Hacker News Reader

Well, quite.

Climate change also exists. So do resource limits.

Something that doesn't exist is the science of living outside of an existing planetary ecosystem.

Do some research on how much is understood about creating a stable ecosystem out of sand, metal ore, and water. You'll find it's a good approximation to zero.

Flag wavers think it's all about building giant rockets, planting a flag - and boom. Colony! Asteroid mining! Etc!

The reality couldn't be more different. Giant rockets are barely the loading screen. Feeding humans, dealing with waste products without choking on them, growing or synthesising essential nutrients, building systems that do all of this in a stable self-sustaining way - these are all beyond hard.

And that's not even getting into psychology and politics.

So until that changes, running your own planet - the one you got for free, and which was working fine already - as if you're trying to test it to destruction to find out just how stable it really is, is an unbelievably dumb thing to do.

> Flag wavers think it's all about building giant rockets, planting a flag - and boom. Colony! Asteroid mining! Etc!

Nobody actually interested in space believes this.

> So until that changes

It wont change unless you try to change it.

Hello. Negative population growth for a while is now baked in to the world's population pyramid. You may now have a good night's sleep. You're welcome.

> these are all beyond hard

I seem to remember some guy saying something about that.

We’ve never let the fact that something doesn’t exist yet stop us. We are a species of inventors. We didn’t stay huddled naked in caves because they work and we got them for free. We aren’t meant to be like the rest of the ecosystem that mutely accepts its fate. We know we can die but we also reject the natural order of succumbing to predation, famine, disease and exposure. This planet is a cradle that we cannot lie in forever. Some day it will be dust and we will have to learn to walk amongst the stars.

A voice of reason. Thank you.

Indeed, when we lived in caves, there were only so many of them. We totally blew past the cave sustainability model thousands of years ago.

I'm not saying we should be cavalier about pushing current limits, but I also wouldn't be cavalier about doing things to hurt today's humans due to fears that are not well founded (because, again, negative population growth is now baked in to the world population pyramid, so that soon we won't be pushing the planet's limits any longer).

> soon we won't be pushing the planet's limits any longer

What constitutes as 'pushing limits' depends on the kind of planet that is considered tolerable. For many conservation-minded people, pushing the limits happened well before 7 billion.

A population shrinking to a quarter of it's size is only considered undesirable to some because the economy doesn't factor in the externalities of having a large population - e.g., climate change, reduced access to nature, increased stress, polluted environment, species loss, food chain collapse. The solution is to no longer permit these to be externalities, and I don't see that happening without government intervention on a global scale.

As for anyone concerned about an ageing population, within the next few decades human labor shortages will be solved with automation - to the point that there will be a shrinking job market. As for caring for the elderly, they will have access to new mobility technology, and life extension - at first expensive, but then trickling down to poorer people before 2 generations.

> So until that changes, running your own planet - the one you got for free, and which was working fine already - as if you're trying to test it to destruction to find out just how stable it really is, is an unbelievably dumb thing to do.

Note that unstated in the quoted text is a strong assumption or implication that we are "trying to test [the planet] to destruction ..." with our 8bn people. It's hard escape a soupçon that when someone says or implies that, they really resent most of that 8bn people, maybe to the point where they'd be ecstatic if they got wiped out. I'm not saying you do, but it's a pretty gross feeling I get when I see that line of argument.

And look, if fertility rates for the whole world were 8 and trending upwards with the current 8bn, then I think I would be panicking myself, and agreeing with you, and predicting ecological disaster, terrible wars, etc. But we're not.

Almost throughout the entire world, fertility rates have crashed below replacement rate. Some cases are fairly surprising, like Iran's, which had a fertility rate of 8 in 1978 and has been below replacement rate for a number of years.

The reasons for fertility rates spiking in the 20th century and then dropping so far so fast are very, very well understood. It even used to be fashionable to talk about that around here, but not now -- now the Malthusian narrative seems to be in full swing without regard to the actual facts of global population pyramid (why??):

- enormous technological and medical advances lowered child mortality rates and increased life expectancy very quickly in the 20th century

- but it took time for the number of children people had in suddenly wealthy countries to drop to match the new reality

- political changes (and possibly pushing even remotely close to the planet's carrying capacity) have caused economic pressures that have driven young people to reduce their fertility, postpone family formation, or forgo family formation altogether

- those add up to us now being about to enter a negative population growth regime

For an example of political changes that have caused such pressures see Social Security and programs like it around the world. Because those programs make caring for the current generation of retirees the burden of the current generations of workers, that puts a not-neglible economic pressure on the working generations, and as fertility rates drop, that pressure increases -- a vicious (or perhaps virtuous, if you like) cycle.

