Why do people who say we need fewer humans on the planet always say, "no one says this?"
Literally every discussion about population, pollution, global warming, fusion, farming, or social sciences has some thread where someone says, "there are too many people and no one is talking about it." It's getting tiring reading this martyrdom, and I generally tend to agree with the viewpoint.
But this is not some edgy take. The most populous country on earth enacted policies that seem to support this idea in the 70s.
Some might even call it a “Thiel Truth”.
Child births need to be at around 2.1 per woman if the population is to remain constant. Right now most developed countries are way below that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...
2 countries have less than 1 kid per woman 114 countries have less than 2 62 countries have less than 3 (20 of which are at less than 2.2) 21 countries have less than 4 18 countries have less than 5 11 countries have less than 6
Of the largest 6 (half the world's population): China has 1.6, India 2.3, US 1.8, Indonesia 2.0, Pakistan 3.6, Brazil 1.7.
Your rich cheap-airline flying, consumerist car owner will emit far more than many families in the developing world.
Any ways this assumes that the world resources (land, water, minerals, technology ) are divided fairly in the population. This is definitely not true and the people who managed to conquered distant lands have much more of this available per person. Simply compare per capita stats of Canada v Bangladesh and the answer becomes clear.
I can't imagine maintaining that in anything other than a brutal and arbitrary way. It's very difficult to separate humans from their humanity, and even in countries where birth limits have been tried, we know that it is an ineffective policy and is ultimately cruel.
> Clean, abundant, and without the catastrophic extinction event already underway.
Just take your ideas one step further. Earth is not a home for humans, it is a crucible that seeks to find the most suitable form of life. There's no reason we should expect to succeed, and if we can't, half-measures that only prolong suffering and the failure of our biology are illogical.
A growing population leads to numerous economic, militaristic, and scientific advantages. Why would any country willingly shackle themselves to their detriment
Anyway, i think that it is a crying shame that we're still farming animals instead of growing artificial meat. Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings, i think that would result in a great leap in our conscience, empathy, etc. - it will unleash a great deal of human mental development with natural results in social and economic development.
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
"The world now produces more than four times the quantity of meat as it did fifty years ago"
"The average person in the world consumed around 43 kilograms of meat in 2014. This ranges from over 100kg in the US and Australia to only 5kg in India."
"Meat consumption increases as the world is getting richer."
When the earth has finite resources, why not reduce the amount of resources used per person before talking about population control? Even with less people, you have to draw a limit somewhere on resource usage.
> Anyway, i think that it is a crying shame that we're still farming animals instead of growing artificial meat. Once we finally have artificial meat and thus stop killing sentient beings, i think that would result in a great leap in our conscience, empathy, etc. - it will unleash a great deal of human mental development with natural results in social and economic development.
Are there any realistic timelines on when lab grown meat will be available and affordable? How about lab grown steaks, whole ducks and whole salmon? At what stage do you think people who won't switch to alternatives now would switch?
If meat was priced at its true cost now and existing alternatives were fairly priced, would there be any need to wait for lab grown alternatives?
Wouldn't lab grown alternatives fail to make an impact when they arrive if meat was still heavily subsidised?
Because there's no dependency here, we can talk about both at the same time.
What do you do with the 70B animals we're no longer consuming?
[until the aliens bring tomorrow the mass production lines of cheap lab meat] Because of naturally gradual process of lab meat quality increase and price decrease there will be no point in time when suddenly "we have 70B animals we're no longer consuming "
But that's literally in your scenario. If you don't have an answer, that's fine, because all of this is idealism. I just never see any conversation pertaining to what we do with all the animals.
It seems like it comes down to a substantial culling, as letting them loose would be disastrous for a few obvious reasons.
Second: That's kind of my perspective. Ideas are cheap and easy. Idealism paints the perfect outcome, without the really hard parts of making it happen, or the incredibly complicated network of systems that would be effected by trying to reach the target. These are huge problems; entrenchment is incentivized and reinforced on many levels. We often don't solve problems, we treat symptoms, because it's easier than doing what needs to be done to solve the problems.
