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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

> There is no unused arable land on a planet that’s already struggling to support a human population that cleared 8 billion last month

The amount of this land that is dedicated to growing food for livestock and the livestock themselves is simply astounding. Reducing meat consumption is a much simpler solution and I believe the one that will win out anyway. Complicated solar systems like this will only become relevant once we’ve addressed the low hanging fruit (pun intended) of overproduction of meat.

Even precision fermentation is an easier to implement fix for land use, which looks increasingly like it can reduce our need for land to grow grains. See Solar Foods for example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods

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Even with it taking up much more space than a lot of other power sources, the amount of solar needed to run the world will take up a relatively modest amount of space.

Tens of thousands of square miles is a lot, but it's pretty manageable if the discussion is optimizing global land use.

Also, "unused arable land" is probably true, but there's likely more than 0 land that could be converted to agriculture from some other use.

I came up with 15 million acres of panels would provide all the US energy needs. We currently have 39 million acres of corn dedicated to putting ethanol in our gasoline.

A long time ago -- in a continent far, far away -- I did a back of the envelope calculation for the area of solar PV required to power Australia's total energy consumption (not just electricity, but heat, industry, and transportation too).

It turned out to be something on the order of 20% of the land area in Tasmania (the island state just off the SE shore of Oz, for those of you unfamiliar with Aussie geography).

Now, I am not for a millisecond suggesting that Aussies cover 20% of Tasmania with solar PV. But that area happened to be within about 20% or so of the estimates of roof area in the country.

Food for thought.

> Even precision fermentation is an easier to implement fix for land use, which looks increasingly like it can reduce our need for land to grow grains. See Solar Foods for example

What do you refer as "precision fermentation" here? The linked Wikipedia article is about "growing microbial biomass that can be used as edible protein". Just curious, perhaps I missed the connection.

My understanding was that was the umbrella term for various technologies one of which Solar Foods use.

https://www.monbiot.com/2022/11/26/fermenting-a-revolution/

Is it incorrect?

Thanks for the link, good to learn more. Perhaps you are right. Mine was a genuine, layman question.

No worries! I’m no expert either :)

The root cause of the problem was plainly mentioned: 8 billion people and counting.

Solutions to problems ought to address root causes.

The Pareto principle applies. Most of the problem is caused by the top billion people ordered by income.

If you have a tailor, that's you.

No. Unless you're happy to keep billions in abject poverty (and that does not ecen protect the environment) the aim is to have all humans on this planet live a good life in good conditions.

Therefore it's not "us vs them" it's all of us together and the root cause is indeed the overall number.

If the top 1% would reduce their lifestyle to that of the next 10%, a lot would be gained right away. Private jets are evil.

You're thinking of the upper 0.01%. Global upper 1% starts at about $1M nw. Private jets are only really affordable at 9 figures.

The top 1% globally probably includes a good chunk of upper-middle class Americans (at least in the classic definition of upper middle class, maybe not in the informal “median income” sense that sometimes gets used). We like to point our fingers at private jets because they are particularly extravagant and we only need to take them away from a couple people, and they are a problem. But also heating McMansions and pushing around suburban SUVs ought to be avoidable.

>Solutions to problems ought to address root causes.

Oh really? Please lead by example.

There are barely more children in the world today than twenty years ago. Increases in population are down to not dying young. In almost all regions of the world people are having fewer children and trending towards lower than replacement levels as the necessity to having enough children that survive to adulthood and can care for you in old age disappears. These are hard facts. Given these facts the suggestion that we tackle the “population problem” implies all sorts of horrible utterly unethical “solutions”.

The “population problem” is a solved problem (not ignoring ongoing efforts and regional as opposed to global problems such as Madagascar population/land use issues which are largely political anyway) and there is nothing left there that we can do to solve the global environmental ecological degradation.

> implies all sorts of horrible utterly unethical “solutions”.

No it doesn't and I am tired of the dishonesty of that claim, which is nothing more than an ad hominem attack aimed at shutting down discussion.

Please refrain from this type of behaviour.

> There are barely more children in the world today than twenty years ago.

Nice tidbit but irrelevant to the point, which is population growth.

Anyway, there clearly is no discussion possible, so good day.

It doesn't imply those horrible solutions exclusively, but it's pretty hard to look at the forced sterilization of parents and abortion of children for generations in China and argue that it doesn't imply them at all.

> there clearly is no discussion possible, so good day.

Eh? I was being completely cordial. At least my intentions were such. If you have a counter argument you have the all the space here you need to present it. I have no power to silence you or anyone else.

That's the issue isn't it?

I simply wrote that the root cause of our problems is the population level. You replied that I implied the most monstrous policies. And now not only you try to deflect but you ask ME to come up with a counter argument...

F that.

You are misinterpreting my words. I can assure you I have no intention to imply that you personally are suggesting monstrous policies. I am saying that once we learn certain details and facts all that we all are left with that can change population levels are monstrous policies. I hope the difference is clearer now. To be as clear as possible: I'm presenting an argument with facts that you or any other reader here may or not be aware of (I really have no way to know!) that if we accept them as being true (I think they are but am wide open to evidence to the contrary) that lead to the conclusion that there is nothing we (humanity not you) can ethically do about the projected population of the world for the next century or so.

In summary, chill my friend. I bear you no ill will at all!

You should stop digging...

Bye.

The root problem is that this number of people is considerable relative to the productive potential of Earth-based resources.

Possible solutions include raising the productive potential of those resources, like the effort described in the article, and acquiring more resources beyond Earth. Neither of those two requires reducing the human population. So I think you're being inexplicably hasty in offering a drastic anti life solution.

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