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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.

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I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change)

To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.

If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.

Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\

That is highly debatable. There are overhead electric cables that often cause the trees to catch fire. Installing cables underground or with stronger insulation and auto-power-shutoff could help prevent several of the fires.

That is true, but fixing that would merely reduce the frequency of the fires, while raising the intensity.

Fires have their own cadence - they happen when the dead leaves and plants accumulate enough there’s sufficient fuel to maintain a forest fire. When we stop all fires the fuel piles up and the next fire is much worse and harder to stop. Up to a point we simply can’t stop it and it consumes all fuel and the forest starts from scratch.

Living stuff contributes too. Anything under 20 feet tall. If it was just dead material, tree farms would not burn. (But they do, they certainly do)

Sometimes electrical lines or humans cause fires, true.

But usually it's just lightning. Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning.

Overall most wildfires (in at least the US west) are human caused:

"People — whether purposeful, reckless or simply careless — are responsible for about 95% of California’s wildfires."

https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2024/07/califor...

I live in Oregon, another fire-prone state. While all human causes cause more fires than lightning, lightning causes more fires than any individual human cause.

https://www.oregon.gov/odf/fire/documents/odf-fires-by-gener...

I'll grant that having looked at the numbers, my earlier statement of "Far more fires, by count, are caused by lightning" is untrue. It's only slightly more.

I'm unable to open your link (phone issue perhaps). I've heard that in WA state most fires (over 80%) are human caused. Given CA is at 95%, why is oregon so different? Are we talking different measures somehow? I'm wondering where the discrepancy is - I doubt that OR would be that unique of a situation.

Odd, it opens for me. It's a PDF though.

It's a pie chart by the Oregon Department of Forestry. I'll give the top few causes here:

26% Lightning 22% Equipment Use 20% Debris Burning 12% Recreation 11% Miscellaneous 4% Smoking 3% Arson

As to your question, Oregon has just over half the population of Washington (4.2M vs 7.8M) but almost 50% more land area (96k sqmi vs 66.5k sqmi), leading to Washington having close to 3x the population density of Oregon (44 vs 118 people/sqmi). California has more than twice the population density of Oregon.

This feels sufficient to account for the discrepancy.

Thank you for adding the numbers (pretty sure the pdf issue is just me, old ass phone)

The population density explanation makes sense. Though, that density is very unequally distributed. Factors like square area with fewer than X people (how much total low density area exists), miles of forest access roads/rec sites - perhaps those numbers might give a very strong correlation. I wonder if you took just northern california, if the causes would even out to OR. (I agree pop density is likely a good correlating measure, just wonder if there is another that is even stronger)

Though, we were comparing apples and oranges! If we compare natural vs all human causes - assuming misc is human caused, then 70% of fires in OR are human caused. The percentage range for human caused fires being between 70% and 90% between different states makes sense.

There is also a second way of stopping fires, which is to create 10x more man-made lakes, ponds, and streams everywhere in the region. It will increase the local humidity, which will in turn diminish the risk of fires. The approach is to maximize the surface of the volume of water exposed to the air. This works because fires require dryness, which will be impossible with sufficient water evaporation and humidity in the area. It is a superior form of terraforming than controlled fires.

That’s probably a losing battle. The coast is already extremely humid due to fog drip.

The problem is that we get crazy weather patterns now due to global warming. For instance, it was ~100F for about a week a few weeks ago, which made everything nice and crispy.

Then, when it cooled off, we got hit with a long windstorm and 15-20% humidity. If that storm had brought lightning, there would have been widespread uncontrollable fires (too windy for helicopters).

It’s not just California. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in the last few years in most states in the western US.

There used to be redwoods all over california. Hardy fire resistant trees, now they are relatively scarce. Second,wood is heavy. The economics to remove dead trees is not there, does not get done for reasons. Next, the area of the land is immense. Cutting fird brakes through it us tens of millions of acres. Further, fire breaks do little in high wind situations. What does move the needle are forest fires. Letting them burn. We've been practicing industrial scale fire suppression since the 50s. Next, immense areas of tree farms, second and third growth forests.

