I actually argue the opposite zooming out. Zooming out our trajectory is up and to the right, like a hockey stick. Almost on every level. We’ve done that with all these disasters that have always happened. Almost like we can innovate or something
There is no monitoring dashboard for the planet. News articles like this are your warnings. There is no innovation to be had that fixes global aquifer levels.
>>>
Original Mathusianism should be distinguished from neo-Malthusianism, in that the latter does at least have some evidential basis in that it is based on measurement of resource levels and their rate of use, not just some political philosopher's wooly notion of overpopulation.
The problem, as I see it, is that even if you are optimistic about the theoretical capacity of the planet to sustain human life, its practical capacity is limited by how efficiently we use the resources to hand, and the current system does not properly incentivise efficient use. More often, it's the complete opposite, because the price of resources like water and soil does not reflect their true scarcity.
It's like having a large store of firewood. Enough, in theory, to heat your home through several years of harsh winters. Then you burn the whole stockpile in a great bonfire on the first cold Autumn night. That night, by every metric, you'll be warmer and cosier than you ever have been before, but you'll still have doomed yourself.
* * *
Reminds me of the well-known type of question in introductory calculus:
Q: "A population of bacteria in a petri-dish doubles every hour, after 24 hours the petri-dish reaches 100% saturation. At what time did the petri-dish reach 50% saturation?"
A: 23 hours.
I wonder how this factors into all this.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/06/01/global-fertilit...
on a century scale, we will fix this by either getting to space or having a lower population. but the pressure is going to crack our systems long before that. I'm still hoping we get better as pressure increases, but there's nothing in nature that says that has to be true. the system will correct itself but how we will look as a species on the other side can be vastly different.
There are about 8 billion people (about 4 billion more than when I was born) in the world. The "birth rate collapse" isn't making much of a dent in that as far as I know.
There's a lot of noise about the population decline for 2100, but I wonder about 2200 and beyond.
If we continue our current growth of energy use, we'll be using the entire luminosity output of the milky way galaxy in, drum roll, 1000 years. I'm skeptical if that's going to happen. To me a much likelier option is that the exponential growth stops at some point. The trajectory of the slime mold is also a hockey stick, until it isn't.
You could be right, and there are plenty if examples of that. It is just a case of we wont know the full story until a long time in the future.