Not a Malthusian, but I’m very worried about the amount of resources we are using. We already lack the carbon budget and farming capacity for the world’s population to live to the standard of an average US citizen. There might be enough space and enough atoms, but we don’t yet have the capability to direct it into sustainable quality of life for all.

As a cow eating, hot showing, car jamming American, I wouldn’t correlate resource usage with quality of life.

OK it’s not a perfect correlation, but manual labourers on under 1800 calories/day and with no AC would definitely benefit from more resources!

Even a European level of resource usage (roughly half that of US, last I checked) would be hard to achieve for the entire world pop.

Did you know that total land under agriculture has been trending down for several decades? Would that put you at ease?

But environmental destruction is way up.

A good example is river health. We can provide more meat with high density grazing. But the waste products have to go somewhere, so the farmers spread them across their fields. Now when it rains, these run into the rivers and we get algae bloom. Majority of rivers in UK are now dying, for example.

Have we discovered a sustainable way of producing more meat in less space? I hope so. But perhaps we are destroying natural systems whose benefit to us has not been properly quantified, in a way that will be extremely difficult to reverse.

Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years?

> Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years?

I keep pointing to the fact that negative population growth is already baked in to the world's population pyramid, and responders conveniently continue to ignore that fact.

We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates.

> But environmental destruction is way up.

> A good example is river health.

Demonstrably false in the U.S. In the U.S. in the 30s river fires were so common that they weren't notable. By 1947 they were so rare that a river fire graced the cover of Time magazine to get people outraged (and succeeded, and good thing too because that was part of a process that led Americans to care about their environment). U.S. rivers are much cleaner than they used to be. Sure, there are some terrible stories still (e.g., the Hudson river has some terrible pollutants now-thankfully-mostly-buried under sediment).

I don't know what's the case in the UK, but I would be surprised if the state of the UK's rivers today was worse than 50 years ago, and shocked to my core if it was worse than 100 years ago.

> We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates.

If the population size goes down but consumption per person goes up by an equivalent amount (easy to imagine when US citizen emits 5x carbon of average citizen of many other countries) we have the same problem.

If things are so rosy environmentally, why are so many species going extinct due to habitat loss?

For "Not a Malthusian", you have a very negative view of the future.

Why is the land no longer farmed? Could it be there isn't enough topsoil left to be fertile? Could it be that there are new crops of McMansions and ever further commutes as the core of our cities is abandoned?

You're looking at it the wrong way.

If population has gone up, so food needs have gone up, and total land under agriculture has gone down, and the planet has greened... that means that farming efficiency has increased by so more than enough to feed the planet's people that it's not profitable to keep so much land under agriculture, and most of the land that is no longer under agriculture didn't get paved over -- it's forest now.

On the environment and fauna, animals are going extinct (like the white rhino) so yes, we are running out of stuff.

Trees—like Dominican mahogany grow really slowly and now there are so few of them we have basically run out. I can name several other examples—most notably Guayacan.

There is a bunch of scarcity and destruction. I’m pretty sure we can fix them—but for the trees and the animals it’s unlikely that I get to experience them as was so in previous lifetimes.

It’s a shame we couldn’t manage them sustainably previously.

Sustainability requires wealth. You mention Dominican mahogany. Have you ever seen pictures of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic? They're really shocking! No trees in sight on the Haitian side; forest as far as the eye can see on the Dominican side. Why is that? Because Haiti is so much poorer than the Dominican Republic that trees are burned for firewood.

The environment is cleanest and best in richer countries because rich people can afford to care about it. That's right, poor people who worry about where their next meal is going to come from could not care less about the environment.

So if you want the 8bn people of this planet to care for it, we have to make them richer than they are.

Play with me for a second...What if sustainability creates wealth? After all—once you are born into a wealthy family—the joke is on you if "you lose it".

> Malthusians exist.

As long as the population increases, Malthus is right. There is going to be some ultimate carrying capacity at some point. Ultimate amount of energy we can harness. It's just a question when. Certainly before our energy consumption is enough to literally boil the oceans.

Plug in different growth rates and the answer could range from tens of years to hundreds of millions of years!

Yes and in billion years the sun will expand, but we don't bring that up in every discussion.

