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Comment by ccvannorman | Hacker News Reader

Totally useless information, since overpopulation will never happen (mainly because as countries evolve and middle class emerges, birth rates plummet.) Even by 2100 population will barely top 10 Bn and will take a millennia to reach 15. [0]

[0] Pew Research: "By 2100, the world's population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion, with annual growth of less than 0.1% – a steep decline from the current rate. Between 1950 and today, the world's population grew between 1% and 2% each year, with the number of people rising from 2.5 billion to more than 7.7 billion"

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When you fly over the United States most is uninhabited and we have the ability to build up density through height. We are even facing a population crises where we don't have enough people to work the jobs that are open now, much less the number of jobs in the next ten years.

> We are even facing a population crises where we don't have enough people to work the jobs that are open now, much less the number of jobs in the next ten years.

I'm not sure that's really a "population crisis", though, because it can be turned around to "we can't afford to pay people enough to do all of the jobs we want done."

> "we can't afford to pay people enough to do all of the jobs we want done."

Probably more accurate to say "we can afford to pay people enough to do all the jobs we want done -but- it would require a more equitable distribution of wealth and that's not going to happen any time soon"

Both of those can be solved in a month with unlimited migration.

But then you get the "standards of living in this city have gone to shit" problem :D

It is not just space, this we have a lot I agree. It is also the ressources and these we have less and we are dependent on others that are also potentially ressource starved.

In last 20 years in the US and other first world countries resource consumption and CO2 emissions flattened or even reversed, whereas economic growth continued almost exponentially. We can now do way more with less resources.

Define economic growth.

It is indeed difficult/impossible to define precisely, but GDP and GDP per capita is a good start

Conversely, the analogous social factors in humans that caused a population decline in rats in these experiments are already at work on humans in the postindustrial Internet-connected world.

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