The species won't go extinct either, we can still keep some around in their natural habitats and zoos, which are both much nicer conditions than most farms. Preferably we won't keep around the breeds that were created for farming, they just aren't healthy animals.
The next quandaries are what do farm owners, farm workers, slaughterhouses, tanners, textiles, feed companies, agriculture focused veterinarian services and products, etc, do now that they're no longer needed?
I'm sure we'd work something out in terms of retraining and government support for new businesses.
One quote from the article regarding media sharing tips for farmers: Most people do not understand the complexity of raising pigs and getting pork from the farm to their table. That means, “[a] good rule of thumb is to speak to a level a third grader [eight to 10 years old] would understand to ensure that things are not taken out of context.
Also, some species have been altered through selective breeding so much they would have trouble survinging normally e.g. rapidly growing animals that would have difficulty supporting their own weight after the age they would normally be slaughtered.
There would hopefully be more land for wild cows, chickens, pigs etc. to thrive after too.
Hmm, I feel like lots of people say that, because overpopulation has been a large topic of discussion and concern for like 40 years.
10% seems pretty extreme, though.
Not being status quo is probably a bit too much for them.
The exchange of opinions concept does work well for most though.
With the popularity of brainwashing and groupthink, talking out of someone elses butt should be considered an evolution of ventriloquism.
Its a neat trick if you don`t get out much.
I think the opportunity to find a young lady with natural resilience is much higher in AU. Using Mick Jagger as an example, we can populate the planet well into our 70's, so unless you age like a fried turd, there is no hurry.
uh, the very definition of a species is intimately tied to the ability and choice to successfully reproduce..
That same part of others might be the part that’s downvoting you. The reflexive, non-verbal, maybe not even particularly cognitive part of us that run the engine room of our human machine. The part that really likes to reproduce.
One exercise that might help draw the distinction I’m talking about is to pick a part of your body, esp a specific hand or foot or even more specific...select fingers or toes. Then do something totally normal like make some coffee or go brush your teeth. While doing this, pay very close attention to the nuances of motion and coordination of that part, and observe how specific those are vs the rather coarse-grained instruction in your head...if there is one at all. For example, the automatic rolling of the toothpaste cap into your ring finger for storage and the way your pinky is cradling the bottom of the tube while your other fingers close in cadence to squeeze the toothpaste in the right direction. I sometimes wonder if this part of us is responsible for some of that silent hand on the Internet.
Anyway, not sure what this has to do with visibility in Nepal, haha
So 10 to the power of how many generations would that be exactly?
If there are no us, there is no one who cares about our existence. There is no sense of losing something if something doesn't exist.
Why not 5%? or 25%?
Also, how would you chose who gets to stay?
In any case I find it quite hard to justify a reduction of population based on being able to have better sights
That, or an endless succession of airborne diseases that keeps the population isolating itself .
Of course, that’s not to say that it’s impossible to have too many people, or even that decreasing the likelihood of human extinction is necessarily one of the most important goals.
But without stagnation, yes, you have the human-caused problems to worry about, but you also have people working to solve those problems, as well as people working to solve the external problems.
Malthusians do, and have, for more than 200 years. Two hundred years.
Now, if we keep growing our population, then yes, eventually the Malthusians must and will be right. And perhaps that eventually is now. It's worth exploring that, even if Malthusians are like the boy who cried wolf.
But I'm skeptical that we're finally at our and the planet's limit for the simple reason that population is already predicted to go flat and then begin declining very soon.
Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, Russia, China, India, Iran -- all of these are below replacement rate fertility now or nearly there and getting there fast. Much of Latin America is well on its way there too. That leaves places like Nigeria, for example, as having high fertility rates, but even there it's a pretty safe prediction that fertility will eventually go down.
Decreasing fertility correlates very well with GDP per capita, and it's understood how wealth has caused low fertility rates. That dynamic need not be universal, but it's a pretty safe bet.
Meanwhile, Malthusians have been perennially wrong not only because they've failed to predict or accept the reality of low and declining fertility rates, but also because they've consistently failed to predict or accept the market's ability to adjust to demand growth. So far we've always found ways to produce more food and so on -- no, there's no guarantee that we will continue to be able to, but the fact that total population will peak soon then begin declining means we probably won't need too much more in the way of food production revolutions.
