Thanos was wrong and Malthus was right

A perspective on population growth that I haven’t seen before. It’s very long, so the tl;dr as I understand it is:

- Humanity has always survived through technological progress to support an increased number of people. Technology changes the carrying capacity of an environment.

- Whether or not we’ll be able to do this forever is unknown.

The underlying article itself has a lot more history and nuggets of information beyond this summary!

Minds are constructed from parts in the environment. For example, the carbon in your bones is the same carbon in the ground but patterned into a human skeletal structure. The mind is meat and so it must be constructed from the amino acids available in the environment along with other chemicals and proteins. This article is a historical overview but it basically comes down to a single statement: more minds = better (because cultural evolution requires networked minds). The obvious issue is that minds are constructed from parts in the environment and increasing pollution reduces the quality of the ingredients that go into their construction. The minds that created the current conditions through industrial metabolism were operating in a less polluted environment. The water, soil, and food did not have microplastics and other synthetic chemicals. So whatever innovations are in store for the future must address the problem of worse materials that now go into mind construction.

No one knows how this is going to play out but I can say with 100% certainty that a mind constructed from synthetic industrial pollutants will be worse off than the one that was constructed from the unpolluted ecology. The alternative is that more pollution somehow makes people smarter and that is plainly false because microplastics make people less healthy. It is true that a larger network of minds can do more and seem smarter than its individual constituents but even networked minds have limits, e.g. social media.

In any case, it's a good historical overview but ultimately does not address the actual problem of large populations. Like yeast making alcohol which eventually drown in the byproducts and outputs of their own metabolic processes the human population is doing the same thing. We are drowning in the metabolic outputs of industrial processes and the outcome is going to be the same as for the yeast. At the end of the day civilization is just another metabolic machine and the outputs of that metabolism will eventually feed back into it because we are operating in a finite volume of space. The question isn't whether it's going to happen but how badly things will fall apart when it becomes obvious to everyone that they are now eating food and drinking water with plastic in it.

Your downvotes mean nothing to me, I've seen what you people upvote.