extinction events. Our industrial activity has changed the Earth climate. There is very little wilderness left anywhere. The forests are getting clear cut and eliminated. We have exceeded the Earth's capacity to support us already and there is no end in sight, unfortunately. Humans are the disease and unless we learn to live sustainably (as opposed to infinite expansion), the life is going to get worse for every subsequent generation and we are toast in the end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com