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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

We farm instead of hunt & gather on land since a long time.

The same has to happen in the oceans.

We already have ponds for growing non saltwater fish. Farming cattle fish in the ocean would be interesting!

Nations in the far east already have have vast fish farms in the ocean (along the coasts). They are huge and produce huge quantities of fish -- a substantial percentage of fish consumed. But there are species that people like to eat that cannot be farmed economically or at all. So they are caught in the wild.

There are already many aquaculture pens in the ocean near Port Lincoln, South Australia, often for tuna. You see them from the air when flying over. Here's a photo of what they look like:

https://www.cleanseas.com.au/custom/files/media/our-farm-2.j...

The issue is that many of the desirable farmed fish like tuna and salmon are carnivores. Farming them still requires catching mass quantities of less-commercially-useful fish along with the issues that has.

Edit: I should say part of the issue. There are other ecological concerns with farmed fish.

They exist already. https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/fishonafarm/

Ya, no. Nothing wrong with hunting straight from nature. The key word is sustainable.

If you live on the ocean, you have every human right to fish fo nourishment. The issue here is militarized mass scale industrial fishing, illegally raping reassures to feed foreign people, mostly landlocked people sushi rolls and fish fillet.

What we need is a culture that eats local. Its a consumption issue. Farmed fish are most of the time also destructive to the environment, they are fed less than ideal and sustainable feeds, are not as healthy to eat, and most importantly are not healthy and happy fish, they are slaves in horrible life cycles.

So what are the city people going to eat if it has to be local?

My perspective is that there are simply too many people and they are leading an increasingly modern (high consumption) lifestyle.

I would tend to agree. Cities breed lots of problems. Social, economic, environmental, every kind you can imagine. And it creates very very small communities outside those cities which comes with its own problems too (think small town sheriff's tyranny type stuff - yes there's racial profiling etc in big cities as well, didn't say it was a unique problem). Bigger numbers do have an advantage but there is definitely a number that is too large.

I would advocate for lots of intermediate size cities but that doesn't seem to be what anyone in power wants.

Also, are you advocating for Thanos like mercy here? ;)

Not just that the settlement size is not right, but that the planet can only support so many people. Sure, they estimate it can support up to 11 billion. But that assumes increases in technology and commercial agricultural as well as consumer changes (like little meat). This also doesn't take into account it being sustainable or not.

We need a shrinking population and less consumerism. We are not currently sustainable (and unlikely to become so anytime soon).

> the planet can only support so many people

I think this is a big, and very sad misunderstanding.

Back in humanity's hunter gatherer days, we truly lived off what the planet spontaneously produces, and that sustained world population of something like 50 million people.

The we invented farming, and all sorts of technology, and now we're 7000 million.

So how do those 6950 extra millions survive?

I think the best way to think of it is that they (we) produce their (our) own food!

Each mouth to feed also comes with two hands to produce food. The planet doesn't have to do the work. We make our own food.

This is wrong. By this logic the planet could support infinite people, which is clearly impossible.

> The planet doesn't have to do the work. We make our own food.

We don't just conjure food from the ether, it requires space and resources, both of which are finite. We're already using half of the world's habitable land for farming, and we need to retain some wild spaces to perform all of the ecological functions that farmland can't. There's a limited amount of fresh water, etc.

And food isn't the only bottleneck. If the current population all lived a modern western lifestyle, we'd be emitting an even more unsustainable amount of carbon.

The planet is a closed, finite system, so by definition there must be some upper limit to what it can support.

So why do the experts estimate the planet can support between 8 and 11 billion people?

2 hands to produce it? No. Modern agriculture relies on machines for most things. The high yield monocrop pattern is how we feed so many already. I firmly believe that increasing people will decrease suitability.

If they have such a high population and low production that they have to steal other peoples food sources, they're an existential threat to everyone else. What they will eat has been determined, and it's not likely to make the transition to local. So other people's starvation and the mass destruction of habitat will continue to be their externalities.

Much of the fish in the US is imported from China. So it's not just what "they" are eating.

Do me a favor and post the latest figures on US domestic fish vs imports, where the imports break out to on a country-by-country basis, along with separating out US domestic fish that are exported to and then imported from China in a processing loop (used for cheaper processing, not actually caught or farmed by China).

That way we can better analyze the context of what "much" actually means.

You can do that if you'd like. It's supposed to be 30% of seafood is actual Chinese imports.

> Ya, no.

Please don't do this.

> are not healthy and happy fish

Citation needed that wild fish are "happy".

And it's dishonesty to assume unsustainable farming and sustainable wild catch in your argument.

Do you have any evidence that sufficient wild catch exists to feed the population?

> Nothing wrong with hunting straight from nature.

Wild animals are likely to have parasites. Farmed animals can be controlled for that.

Farms are often crowded and prime locations for parasites. Fish farms are notorious: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/supermarket-salmon-riddle...

Parasites are no problem as long as you cook the food properly.

Farmed animals have a tendency to be a mono culture that is housed on way too little space which is a breeding ground for problems that then need to be controlled by heavy use of pharmaceuticals which is detrimental to human survival.

Think anti biotic use in chickens for example. And the resistances that come with it. And fish tanks that do exist already have some of these issues already as well. How expanding that even more is a good thing is nebolous to me.

Also the animals may not like it.

*reasources

> What we need is a culture that eats local

This hostility to transporting goods you see occasionally is hard for me to understand.

I mean, I know I disagree with it, but what's weird is I don't even understand the underlying reasoning.

Interesting perspective, I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

Fishing is really barbaric. It's fairly bloodless since we suffocate all the creatures but it's like going to Yosemite and just cutting the throats open of the animals you find, tossing then in a bag and taking them off to sell on the market.

I mean what on earth year are we in again?

No, at least I don't suffocate fish that I catch. I stun and kill.

Also awful. It's not about an individual fish, many people don't understand this.

It's about disruption of an ecosystem that material reality demonstrates we still very poorly understand.

There's exactly zero evidence that anyone other than very specific tribes of indigenous peoples who sustained thousands of years, that humans writ large know how to maintain ecosystems.

All evidence points to our current practices having massive deleterious consequences and that we are already a few decades into a mass extinction event.

If that's not enough evidence to harbor every ship (or at least 95%) until we figure out what the fuck we're doing, there's no hope.

That's the truly repulsive aspects of barbarism, it's about the combination of ignorance and indifference as to the consequences of our actions

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