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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I get the sense that people hate that we exist, in the numbers that we do, because of our impact on the earth by merely existing. A self-hatred if you will. And before you respond with "if only we did X, it would be fine," consider that the difficulty of convincing/coercing lots of people to do things is also an inherent part of our existence. Also part of our existence is the incentive to cheat to get ahead (in whatever economic system you pick).

We can't live like native Americans with iPhones.

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>We can't live like native Americans with iPhones.

We probably could in the next 100 years through automation, massive reduction in population, and making things to last instead of making things to be replaced. Building a society whose values aren't based around never-ending growth.

We won't, but we could.

There is a good anti-growth counter argument/observation in Homo Deus. Population growth necessitates economic growth otherwise you end up with unemployment which destabilizes society and can lead to war.

If you don't have population growth you still need economic growth to provide upward mobility to people at the bottom. Without growth you have a zero-sum game which again can lead to war.

Ideally improvements in efficiency or a shift values/culture can create a world where we can have economic growth without increasing the burden on the planet.

>If you don't have population growth you still need economic growth to provide upward mobility to people at the bottom. Without growth you have a zero-sum game which again can lead to war.

OR you reset wealth upon death. You don't necessarily need unlimited growth if you prevent wealth from pooling at the top.

What does that look like, in practice? You have a family of four, and the father dies suddenly. What happens to the house? The wife re-marries, dies, and the second husband re-marries. At what point is this 'reset' occurring? To whom does the wealth transfer when it is 'reset'?

population growth is starting to recede. Most 1st world countries are growing through immigration, with a birth rate that is too low to support our population.

We are trending towards having a smaller population in 100 years.

EU Birth rate over time: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251516/crude-birth-rate...

US Birth rate is 1.7 kids per female.

massive reduction in population is a very ugly thing. There's basically no good way to do that.

Not necessarily. Demographics indicates that developed nations seem to have near-replacement birth rates. Anything less than 1 and you get exponential decay. So a small nudge will eventually lead to large reductions in population, but the rate of decline need not be severe.

There are of course issues that a lot of the economy is predicated on growth, but again, I'm actually pretty optimistic that markets and humans are pretty resilient and adaptable given enough warning and time.

I don't know, Japan seems to be doing OK. There are all sorts of problems that are going to eventually arise simply due to the fact that our economies are built on endless growth. But IF they embraced it and were able to advance automation fast enough, most of those would be overcome. Mainly: who will take care of the elderly.

HA part of that could be easily solved if suicide weren't so stigmatized. If everyone could just agree that once you're past the age of 80, once you get to a point of being infirm you just take a magic pill and peace out on your own terms, we'd be far better off as a species.

Raise the standard of living, and people have less babies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

From the article: "In a 1974 United Nations population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating 'Development is the best contraceptive.'"

True, although it'll eventually happen on its own, and it likely won't be on our terms.

Some decades with very old population, and many countries are headed in that direction.

The problem is that we life under a system that demands endless growth on a finite plane.

It's pretty clear that the human population has grown beyond the ability of the planet to sustain a progression towards universal industrialization. Humans have nowhere else to live and we're eroding what underpins our ability to survive.

We more than tripled the human population in the last 100 years. In my own lifetime, the human population has grown by 42%. It's insanity to believe we can continue this without serious consequences.

I've read studies that show human population peaking around 2100 and slowly lessening until it finds a happy medium. This is due to increased access to birth control in developing nations as well as people simply having less children because automation on the farm replaces the need to have several workers (the kids) around to help with the harvest, etc.

Link to article: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...

That means 70 years of population growth and then a plateau on consumption levels that are still insane.

Sometimes I get the sense that people would rather put their head in the sand than discuss the realities around human impacts on the Earth.

This has nothing to do with "hating that we exist", however, at a minimum we probably have a responsibility to study, discuss and understand our impacts on the Earth, and not just for what it means for other species, but for what it means for us.

Insects are seriously part of eco-system, what part of that is not important?

pp remarkably off-topic and additionally self-defeating.

There's a Radiolab episode about a subspecies of butterfly that only lives on and around this one US military base, and the 20 years of effort one ecologist spent trying to save the species. The ecologist admits that nothing else depends on that butterfly for existence, but it's still worth saving because of a moral obligation we have for making it endangered.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLndueWMub3J...

I think we're going to have to make tradeoffs, and spending 20 years of resources on saving a small insect in one area probably isn't worth it.

so this story is amplified, so that those predisposed to this outlook have something to carry around..

> spending 20 years of resources

this overly-simple, too simple, example of one person and "the military" is not at all representative of say, the Bison and praries, or frogs and freshwater. And who are the most prolific polluters in the Federal Government, and who is famous for "20 years of resources wasted for no result" .. ?

Its just as abrasive to hear this pre-baked conclusion, as for others to hear the actual truth of say, entire regions of coral going extinct.

All of it isn't important, in an absolute sense.

Shift your view up a couple levels of abstraction and everything on the planet is ultimately meaningless. People always seem to argue about "saving the planet" as though it has some greater meaning, when in reality it is just a poor proxy for "keep the planet inhabitable for humans".

> Sometimes I get the sense that people hate that we exist, in the numbers that we do, because of our impact on the earth by merely existing.

I thought you were trying to speak for the insect kingdom here for a moment.

I'm sure there are some who do. There are a lot of people out there, you can find just about any belief.

But sometimes I get the sense that people say things like this as a way to derail the conversation. They'd rather talk about other people's motives and beliefs than the the actual observation about the environment.

And we know those people are out there. Some of them get paid a lot to do it.

There is strong evidence that when humans first arrived in locations they had never existed before, mass extinctions of megafaunal species occurred. And this was thousands of years ago, before we collectively had any idea about the dangers of biodiversity loss, climate change, or the sheer extent of the power we wielded as a species. The first time we ever thought about the greenhouse effect as a tangible concept was only 200 years ago.

Given that it required us thousands of years to develop a scientific mindset to even be able to comprehend the scope of our own destruction, I can't see how we could have stopped ourselves any sooner.

The recent uptick in energy consumption is now magnifying the problem at an exponential rate, but it doesn't sound agreeable or practical to prevent people from spreading around to consume all the resources we have, or to smack the newly invented, frivolous and energy-draining devices from their inventors' hands the moment they've been first actualized.

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