No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to avoid that check.
I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not the end.
No other species can grow it's population exponentially. True. However, we aren't any other species (that we know of at least). The planet can support far more people, it truly can, and more so, the rest of space awaits. We can spread further and further. Is it really good to wish for a reduction of our species? of the only life we know that can truly observe and appreciate the beauty of creation?
More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
And even worse, if you add people until most has to live a life on the brink of starvation again that could stop innovation from ever happening again in the future, our current time is an historical anomaly and there is no guarantee that we can ever get back here if we screw up and get everyone back to a state of misery. There are only so many ways we can improve food production, we found a lot of them the past 200 years and that led to a ton of innovations since people no longer had to worry about starvation. But all of that will quickly revert if you can no longer buy food at a supermarket, since there is simply not enough food to feed every American, some will have to starve to death.
But as their incomes tripled and their children survived childhood, their birthdates dropped and their surviving children are better educated and less malnourished. This has been happening almost everywhere in the world, and is why world population will peak in a couple decades without mass starvation.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?count...
That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
the max? I don't know about max. However, yeah, you're right. That does not mean we cannot continue in the future and do it better. Lab Grown meat is nearly a thing, and reducing the price of that will drop global emissions. EVs are becoming far more common and will be replacing ICE vehicles come the turn of the decade, we're building more and more solar and renewable energy resources.
We can fix these problems. Yes, the problems are created by us. That does not mean we cannot fix them while continuing to progress and reduce poverty. More people, more brains only benefits that effort. Not reduces it.
The system of our society needs tweaks. Our incentives are sometimes wrong. But again, reducing people doesn't fix that. More people aids us to build better systems.
Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.
https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...
Even the 689 million "extreme poverty" number does at least mean there's more people in poverty today than were total alive approx 300 years ago.
I mean .... why? Why are we assuming that more people aren't working to create more energy, more resources? The Earth can feed, and provide far more energy than we currently are using. Pump out nuclear reactors for every town and we will have enough energy for 10 times the people. Granted, it's not as easy as saying that but my point is that energy is not finite, and resources are far more that we are currently not utilizing.
I don't imagine more people will be living with the same resources. After all, the growth to nearly 8 billion resulted in most people's quality of life rising and poverty decreasing. This is a fact. A cold hard fact, that nearly everyone on an absolute level has gotten better lives.
If we can do that for 8 billion, why can't we for another 8?
More so, increased population results in different, new problems and solving those problems results in us further progressing, not regressing.
I guess, I just don't like thinking of this as the end of history. We can grow and grow, and grow. I don't wish for humanity to simply fizzle out. We've done pretty well till now, let's keep going. We can do better.
As far as we know, we're the only species in the universe, in the whole wide universe that can truly appreciate the beauty of the universe. That can observe. Catalogue. Create Art. Sing songs and so on.
The vast wide massive universe. It deserves to be seen. It deserves to be documented. To be explored. We need to live, and grow far more than now to do that.
Sure I believe the earth can support 10 billion people who doesn't live in poverty, but that would require a lot of infrastructure that we don't yet have. Adding people before you can ensure they don't have to live a life of misery will just hurt progress, for progress it is better to have 100 people who live a good life than 1000 people who live near starvation, so the fastest way to get to 10 billion people living a well life is not to first add 10 billion people who have to live in misery.
Fortunately, we've made huge strides in this area in the last few decades. Global poverty is at an all time low and is decreasing. The same is true for food, female empowerment, family sizes, suicide, plastics, etc.
The world, really actually is getting better on a lot of major measures.
Yes, there are big challenges ahead. But as a species, we're honestly doing okay, maybe even better than okay.
There's a lot of data backing all this enthusiasm up. I'd link to a few papers, but GapMinder[0] is the best place I've seen where all the data is collated and searchable. They have great graphing interactives too [1]. GapMinder is an effort by the late-great Hans Rosling. You may remember his as that Swedish doctor from the TED talks [2]. I'd suggest any HN readers to dive into the site and see. They have a great little quiz[3] to help you renormalize yourself to current data as well.
All hope is not lost! Things really are going to be okay-ish. Not the same, but not terrible. Our work is not in vain.
[0] https://www.gapminder.org/
[1] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v1
Does it? It does if we're at the level of cutting wood to feed our individual fireplaces, and there's only so much wood around. But we don't live in that world any more.
You need a large number of people to be able to manufacture giant windmills in... Texas, I think? Installed in Wyoming, with generators built in Switzerland. Combined with solar panels built in China. This is to replace oil from North Dakota, drilled with equipment manufactured in Texas, piped to whereever. And that's replacing coal dug in Wyoming, hauled hundreds of miles by locomotives built in Pennsylvania or Texas or Mexico or Canada.
That takes people. It takes a lot of people, connected to each other, to give us a world where we're not just competing for who can chop down more of the few remaining local trees.
Malthusianism didn't work in 1700s and doesn't work now. Economists produced endogenous growth theories explaining how more population could lead to higher output per capita in the 80s. Romer won a Nobel prize for it.
The evidence we have now strongly supports their arguments. Productivity scales superlinearly with urban population so that each doubling leads to a 15% increase in p.c output. This is true everywhere we look i.e. regressing log(income per capita) on log(city population) produces near-perfect lines with slopes close to 1.15 whether you're looking at the U.S or Bangladesh. This is easily explicable in terms of the network externalities. Furthermore, studies comparing the networked lives of people living in more/less populous areas (inferred from phone usage data) show that people living in bigger cities do indeed communicate more. How much more? 15% for every doubling of city size! All of this can be explained in terms of graph theory. More nodes -> more cultural and technical niches (interconnected node clusters) -> more potential synergies as every niche has more niches to connect to. And so on. Connectivity increases faster than linearly, hence the superlinear scaling. Not coincidentally, the connectivity of brains seems to be the same (double the number of cortical neurons in a mammal, the number of synapses per neuron increases by 15-20%).
