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Comment by pietrovismara | Hacker News Reader

You know, we could instead revisit the concept we have of growth. Instead of growing for the sake of it, like a tumor, we could define what kind of growth we want and in what direction, and see if it's compatible with our resources. Do we really need growth or do we need happiness? Once we scientifically solved major health issues does it really make sense to keep growing indefinitely? Couldn't we just put a limit to our population and enjoy our fully automated utopia?

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> we could define what kind of growth we want and in what direction

The best proposal so far is growth with speed of light in all directions.

> Do we really need growth or do we need happiness?

What about the people who are not happy when our knowledge about world, and the number of populated planets does not grow or does not grow fast enough?

> Once we scientifically solved major health issues

The two greatest health issues are senescence and limited capability of learning new things, when we solve those we'll need even more people to create art so that we don't get bored, and to develop new technologies so that we do not die when sun explodes in couple of billion years.

The population of Europe is already declining and other continents are likely to follow as their standard of living increases. Average fertiliy across the world has been in decline for about 50 years now and has halved over this period [1]. If the trend continues we will simply run out of people and go extinct.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

> we could instead revisit the concept we have of growth

You say 'we' like humanity wasn't 7 billions or so completely autonomous actors.

This would be a more accurate sentence: '7 billions autonomous actors could decide to act as one, and the act could be lowering its growth rate'.

You see, it simply won't happen.

First of all, it's not 7 billions sentients but rather a handful of government. Furthermore, humanity at the moment already agrees blindly that the only way forward is reckless growth, if we all managed to agree on something without even knowing why, perhaps we can also agree on something more rational.

> rather a handful of government.

Which are mostly democracies, or sort of. China, Russia and North Korea apart, every big population center is governed in a way or another threw a certain form of consensus.

> humanity at the moment already agrees blindly that the only way forward is reckless growth

Again you talk as if humans were a single body. You're not agreeing blindly on 'reckless growth', as far as I can tell, and you're far from being alone in that case.

Humanity speaking and thinking as one is just a dream (you're free to dream, thought!).

Putting a limit on population would imply a dystopia to most.

Not really, just some common sense and shared culture.

You are welcome to take VHEMT’s path. I want kids.

You didn't get what I mean. We need to foster a culture that prevents reckless growth by discouraging having more than n children per family. I'm talking cultural peer pressure, not imposition. You can have as many children as you want (if you so selfishly want to behave), the important is that the majority of the population understands that they're not doing a favor to their fellow humans by having more than n children.

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