Malthusian also complain about pollution but don't seem to understand that more wealth == cleaner environment -- not at first, maybe, but certainly at some point. Just look at Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic: Haitians are so poor that they cut down their tree for firewood, while Dominicans are wealthy enough that they do not -- same island, same climate, different stories. Or look at the U.S.! In the 1930s river fires were so commonplace as to not be news. In the late 40s river fires were rare enough that they made Time magazine's cover. Now they're even rarer. Those are just some examples. Of course, most Americans have no idea how clean the U.S. is because they've not been to, e.g., Beijing, but that's good anyways: we can always get cleaner.
> ... because having as many kids as you like seems to be considered a basic human right. But imagine Earth with a stable 10% of our current population.
If some family wants to have six children, in a country that has below-replacement fertility rates, that won't move the needle. These are macro trends.
What you write comes across as rather ominous: a threat to impose Chinese-style family planning rules. Not only is it a very bad idea (ask China!) but it's also quite tyrannical, and completely unnecessary given the macro fertility trends.
How do you imagine we'll get to 10% of the current population anyways? War? Draconian family planning? Something worse? How much time do you think we can afford to let pass before we reach that 10%? Centuries? Decades?? If you say "centuries", it might happen naturally. Saying "decades" would strongly imply that you must have some truly awful ideas for how to make it happen.
It's only been a few generations since we've had mass literacy.
Genghis Khan and Francisco Pizarro are the few two very famous people I could think of who were illiterate a few hundred years ago.
Even 100 years ago, I've read about successful businessmen who couldn't read.
Historically of course, the rich and powerful would hire scribes to do the reading and writing for them.
When I read "strongly selected" I expect something like lactase persistence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Genetics , where there the genetic correlations, down even to the allele level, have been identified.
EDIT: I just remember. The Cherokee language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language turned a completely illiterate culture into one with more per capita readers than the recently introduced English culture. That's seems like a clear indication that there's no need for evolutionary selection specifically for literacy.
You're confusing phenotype and genotype. The genes for the ability to write include the ones for the citric acid cycle, which I think we can all agree is selected for. Nobody knows what mutations would be necessary to stop antinatalism from catching on, but natural selection will probably be able to find them. If the answer was "humans are now too dumb to talk about antinatalism," then that would happen, although something else could happen as well. (Maybe "humans now love kids way more than previous generations thought possible.")
>I just remember. The Cherokee language turned a completely illiterate culture into one with more per capita readers than the recently introduced English culture.
Yeah, so obviously whatever genes give people the ability to write, from the citric acid cycle to the mysterious neurological stuff, are selected for strongly enough to be fixed in a population that was separated for a long time. You're not really disagreeing with me... I'm saying that "writing genes" are selected for, potentially because of benefits unrelated to writing, and you're saying that the behavior of writing isn't selected for. Those two statements do not contradict.
I don't think there was any strong selection for the ability to write.
How do you know it wasn't a spandrel?
Usually this argument boils down to "everyone I know and like should still be allowed to live, but we should totally get rid of billions of anonymous (poor) people"
But, with magic, imagine we had every technology we have now but with only 10% of the world's population. It _would_ be incredible, you could fly all over the world to your heart's content, your neighbor could buy a big diesel truck, and your friend could all the sushi they could ever want, and the world wouldn't notice. There would be immense open spaces, untouched, able to be enjoyed and the permanent residents, the plants and animals, wouldn't be perturbed.
That sounds pretty appealing to me, maybe it doesn't to you, but that is what someone is talking about, they aren't gleefully suggesting genocide. Now, how would we get there without magic? If I were king the first thing on my list would be educating children, specifically educated girls have many fewer and later children. Other things that drive birth rates down? Increasing quality of life, access to healthcare, and a strong social safety net, none of those things smells like bad things. I hope the next time someone suggests that you assume they mean doing those things over murder.
I would wager that would increase the amount of people having children.
Financially comfortable and well educated families tend to have less children, this is a pattern that has been repeated many times across country and cultural borders.