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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

Feels like this completely misses the problems of habitat destruction, biodiversity, etc. I don't want to live in a big mall, so I'm not really in favour of plans that go "let's go live on Mars, the goal is only for the human species to survive".

IMO we need to produce less, consume less, and stop destroying whatever remains of life other than the human species. More energy doesn't seem like the solution to that.

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> IMO we need to produce less, consume less, and stop destroying whatever remains of life other than the human species.

producing less and consuming less means less people in the end. Are you in favor of that? Because nobody wants to live with subpar level of life.

Let's be honest: mass extinction means less people. We are going towards wars and mass starvation. Either we can admit we're not sustainable and try to save what's left, or we can bet that we need to do more (much more, according to the article) of what's killing us, and at some point it will magically work.

No, I agree with environmental protection but fundamentally disagree with your live small mindset. We can do both, we sustainable and be highly technologically progressive at the same time.

Opposite of “live small” usually means “each year bigger and better”, which kind of means geometric growth, which almost by definition seems unsustainable.

Does it? The opening poster specifically wrote: “we need to produce less, consume less” that is not just non-geometric growth but negative growth. So in this case the opposite of live small can simply be zero growth, or further exponential growth for a limited time and then zero growth or linear growth.

> which almost by definition seems unsustainable.

We were told 1 billion people was unsustainable a century ago, look where technology brought us. Not only we manage almost 10x more without mass starvation, but at the same time everyone is much, much richer than their great-grand-parents

> we manage almost 10x more without mass starvation

Really? We're going towards mass extinction right now. And I think it's pretty safe to say that the growth that allowed us to get here is what's killing us. I don't think we can say we managed, we just haven't paid for it yet.

Seems like your post is also completely missing the point: if you want a sustainable economy you will have a sustainable standard of living. That roughly translates to eating grass hoppers once a day at our current population density.

There's very little reason to eat grasshoppers when chicken has roughly the same efficiency at converting food into protein. Especially considering that the necessary infrastructure and marketing already exists for chicken.

Chicken require high quality feed to grow. Grasshoppers just been grass.

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