All this to say, we certainly aren't approaching a world of less abundance per capita as the world continues to urbanise. Anybody who thinks this just isn't acquainted with the evidence.
All the advances are due to exploitation all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
Not sure how advocating for more people is selfish, but okay.
> More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits.
Energy can be practically infinite. Simply requires us to use nuclear power. Yes, Yes, there's issues of waste with that. It's overblown and a moral panic.
More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite".
That's what i mean. Resources and Energy are practically infinite when you look at it on a long term scale.
I simply don't think, it's a good idea to advocate for humanity to simply reduce and fizzle out. No. Why should we? We should advance life forward. That does not mean in the same way as before. We can do better. But advocating for the reduction of humanity, of life, is wrong in my opinion.
After all, there is no other life we know of out there like us. Why stop?
That's what people thought about oil, trees, etc. before.
Trees are literally infinite. Just plant enough of them while you cut them down.
Oil is not, but oil is energy, and energy is also practically infinite as long as we do it cleanly, and we have the capability to do so that today.
Quality trees are nowhere near infinite.
Quality energy (stored in a lower state of entropy, conveniently accessible and usable when and where we need it) is not infinite. This one is obviously not true today. If it were, people would not be complaining about increasing fossil fuel prices, since they would be happy using the cheap (due to infinite supply) “clean” energy.
Nice in theory but there's a big, big problem in the interim: in many instances that interim exceeds 300-plus years before there's a solution (if there's a practical one at all)!
Many of the world's best timbers have been exploited to the point of extinction and the few trees that remain in the wild are strictly controlled by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) in that the export trade is strictly banned (just like elephant tusks - that means exporting any quantity no matter how small is illegal). Even so, illegal logging is now out of control and it's reducing their remaining numbers to critically low levels.
Demand for timbers such as the dalbergias: Brazilian Rosewood - Dalbergia nigra, Cocobolo D. Retusa, etc. and many other depleted species such as Lignum vitae is already so high that - like the drug trade - there are instances where people in the illegal trade are killing one another over 'territory' and the 'rights' to illegal smuggling.
Many good hardwood tree can take many hundreds of years to mature and despite many, many decades of the very best science chemical engineering has devised, it hasn't come anywhere near producing good artifical verions of these timbers. If we immediately started a planting operation of Manhattan Project size proportions to repopulate these trees to the level they were two hundreds years ago it would still take several hundreds of years before the world had sufficient timber to meet current (let alone the future) demand. And that's just the beginning of supply problems in the lumber industry.
So what's your solution for the next few hundred years?
Incidentally, in China, rosewoods (dalbergias) are revered with almost mystical significance, they are symbols of huge cultural and personal importance. With its newfound wealth, Chinese demand for these now rare timbers has skyrocketed and the Chinese will pay almost any amount to get their hands on them. As the population of more affluent Chinese grows, this problem will get steadily worse.
Now consider this is only one of many similar environmental problems the world is currently facing.
There is even more than that if we go proactively grab a fraction of the the billions of galaxies of resources just meaninglessly burning themselves away.
Also, the per capita usage of energy/garbage/resources tends to decrease as populations go up. The net, of course, increases, but the per capita decreases. Combine that with cleaner fuels are were set to get carbon neutral as a globe by ~2080, if I'm remembering correctly (I may not be!)
What things though? It is mostly materialistic, isn't it? We are more comfortable than ever. We can talk to a person on the other side of the planet anytime we want. Yet, we don't know our neighbors. More people are lonely, more people are single etc. We live longer today, yet my generation seems less happy than my parents' generation. When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today? We can't even be sure kids are safe in schools (though this particular problem is just American one).
On one side, we are relentlessly moving ahead, mostly materialistic. Fantastic communication tools, medical equipment etc. On the other side, people are obese, unhappy, unhealthy (mentally and physically).
We can't even a significant portion of the people accept that climate change issues are real and maybe slightly alter their lifestyle (eat less meat, less dairy, use less plastic...). How are you proposing to achieve any kind of cooperation between people when the population keeps going up?
Exactly. The trouble is that those who weren't there to experience the freedom we had as kids and the resilisence and self confidence it instilled and developed in us simply don't understand.
It's a tragedy really.
There will always be smart people and brilliant artists. If we reduce population, they will just come at a slower rate, which is fine. Will just make them more special when they do come.
I hate people and definitely would love to see fewer of them.
Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow that is out there.
why? and why would it not be worse? just because of the number of people?
I think that no matter how efficient our food generation processes get, this is very little space per person. That's why people live in the air and on top of each other.
What do you think about Netherlands? It seems to me they had a good way to use the space while keeping it green and also caring about nature.
Earth can support at least twice the current number of people with a better organisation while also disrupting less the natural habitat.
What makes it hard to achieve this is our focus on nationalities and countries instead of thinking about a global society combined with our greed and our individual/centrism way to think about the world as if the only way forward is us vs the forest or us vs the wild animals ... we should focus more on how to embed into nature and not how to change it to make it work for us.
They're clearly wasting food an oxygen...
Every generation has it's soothsayers that are absolutely certain we are near the population limit and heading for certain doom. And every one of them was wrong. Our population soared past those limits, no problem.
I share the opinion that earth can sustain about 100B of us, with a bit of planning and thoughtful engineering. So long as most people don't mind living in sky scrapers. More people = more brains to solve the type of problems that I assume you are worried about.
I don't actually believe we will continue growing like we have, as nothing in human affairs follows a strait line for long. Every great kingdom has fallen, every empire divided. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. We don't need to try and control it, but only observe and adapt to it.