Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

The Hacker News and geek community is weird. Ask them about reaching Mars or fusion and they say it's inevitable. They're unqualified good results.

Suggest we have fewer children for a few generations and consume less and it's absolutely impossible, against human nature. The One Child policy proves it.

We idolize people who change the world as entrepreneurs but say one person can't make a difference in changing culture.

Yet many cultures have chosen to lower birthrates through peaceful, voluntary means resulting in prosperity and stability. On a personal level, I've lowered my footprint by about 90 percent in a few years according to online calculators and every change improved my life. I figure most westerners could drop 75 - 80 percent with just the low-hanging fruit, improving their lives -- buying less junk, wasting less food, living closer to family, camping instead of visiting Timbuktu.

Changing course is a matter of belief and choice far more than technology. While it's not monolithic, this community seems to choose to believe living sustainably is harder than space travel. I'd argue space travel is more attainable when we aren't pushing the Earth's limits to sustain life and human society.

You aren't wrong but to me you are focusing on the wrong things. As you say, the west is already dropping the birth rate and being more and more focused on sustainability, etc. Eventually, it will get there. Change takes time.

The big problem is the 3rd world. People there don't a have a choice. They don't want their family to starve. Women are largely forced into a reproduction role only. But we know that the way to reduce birth rate is to educate women and give them jobs and careers. We know that if we can create stable jobs in the 3rd world, they will stop clear cutting forests. To me, that is where the billionaires should be putting their money. If we raise the global standard of living enough, our high population problems will slowly revert.

"They don't want their family to starve."

We know how to stop that. We don't have to sentence people to subsistence agriculture. When you know better, you do better, and we know better.

We can farm in ways that build high carbon soils. We can do this even in the 3rd world. Teach people the proper techniques.

It's nonsense to claim that we just have to accept this kind of collapse.

"Teach people the proper techniques."

I read quite a long article once, it was about efforts to teach Iraqi farmers how to use modern techniques and modern equipment.

The main problem they encountered wasn't conservative mindset. No, the farmers were willing to try something new.

It was missing infrastructure. Once you start using any sophisticated equipment, you need repairs, distribution of spare parts, good documentation in local language etc. Such a system is not easy to set up in a really foreign country, much less so if security is problematic.

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