also opens the door to scanning the developing fetus for diseases (+- other attributes) and termination if the fetus fails to meet some quality control.
You ought to know that what you take here as a given is Malthusian and widely disagreed with in nearly every culture across the world
Malthus reasoning is rock solid. Exponential population growth puts strain on finite resources. Malthus was a huge influence on Darwin. That premise - the tension between different growth rates of populations and resources - underlies the theory of natural selection, people on this forum will certainly get behind that. But call it Malthusian, and it's suddenly false.
It's also wrong to think that Malthus only just predicted doom. He used his model to explain a great deal of sociological phenomena (e.g. infanticide in china, delayed child rearing in wealthier societies, differences in diet between east and west).
It's not that Malthus was wrong. It was that he was only mostly correct. People today are nitpicking on the little bits and pieces where he was incomplete. He also wrote this at the start of the industrial revolution. He couldn't have known.
Interesting to note that a lot of ideas contemporary with Malthus were wrong. For example, it was thought that the popular use of contraception would result in people marrying younger, since men would not fear taking a wife early in their career (they could control when and how many children to have, in harmony with whatever economic resources they might have). It turns out that contraception had the opposite effect
The later you are in the exponential, the less technology can stretch it.
At a 1% annual growth rate, for example, we've about 3400 years before the mass needed for the bodies of all then living humans will equal the combined mass of the Earth and Moon.
Another 600 years and the mass of living humans equals the mass of Jupiter.
700 more years and the mass of all living humans equals the mass of the entire solar system.
2000 more years the mass of all living humans equals the mass of the entire Milky Way.
Less than 100 years after that we need to add the entire mass of the Andromeda Galaxy.
From that to needing the entire mass of the observable universe for human bodies is just another 5500 years (around 12300 years from now).
Coincidentally (at least I think it is a coincidence...) that's also about the time that without FTL travel we run out of space in the universe to hold everybody. Right now every human is on or very near Earth. Given no FTL, it follows that N years from now every human must be within N light-years of Earth.
Take the volume of a sphere of radius N light-years, and divide that by the number of people alive N years from now at 1% annual growth. That gives you how much space you have available per person.
Around N=12000 the available space per person to drops under 0.06 m^3, which is the volume of a typical human.
At 0.1% growth all the intervals above are about 10 times longer, so we hit the mass limit and the space limit at around 120000 years from now. 0.01% growth moves those both out to around 1.2 million years.
Exponentials are truly terrifying. They can be cute and cuddly when they are young, but the mature form eats everything.
I forget where I read this:
"Exponentials often end up being sigmoids in disguise."
If you put yeast in a jar and some sugar in it, the yeast is going to consume all the sugar and grow until there's no more nutrient left, and then just die.
But we are limited to the part of the universe that we can access.
We've got a single planet we can easily access.
We've got a few more planets we can reasonably access with reasonably foreseeable improvements to our technology.
Past that, unless there are some major fundamental physics breakthroughs, we've got no even remotely plausible way to make use of any resource outside the solar system in any volume that makes a noticeable difference.
The most important resource for us people is other people!
A lone human typically doesn't survive the winter. Big populations allow division of labor which is what has given us the, to people of the less populated past, unthinkable prosperity and long healthy lives.
Tons of data here. Look for yourself: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Like; it an 'emotional' argument but doesn't actually propose solutions. I'd like to hear more about solutions or actual push back rather than simply push the emotion button over a conspiracy fear.
True it is The Economist, which can be suspect in that it tends to reflect something of an agenda of a minority population with a lot of power. I am in fact willing to believe that there is a small group of people who would prefer there to be less people period. But it still doesn't feel unreasonable to examine our morals. I'd prefer to build coherent arguments to oppose the concepts if these are bad concepts. Not just push the emotion button a lot.
If a single family has to make decisions about having more babies or not based on budget, then why can't a planet full of people decide how many people should exist period? Why is that "bad" to even think about?
And why not 'scan' an unborn child for diseases and terminate in some cases? I don't think it implicitly is 'defacto bad' as the sentence implies. This second comment attempts to tie larger issues of population to more narrow fear based issues around abortion. It's creating a gordian knot. It's not a great argument.
Is there a way to make an argument that isn't mashing the emotion button over and over? And that isn't trying to conflate far and near issues together into an unresolvable emotional morass?
I do favor a pro-choice stance, but I want to avoid strictly falling down into a pro-choice versus pro-life stance since that is hugely loaded politically with people on the left hugely inflamed at the restriction in women's freedoms, and people on the right ostensibly outraged that every single life is not seen as sacred. As a left leaning person I do think the people on the right are not charitable, and I do think they don't actually care about lives, but rather they are using babies as emotional tools to try manipulate emotions and hold onto power. So I tend to think pro-lifers are manipulative - basically I see them as trying to manipulate me with their rhetoric. But I am willing to acknowledge that it is worth trying to think about this more; a charitable read has to include room for some pro-life arguments that human life is indeed sacred. The problem with the scanning statement however is that it leads us only to an emotional argument - and those are not solvable today. It might be nice to propose an idea or solution, not just (again) hit the emotion button.
If we have a mental model of a potential child as having the best possible outcomes, having the most joyous life, contributing the most - then of course it is an utter tragedy to deprive that child of a possible life. But I think our mental model of life should be more like what we actually see in nature; a garden that is riotous and constantly and eagerly grows, and we weed and prune that garden constantly. I'd argue that we are 'helpess gardeners' - we cannot avoid gardening, we cannot avoid stepping in the garden, we can only choose where to step. The solution space I see here that bridges left and right values is to decide who the decision maker is around if a child lives or dies. I'd argue the best decision maker is the person most closely involved and most entangled with that life - basically the mother. I'd pour dollars funding and energy into the people with utereses - rather than into judges and police. Any structural imperialism that deprives the mother of agency and turns them into a baby factory feels cruel to me but also is clearly not valuing the mommas life itself. If people on the left or the right want to fund that mother, educate that mother, argue with that mother - then they should empower the uterus owner as much as they wish - pay for schooling, education, rhetoric - whatever they want to expose them to - but delegate the power of the decision to the uterus owner. People on the right then get a chance to bombard that poor uterus owner with their campaign - but so be it - at least the energy, money and attention are placed in the right spot. This is more diverse, close to the ground, grass roots and reflects more the nature of the world - that decisions should be distributed and local - more ecological. In any world where uterus owners were male this would instantly be the case - we only consider denying women agency because we come from a patriarchy.
Probably in fact - if we want to solve far field issues like planetary population concerns, then education is probably the best way in general. The system as a whole can load balance births with locally available resources if it is allowed to do so I believe.
Also- the future isn't necessarily all humans and nothing else.
It has been definitively established that this is entirely voluntary? Do you have a source you can cite?
The US has a population density 1/15th India's. It's high time for a billion Indians to move to the US.
ELON: Well, I mean I really view what we’re doing here as making life multiplanetary as opposed to escaping, and I think like 99 percent of our resources should be spent making sure the future on Earth is good. But I think at least 1% of our resources should be used to make like multiplanetary and extending consciousness out to other planets. Both for the defensives reason of preserving the light of consciousness into the future as well as the adventure, the excitement - I find it personally more motivating than the defensive argument.
REPORTER: So you prefer to be an optimist rather than a pessimist?
ELON: I mean I think excitement and adventure and a sense of possibility about the future are incredibly important. Otherwise, why live?
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I’m getting to the point where I assume that comments like yours are dramatically mischaracterizing Musk. He’s so easy to criticize without ascribing hyperbolic-ly stupid arguments to him.