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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> the global population as it's not a trajectory that be sustained indefinitely

It's a bit wild to see Malthusianism alive and well in 2024. He couldn't predict the industrial revolution, and we likely can't predict whatever will come next, either.

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It’s also a bit wild to cite one data point of an unexpected state change and use it to assume with such confidence that another one will occur.

It's a bit wild to expect more than one in a simple comment change doesn't happen overnight and smart people are saying "it'sa coming"

Smart people also say it’s not coming. The correct conclusion is that it’s not clear.

Malthusianism is from the late 1700s. Another example would be Paul Ehrlich who wrote 'The Population Bomb' in the 1960s with the quote:

> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.

Smart people make predictions about the future all the time. The problem is the future is hard to predict. The mere fact that birth rates in developed nations are falling below sustainment level calls into question any sort of extrapolation of when or if overpopulation will happen. That's not to say the Earth can support an infinite number of people because it can't; but that doesn't imply any specific trends we see right now will continue into the future.

I don't have to be in the business or habit of making laughably naive or galaxy-brain futurist predictions to acknowledge that habitable square-footage of land available to occupy is for all intents and purposes fixed. I'm not making any predictions, just noting that if we're growing above replacement rate indefinitely we will eventually run out of space barring eventual expansions off the planet. Even if every city on earth became as dense as Tokyo, even if we created all food production in sunless underground bunkers or skyscraper food farms, even if all nutrition becomes paste from compostable tubes, a society that inherently requires population growth indefinitely to function effectively has to get off-planet at some point.

This is especially true if you value (as I certainly do) the ongoing existence of land not just for farming and habitation but for the diverse ecologies of flora and fauna to continue to exist. I'm certainly more pessimistic than optimistic about how the rest of the natural world would fare in the next 150 years if we continue on as we have been.

But honestly, this to me is a sideshow: given our ability to produce efficiently and often autonomously, we shouldn't require a reliance on constant population growth to function effectively. Maybe that's where I'm being laughably naive.

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