Its not actually practically relevant and every-time people used it as an argument it has been proven in terms of practical impact.

> As long as the population increases, Malthus is right.

Wrong. As long as population growth remains positive without end in sight, Malthus right.

However, THE END OF POSITIVE POPULATION GROWTH IS IN SIGHT.

I mean, I said so in the comment you responded to, and you conveniently ignored it. Instead you went right for the Malthusian fearmongering talking points. "It's just a question of when" -- no, no it's not, not if population plateaus and then shrinks (negative population growth for a while is practically baked in now into the world's demographics).

> Plug in different growth rates and the answer could range from tens of years to hundreds of millions of years!

Why thank you. Hundreds of millions of years is more than there is time for life on this planet. Without our help, each successive glacial period was ending with CO2 lower than the end of the previous glacial period, and plants starve below certain levels (I think it's 150ppm for one kind of photosynthesis, lower for another) and was going to end up below those levels soon enough. Now, thanks to HUMANS life on Earth has millions more years in it because we've put a little bit of the Earth's sequestered carbon back into the carbon cycle.

If there were fewer people on Earth, then presumably there would be less deforestation, overfishing, greenhouse emissions, etc. I strongly reject the idea that the Earth can support the current human population at the current levels of consumption and pollution.

There already is less deforestation. The planet has greened enormously in the past several decades, as shown by satellite imaging. Total land under cultivation has shrunk for the past several decades. In other words, we've increased consumption using less of the resources you seem to value.

Even if we had 16x less people, some rich bastard would claim ownership of the now excess resources.

Whatever for? If there's no one to sell products to...

I don't know. People use resources for the craziest purposes. Personally, building an immense compute wall comes to mind.

> But the malthusians want to reduce population by 16x

This seems pretty extreme, but thank you for bringing the concept of Malthusianism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism ) to my attention. While i'm not convinced that it's likely to be the end of humanity (but rather the results of thousands of compounding factors), the irresponsibility in regards to unrestrained consumerism is something that i see every day, and there is certainly some merit to those arguments in my eyes because of this.

> The answer is pretty simple: we each don't know everything, in fact we know very little (and about many many things nothing really), and we are very (extremely!) susceptible to peer pressure, and we like to go with the flow, and we accept authority blindly where we know little, and so on.

This, however, i'm not entirely sure about. Short of militant disregard for climate change or even the idea that human actions are capable of changing it in the first place, the viewpoints that i've personally seen expressed are more in the direction of feeling powerless and somewhat depressed about the state of things. Instead of outright ignorance, most of the people that i've talked with believe that the governments have largely failed them and the mechanisms of representation that should be in place are only so as far as looks are concerned. For example, lobbying and corporate interests are prioritized, as well as industry development is prioritized over sustainability. In the end, it feels like maximizing profit margins takes precedence over sustainable progress and long term advancement.

Edit: Climate change and all that is just one example, but the fact that many feel powerless even if they aware of what's going on stands for other things as well.

And most of those people that i've talked with have felt like there's little to nothing that they can individually do, seeing as a significant portion of the society is more than happy to live a hedonistic lifestyle that's rooted in consumption. That doesn't mean that we need to live in some dystopian nightmare either, but i'd argue that it's definitely a worthy goal to make the environment thrive first and to focus on a more utilitarian way of life - meat dishes as something to enjoy rather than to have with every meal, a new phone every 5 years instead of every single year, energy efficient hardware (like Athlon 200GEs) for homelabs instead of the latest Threadripper CPUs (unless absolutely necessary), a used but dependable car instead of a new one and so on. And, of course, supporting local and small businesses, as well as trying your own hand at some of that stuff - going out to hunt game, drag it back home, skin it and cook it (if nothing else, that really makes you appreciate the meat you're eating), or even just simpler things like growing your own tomatoes and cucumbers (which are absolutely delicious), where possible.

If everyone lived at least a bit more like that, we'd have even more breathing room in regards to the environment, in regards to resource usage etc., which feels like a good thing no matter how you look at it. Of course, that's probably also unrealistic as far as expectations go.

I strongly believe the consuming less is not the way to solve the climate crisis.

The reason is that it's thought from a perspective of the global north, that assumes we just need to restrict a little to achieve a lot. That is not going to solve the global climate crisis.

The simple reason is that there are 7 billion people who are not living in the rich countries. These people have the right to access resources as much as the people born in rich countries.