Best thing, get the hell out of the forests and let them all burn on a regular basis.

Redwoods are fire resistant. Their thick bark acts as shielding and their canopies are way above the height where fires historically burnt.

Indeed - the fact they were cut down nearly to the point of extinction is something of a tragedy. The trees that replaced them are not fire resistant. Thus is counter evidence for the idea that humans need to be cutting down anything to improve the fire resistant of forests.

Forest fires may be fine, as long as they are not catastrophic.

No need to prevent every fire. But it must be possible to prevent the fires from making air dangerous to breathe in cities, and certainly to prevent forest fires from burning down human settlements.

No need to terraform the whole land, but culturing it a little bit to make more habitable should be fine.

Previously, people raked the forest, and that worked OK for 1000’s of years. Before that, fires burned uncontrolled, which also cleared out the underbrush.

The problem we have now is due to almost a century of fire suppression. We stopped raking the forest and also stopped letting small fires clear out the accumulated fuel.

Of course, global warming doesn’t help. Neither does PG&E’s historic lack of line maintenance.

> People are destructive to the planet in every way possible,

Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?

> It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people

Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?

You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.

> You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.

You claimed it, without evidence, without even argument.

Given that history (as I read it) does not support your statement, and you didn't support it either, why shouldn't we ignore it?

Have you traveled to third world countries with very high population densities? Have you breathed the air on their streets? Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US? The evidence is already strong that plastics, PFAS, and CO2 are not recycled; they just keep piling on in the environment and in the human body. You can literally smell plastic burning in the air in those countries and regions, and the immune system reacts very strongly to it in a negative way. Developing anything cool will be the last thing on the mind at that time.

> Travel to China, India, parts of the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and realize just how foul the air there is to breathe. That's what you want for the US?

I'll go out on a limb and predict that their answer to that would be "no". I don't think you're assuming good faith here.

I am assuming bad faith for a good reason, which is that the parent comment failed to acknowledge the obvious, which is that the listed pollutants keep accumulating in the environment, proportional to the number of people that exist. In fact, the parent comment even rejected this established knowledge, thereby proving its bad faith.

You are assuming bad faith because you are reading things into my words that are not there.

I do not deny that (some) pollutants accumulate. I also do not deny that pollution is quite bad in some places.

I am specifically questioning your claim that doubling pollution would specifically halve the rate of innovation. I was pointing out that you have not supported that statement. You claimed it twice, you still haven't supported it, and I'm pretty sure that you can't support it.

Stop trying to read into my statement wild claims that aren't there. Can you support your claim?

Yes, microplastics accumulate in the brain over the years [PMID: 38765967]. They cause anxiety [PMID: 37269995] and brain inflammation [DOI: 10.3390/ijms241512308]. There is a lot more research on them than I am quoting here.

When someone is suffering from crippling anxiety, if you have ever suffered from it, the last thing on their mind will be to develop anything cool.

Moreover, microplastics accumulate and harm various organs, not only the brain. They also cause generational infertility due to the pervasive co-presence of toxins like phthalate in them [PMID: 39446714].

Similarly, higher CO2 levels are detrimental to cognition. This has been known for years and is established knowledge.

First, these studies merely suggest that microplastics have these effects in humans, yet you state them as fact. However, I don't want to argue that microplastics are harmless or that pollution is not an issue. Neither do I want to defend the point that doubling the population doubles the "speed of discovery". But even if all of your points are accurate, you would still have to show that these negative effects outweigh the benefit of a priori doubling productivity. In fact, you make the even stronger claim that doubling the population will actually cut the "speed of discovery" in half. None of this is substantiated by your argument.

How is it that despite the vast population, we no longer have geniuses like Newton, Leibnitz, Gauss, Maxwell, Einstein, etc.? If they existed today, they would just be selling ads and stocks.

You don't even have to travel that far. The air between middle of nowhere US and everywhere else USA is very different. It is amazing how quickly we get used to our local environments (order days/weeks).

> Travel to China... other parts of Asia

I hope you're not thinking of Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea because the air is fine there and we live the longest:

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

I meant more like India, China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, Iran, etc.

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