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Comment by throwaway5959 | Hacker News Reader

It’s insanely selfish to have ten kids with global population trends.

Isn't the trend that developed nations are starting to plateau, and global population is expected to peak in the next few decades? I'm actually more worried about the opposite problem in the short term. With birth rates so low, the folks being born now are going to be supporting a disproportionately large elderly population.

There is no population crisis that's 100% propaganda. We have so much arable land yet to be developed, oceans yet to be fully utilized. The Earth can easily hold 1 trillion people. The only ones promoting population control are the people who make money off of labor scarcity and fear.

A trillion people. 100 times as many people as today. Think about that for a second and get back to me with how we’re going to maintain our lifestyle with the demands we already put on lumber, copper, etc.

Fast-growing planting programs, new materials, new ways to live. Our current tradeoffs inherent to urban or rural life will look primitive.

It won’t happen though because the planet is stalling out around 9-10 billion and will see wars and starvation from under population.

Less that two percent of the population is involved in growing food today. Not sure how we’ll have starvation as a major issue due to “under population”.

Yes, that is a good place to start from. Look at it this way: we have starvation in the world at that 2% due to both issues growing food and indirect issues (transportation, fuel, lack of opportunity, corruption.) If agriculture jobs were forced to 2.5%, what kind of pressure would that put on everything else involved in successfully distributing food. And what would that in turn do to the percentage forced to do more localized agriculture or subsistence work. And what would the costs of and political/behavioral (over)reactions to the shock and the unevenness of each of those adjustments be.

Agreed. We all just need to stand shoulder to shoulder and we'll be fine. Social security and pensions will be well funded with all the new payers.

Seeing a lot of doomsayers lately that a population collapse is coming.

Guess argument is, humans are really ever a generation away from extinction.

And latest trends are way down, we are below the replacement rate.

So in 50 years, we'll be out of people, and not able keep the 'modern' world moving.

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