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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

. . . in * 2100 *

There's a bit of fuzz in the numbers but the peak is still 70+ years away, then a decline and a stabilisation.

    World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100

https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-...

    The UN Population Division has calculated the future population of the world's countries, based on current demographic trends. In 2022, world population reached 8 billion. The UN's 2022 report projects world population to be 9.7 billion people in 2050, and about 10.3 billion by 2100.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...

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   > World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100

This to me always stands out as the main reason why house prices in desirable areas across the world (eg. London, Australia, Singapore, etc.) won’t drop any time soon. Quite the opposite, they will continue to go up steeply for another few decades.

Today we’re 8 billion people, add another 50% of today’s population on top of what we already have, in less than the next 80 years, whilst habitable areas decrease due to climate change, and we’re in a perfect scenario where sharp population growth will simply outpace any building efforts we could achieve with the current workforce we have.

> any building efforts we could achieve

Maybe not any building efforts we want to achieve, but there are certainly approaches within the possible envelope, eg something like arrays of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka with mod-cons.

(I am continually amazed that the Eichler developments in the Bay Area, which were once considered the epitome of "ticky tacky", are now cool, just because they're no longer the cheap & cheery affordable thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Eichler#Santa_Clara_Cou... )

> simply outpace any building efforts we could achieve with the current workforce we have.

Trades are learnable skills, my father built two of his houses (one after the other), I've built a house of my own, worked on a sheep shearing robot and contributed to brick laying robots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBhcm-kRA68

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s17IAj-XpU

Modern building efforts include lots of prefab and the ability to push up structures fast - pressures in the west that depress housing construction go far deeper than an inability to build; there are financial and zoning factors at play.

Talk to residents of many SE Asian countries, eg: Tokyo and elsewhere and work out how they can build enough to house higher and denser populations whereas "the West" struggles.

> Talk to residents of many SE Asian countries, eg: Tokyo and elsewhere and work out how they can build enough to house higher and denser populations whereas "the West" struggles

Last time I checked was before the pandemic, but from what I remember in Tokyo most flats and housing is way out of the league of normal people and if you are wealthy enough to get on the housing ladder then it’s a tiny flat literally the size of a shipping container where you have to fold your bed away to turn it into a dining table because you’re squeezed into a tiny space like a chicken in a battery and for that “luxury” you’ll have to pay off debt for the best part of your life.

Kind of proves my point, no?

When you have that many people in cities you need either nigh on unlimited surburbia and magical public transport OR a willingness to live in a compact space.

Western housing crisis results from an unwillingness to mostly have dense cities and sensible suburbs with dense multi family blocks interspersed with common parklands.

We can't all have a McMansion with indoor shooting range and swimming pool.

I’m not debating here fictional solutions to how urban areas are being built.

I’m just stating the fact that due to a still very much accelerating population explosion until 2100 combined with a decrease of habitable space it will inevitably create a huge (further) boom in house prices. Wether we start accommodating people in shoe boxes or McMansions has little impact on what I am saying, because the point is, if you buy a nice property today then it will go up in value because there will be market pressure and anyone who will be able to afford a nice home will outbid each other in the free market for the stock of nice housing which we have.

>We can't all have a McMansion with indoor shooting range and swimming pool.

my guess is we will have virtual solutions for that and our bodies will spend most of our time in our broom closet size apartments (or coffin size)

Wow, you know absolutely nothing about Tokyo.

It's not like America, where everyone lives in a McMansion with 40 acres, even in the middle of NYC. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.

House prices have very little to do with how many people need housing.

Their price is almost entirely defined by the apetites of the rich for the investment vessel.

China currently could house 3 times larger population than they actually have.

You contradict yourself.

If you believe in climate change raising sea levels, then property in (half of) London and (most of) Singapore will be literally and financially underwater.

Sigmoids are notoriously difficult to predict, so I think it safe to leave the factoid that that date coincidentally correlates nicely with the next precession of the equinoxes, into the Age of Aquarius ;)

Hmm, you say that but I'm repeated assured by a vocal faction here on HN that human population numbers are about to plummet in an abyss of no return unless we immediately breed more and faster than ever.

Körner, The Pleasures of Counting (1996)

> † Social Darwinism applies the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest to human society. Rich social Darwinists take wealth as the best indication of fitness to survive, academic social Darwinists take intellectual achievements as the best indication and so on. They are often haunted by the fear that the unfit do not understand this and may outbreed the fit.

(aside: sheep shearing robots? you wouldn't be kiwi by any chance?)

Kiwi? They're not the only only country with sheep, cliff edges and Wellington boots you know . . .

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM

James T, Peter K, Robyn O. et al design and proto build early 1980s, second and mid gen versions mid 80s to early 1990s. Funding suspended as computer vision was being added.

Tangentially, (years later, next university across in same city): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902710

> the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest

That was Spencer; regrettably both Darwin and Wallace jumped on that proto Nazi dog whistle band wagon.

Sorry for the inadvertent slur, mate!

Funding suspended after the geneticists bred cattle (Australian Miniline) with small enough hind legs?

Suspended after the wool board decided they had enough in hand as a reserve in case labour shortages increased and wages climbed. They also funded a chemical|feed additive based shearing scheme that altered the wool at the follicle as it grew so that a few days later the wool would peel|comb off effortessly .. that kind of sorta almost worked ( IIRC ).

General robotics got a boost (most of the software was researched and written at the time - very few robotic libraries then), shearing got a wider better performing shear and a system for automated handling and delivery of sheep to shearer (human or robot).

James T (Engineering lead) wrote a book on it and went off to find landmines in Cambodia .. arguably a more rewarding use of skills (??).

> Sorry for the inadvertent slur, mate!

Yeah, right, robots and shearing is super blokey shit, ain't it just:

https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/eun-jung-h...

https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/robyn-owen...

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=l8Mn4-UAAAAJ

I could go on, this was the same university that had https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/cheryl-pra...

teaching Permutations to Greg Egan.

Oops! Sorry.

Maybe I'd best stop apologising before my (thankfully barnyard-acid-resistant) footwear gets covered in it?

  It was somewhere west, that country in a land of import yew,
  That they formed an institution called the Sa-andgroper U.
  They were long and wiry natives of the rugged beach abode,
  And the robot never welded that the Boorloos couldn't code;

> ...a system for automated handling and delivery...

After watching the first bit of that video, I had been about to ask about the load/unload story. Why was the sheep upside down? (I'd think letting it nummle on something during the process might relax it more than being flipped, but I have no clue about small animals)

[having grown up where land and especially labour is expensive, my wife is a fan of "McLeod's Daughters", especially: "I was wondering if you could point me to the ladies?" "Sorry, we don't have any of them around here"]

While there's no shortage of women in rural Australia, elegant ladies can be a hard find.

> Why was the sheep upside down?

That's not specific to robots, human shearers on teams generally start by pulling sheep from the race, dragging them over to the station on their bums|backs and begin with belly blows (long runs of the shear) to free the thinner belly fleece, and then rock the sheep from one side to the other to work the fleece free from flank to spine .. and then there's (ideally) a single wool blanket fleece off in one piece.

> pulling sheep from the race

That (and the intellect?) explains why any given sheep might be willing to be contract shorn a second time!

> immediately breed more and faster than ever

According to [Kubrick64] it's "breed more prodigously": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y&t=163s

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