Consuming 20% less carbon in the west will not offset the increased consumption in the rest of the world.

Every gallon of oil that can be produced at a reasonable price will be consumed. If Europe and the US switched to all electric cars tomorrow, the rest of the world would still consume the oil, especially at a lower price than now (because the US and Europe are no longer conusming it).

There are things we could do right now, without significant impact to our lifestyle. I just learned, that over 3% of climate emissions are crop burning. 2% is deforestation. We could literally stop this with the signing of a bill. The US and the EU agree to tax imports from crop burning countries at a high rate. It will drive up prices of Brazilian beef and Indonesian palm oil a little, but of little impact to the consumer.

Cement is another 3%, which could be solved with CO2 neutral cement. Electric trucks will be a game changer once they are cheaper to run than Gas trucks. And yes nuclear is something we can't stop developing.

When I argue for a tech forward approach than not because I'm a tech bro that believes science solves all problems, but because I strongly believe reductions are not gonna work. If we rely on consumption reductions we are truly screwed.

Reductions are not gonna work nor tech. Technology is just going to increase demand.

So the only way is to accept it?

Negative population growth for a while is baked into the world's population pyramid now. We're going to have to learn to deal with that.

> We could literally stop this with the signing of a bill.

That may be, but Occam's razor suggests that it would be a good idea to ask why that still hasn't been done. Surely there are some reason why such obvious and useful things still haven't been implemented, right? I may be wrong, but i'd like to suggest that there are certain interest groups behind all of that, for whom such changes would be bad for business.

Also, what makes you think that both approaches couldn't be utilized? Use less resources, increase taxes to compensate the drop in prices that would otherwise follow and gradually stop subsidizing things like meat production, at least to the degree where the price at stores is artificially lowered. At the same time, attempt to subsidize wind, sun, geothermal, nuclear and other forms of getting electricity and see whether things are better or worse in 50 years.

Those approaches are not mutually exclusive, as long as you have plenty of legislative bodies on your side. Sadly, we don't and probably won't, at least until a generational shift takes place. As Planck's principle states: "Science progresses one funeral at a time", which could be attributed to social policies to some degree as well.

Of course, in regards to electric vehicles, one also has to consider the necessary infrastructure to support them and what's the CO2 cost of creating their batteries in the first place. For a while, and certainly in some geographical settings, hybrid vehicles could also be good for a gradual transition.

> That may be, but Occam's razor suggests that it would be a good idea to ask why that still hasn't been done. Surely there are some reason why such obvious and useful things still haven't been implemented, right? I may be wrong, but i'd like to suggest that there are certain interest groups behind all of that, for whom such changes would be bad for business.

Clearly there are, we want cheaper Brazilian beef, Indonesian palm oil, Cambodian agricultural products. But let's say we tax imports from countries that don't clamp down on crop burning, I doubt the average consumer would feel any difference. The last flood in Germany is estimated to cost 10 billion Euro. Overall the benefit would outweigh the cost.

>Also, what makes you think that both approaches couldn't be utilized? Use less resources, increase taxes to compensate the drop in prices that would otherwise follow and gradually stop subsidizing things like meat production, at least to the degree where the price at stores is artificially lowered. At the same time, attempt to subsidize wind, sun, geothermal, nuclear and other forms of getting electricity and see whether things are better or worse in 50 years.

I think using less resources can certainly help but to a degree that it almost doesn't matter. Especially if it's just about irrelevant stand-ins. For example the EU will forbid the sale of fossil fuel motorbikes in 2035. This is about something that has an effect on 0.1% of the carbon emission of a single economic area. And with motorcycles the benefits are way way less than cars as they are driven a lot less than cars and the increased CO2 of production takes years to result in CO2 reductions of the lifetime. So a whole industry is forced to build new factories develop new models for the smallest of the small reductions, while the big stuff is left on the table. Or SUV's. SUV owners are demonized, while millions of tons of CO2 are emitted shipping Chinese made goods around the globe.

> Those approaches are not mutually exclusive, as long as you have plenty of legislative bodies on your side. Sadly, we don't and probably won't, at least until a generational shift takes place. As Planck's principle states: "Science progresses one funeral at a time", which could be attributed to social policies to some degree as well.

Agreed and this is what I want to achieve. A science driven approach not one of pandering to envy and the industry groups.

> > But the malthusians want to reduce population by 16x

> This seems pretty extreme

Well, yes, that's because it is. But some really do want that. See The Georgia Guidestones for more information.