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Comment by genman | Hacker News Reader

The weather is not the problem. Overpopulation is. And it is a local problem, so limiting population elsewhere doesn't help.

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People screaming overpopulation are always and everywhere on a slippery slope to eugenics.

Carrying capacity is mediated by technology. WRT water, wastewater reclamation and desalination have a lot of gains that aren’t widely deployed. Also rewilding and reforestation can do a lot to mitigate creeping aridity.

This doesn't have to be true anymore. Not all "we have too many people" people believe we need to FORCE depopulation. We have strong reason to believe that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children. Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop.

Personally the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization. Remember that we already produce an immense oversupply of food. Every human that is hungry is not a resource production problem, but a lack of empathy problem. The earth can only struggle to supply billions of humans if you insist that nothing can happen without a strong profit motive.

> Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop.

And this result is somehow supposed to be a good thing? Every country that has this result, no matter how we theorize that it got there in the first place, is now facing a demographic crisis

> that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children.

The devil is in the details here, and programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history.

> the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization

This is sort of what I'm driving at.

You better give some references about this "checkered recent history" because for example the programs US had for Africa were removed by GWB in the beginning of century when there was still less then billion of people in Africa. Now there is close to twice as that and Africa is not able to feed itself because population is growing faster than its capacity to produce food.

Normally those who stand against birth control have some very clear political agenda to use the size of the population in their advantage.

I'm not making an argument against birth control.

So as an example of checkered history, I'm referring to things like the push for circumcision as a measure to fight AIDs which has counterintuitively lead to a drop in condom usage in some places[1]. This is a great example of well meaning people from Europe and the US intervening in a way that makes things worse.

There have been concerns around HIV risk with DMPA[1] and ethical concerns about around the initial trials of the drug[3].

There were forced sterilizations in South Africa as recently as 2005[4].

There were similar issues in Kenya in the early 2010s[5].

My point was that people should look upon population alarmists with some skepticism, and when they talk about birth control in Africa I think it merits extra scrutiny.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3362967/

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7232639/

[3]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441692.2019.1...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51637751

[5] https://www.hhrjournal.org/2015/07/kenya-forced-sterilizatio...

I don't see how any of this is relevant to the issue. I'm talking about birth control that is family planning, programs that provide contraceptives and these incidence are something completely different.

My original statement was "programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history.".

Forced sterilization falls neatly in that category.

These examples are about infectious disease control and not about family planning.

You can call it overpopulation, I call it underdesalination. There is lot's of sun there and lot's of seawater.

According to ChatGPT it takes at least 3 kWh to desalinate 1000l of salt-water.

Following that math and its estimates on solar panels that would come down to 0.003 m^2 of solar panels per liters.

UAE is about 83.6 billion m^2, lets assume half of that can be covered in solar panels, so that would be enough to desalinate 13 trillion liters of water.

That sounds like it could be enough for a country like UAE by a factor of 10, if ChatGPT's math is right (probably not) and water can be desalinated instantly (probably not).

If your thought experiment leads you to consider that half the country, or even 5% of the country, should be covered in solar panels, then there a problem somewhere.

So your reference is “According to ChatGPT”. Did you feel anything when typing this?

So, your argument is "you used ChatGPT for this". They didn't even write the comment with GPT, they just used it as a starting point for some napkin math. The other commenter not only dismissed the idea, but also emphasized how unrealistic and poorly planned it is by responding to the contents of the content, including how absurd it would be to implement that much solar coverage. I'm sure it's fun to make fun of the large language model, but at least it provided some drive to the conversation, even if its value was in being corrected. Did you feel like your addition was significant?

No, I didn‘t intend to make an argument, I was asking a genuine question because I‘m trying to understand the perspective on the world of people who consider LLM a kind of „source“. To me OP reads like “according to my Ouija board” and I’m frightened by the idea that people on HN are using the output of LLM as “quotable facts” (and not as a tool to start further research outside of it, which would be fine IMO.) I’d like to know if the poster had any doubts using ChatGPT as a source of fact to base their calculations on, when they obviously had access to the internet with all necessary sources to properlt calculate an answer for this basic question.

Desalination is expensive, but it’s not just about the desalination simply pumping water up hill is costly.

Nevada averages 5,500 ft above sea level. Moving 1 acre foot of water up that high at 100% efficiency takes ~5.6 MWh and a single mid sized farm can use that much water hourly.

Start talking 25 inches of water per year across millions of acres and you’ll need a lot of solar. Worse, commercial reverse osmosis desalination only removes around 95-99% of salt so that farmland is quickly getting degraded.

Then don't farm in Nevada?? Humans don't consume that much water and lot of it can be recycled.

Humans generally use negligible mounts of water, the only meaningful water shortages are based around agriculture.

So don’t do water intensive farming in Nevada?

Nevada is just an example South Dakota is only 2,200 feet above sea level, but now you need an extra long pipe causing its own issues.

The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue.

"The point is desalination isn’t some magic fix that makes everything ok. The remaining salt is probably the biggest issue."

No, but it is a whole lot easier close to the sea. Like most of UAEs cities are. The remaining salt, you could just pipe out in the ocean, if you go in some km towards a current and spread it out enough. Salt in the ocean is only a local problem, if it does not diffuse quickly enough.

And for deserts with a high altitude or that are more inland, no, desalination is probably not the solution.

Salt in the desalinated water not salt in the ocean.

take a black pvc pipe,stick one end into seawatter,add destillation collection crevices and overflowholes,put the other end up high on a hill

That doesn’t work. There’s a pressure difference across a desalinization system, it doesn’t output high pressure water.

its desalination and pumping via destillation by sunlight. it works.

its basically a heat driven capillary system.

"5,500 ft above sea level"

What your talking about works on small hills near sea level, but runs into real physical limitations. It's also slow and thus vastly more expensive per acre foot than commercial systems.

You can't fix shortage of agricultural or industrial water with desalination because you end up with a bag of potatoes for $50

Desalination only solves water shortages for human consumption. Water shortages mean famine

A single hectare of potatoes need about 7,000 tonns / m3 of water. Desalination costs $1/m3, The cost of growing russet type potatoes for the fresh market was $2032 per acre. So potatoes will be 3 times more expensive

For wheat, the difference is even worse

True, but if you want to grow in the desert, there are more efficient methods and crops to grow, like in closed greenhouses, that keep most of the water.

Why not ship the potatoes in?

That's acting like we don't literally trade resources globally to maintain our population level

We can do this because the overpopulation is not happening globally. If for example Ukraine and Russia had the same population growth than Africa and Middle East is having then there wouldn't be no grain available for Africa or Middle East. But there are limits to overpopulation and it is water.

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