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Comment by unchocked | Hacker News Reader

Engineering an improved rubisco into the food supply (or the notional biological carbon capture stream) would significantly boost to the carrying capacity of our planet.

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Alternatively, we could carry the same number of people while preserving more of the planet for wildlife and wilderness.

Good news. People are having less kids and population growth may reverse soon.

What are the chances this will result in more food for everyone?

Depends on how many soylent green factories we build in response to climate change.

This goes back to my theory that the people most freaked out about climate change are the ones with kids, who are mad that other less responsible people have more kids, while I'm just chilling here with no kids at all and clearly see that if all those assholes stopped having kids, climate change would be solved within 20 years.

Married vegetarian with no kids living in a major city with no cars checking in — I completely agree.

Go Vegan! It’s easier than you think, especially since you live in a city. No judgements from me if you can’t/choose not to, it does take work. Just a bit of encouragement, and a thank you for making the compassionate and ecologically sound choice.

Climate change absolutely won't be solved in twenty years if everybody stops having kids. What's your logic there?

"if all those assholes stopped having kids"

So to save humanity, humanity must be destroyed?

Also, who do you think, will take care of you, when you cannot anymore, but there aren't people anymore doing it.

Robots? Well, hopefully they can take care of themself then. Or is this the whole idea? Pass everything on to the machines?

Then your money would be worth a ton due to deflation, but unable to purchase anything because the workforce is near non existent…

I’m happily child-free myself, but for natural reasons. I’ll let the breeders keep the Ponzi scheme going.

In developed countries..

All countries. It just takes a while before the effects kick in.

Exactly, we're all in this together. There is only one Earth and the only way to move forward is to work together and help each other out.

International politics does not need to be a zero sum game, a little bit of mutual assistance can go a long way.

No, India and China are both below replacement rate. Most of South America is. Rates are evening out in sub Saharan Africa as well.

This is a misconception that should be corrected. Fertility rates are falling everywhere, even in places with the current highest rates like sub-Saharan Africa: https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...

Probably not fast enough. To actually come back to the population we have today would take a really long time.

Population caps out at 10b and begins to decline again around 2100. That's the current projections.

Which means 2 centuries before we get back to 7 or 8.

Don't worry, climate change will speed that right up

I do worry, because the ones that die will not be the ones who reaped the benefits and remain nonchalant about it today.

UN projections, which are on the "business as usual" side of things.

Plenty of events, like the pandemic, which put immense downward pressure on fertility.

Also, the African continent is a net food importer. This could be turned around - particularly by Nigeria, which has the natural resources to produce fertiliser, but so far the observed effect has been a surge (+65%) of imports.

With the situation in Ukraine being what it is, I don't think this is sustainable.

Niger is currently experiencing a population explosion, which will force it to implement the same policies as Kenya to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe.

Going too fast will cause other issues. Unless we get a decent world war or another covid going the elderly aren't just going to drop dead.

I fear that a 'decent world war' nowadays may include nukes, so damage to the environment will be great. As an example, the dam that was destroyed in Ukraine and flooded a 'small area' (considering the planet-scale)(https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/kakhova-dam-ukraine-russia-1.6...).

Which (your post and my thinking of a response) reminded me of the series: Aftermath - Population Zero (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1264068/); I remember watching some series back in the day.. I think it's time to watch this again.

EDIT: I found it on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l11zPNb-MFg

I'm slowly starting to realise that nukes are very unlikely to be involved simply because the selfish shits who start and run the wars know they personally won't survive if they start the nuke match.

Nobody's growing corn in the mountains.

The Great Plains also count(ed) as wilderness and have wildlife. Just because it’s not as picturesque doesn’t mean it isn’t an important ecosystem.

That's impossible. We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize. We've just taken too much too quickly. In the oceans for example there's population collapse of entire genera in different locations every single year and entire dexoygenated dead areas in the photic zone because of overfishing and damage caused by commercial fleets. According to the IUCN Red List there have been at least ten extinctions every year for the past thirty years. It doesn't help that there's a rivalry going on between which country can post the highest numbers for a mostly meaningless metric in GDP, causing deforestation for livestock, overfishing for export, monocultures spreading dozens of miles for crops that have a fifty percent chance of being burned to preserve prices, and so much mining entire mountain ranges disappear.

> We'd have to reduce to about half of where we are now just for the fauna to stabilize

I mean the article states the tobacco photosyntesized twice as effectively, with RsRubisco, which is actually less efficient the GmRubisco. So food-wise it seems hypothetically achievable.

I agree we'd need massive conscious degrowth in every other part of the economy though.

The trouble is you need a ton of water and fertilizer to support that growth, and drought combined with soil quality degradation is already a huge problem in a lot of regions, and will only become moreso as the globe warms and, p.s., fertilizer production is heavily dependent on petrochemicals and contributes to CO2 emissions.

It could be a huge development, no doubt, but there are many bottlenecks in agricultural production, so we need to be careful not to oversell this as some kind of panacea.

Would it take more water and fertilizer per pound of crop? If not, then that's a wash.

The claim was this technology would increase carrying capacity. That implies growing more food, not growing the same amount of food on less land.

I agree, as far as being able to use less land for agriculture, this could be a beneficial development. Only problem is that's not how humans typically work.

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