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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

The three P's: powerdown, permaculture, population control.

If we do not achieve them, they will be done for us, far less pleasantly.

This was possibly an option 30+ years ago, but I think we may have sailed past that point of no return. We will need to double down on human industriousness in order to accomplish massive necessary geoengineering and/or bioengineering feats within the next couple hundred years.

A couple of hundred years is really optimistic. People thinking we have that much time is part of the problem. Without some miraculous changes, humans will be extinct in 30 years.

30 years is extremely pessimistic. Humans are amazing at adapting their environment to meet their needs and change is already occuring.

I agree that 200 is the high end of the range, but I have always been an optimist :)

I disagree vehemently that optimists are a bigger part of the problem than those who have lost all hope and given their agency over to the hands of fate.

We can agree that the longer it takes, the more will suffer.

At this point many will suffer. But extinction within the century is far from assured.

I would agree with you that extinction is not assured, however, we face many existential threats simultaneously. Some world leaders seem almost eager to play with their Nuclear arsenals. The climate change denying party just got a majority of every branch of the US government. The president elect wants to Drill Baby Drill. A huge fraction of the public think that climate change is a fraud, Elon Musk is going to fix the federal budget and a bunch of nonsense about the radiation from 5G (but not older cellular networks, for some reason). Oh and then there is the rapid rate at which we are burning fossil fuel to create waste heat, crypto blocks and disruptive AI.

On the plus side a nuclear winter might be just what we need to get our temperature under control!

Now that's true dedication to optimism. :)

Why powerdown? How do you propose humane population control? I get permaculture though ;)

> How do you propose humane population control?

Actually, in many (most?) countries this is already happening, for better or for worse. It's just a limited subset of areas/countries that have quick population growth. This has different causes and the possible solutions are politically, socially, religiously and economically complex. Or rather, getting to a situation where a solution is applied is complex more than the actual solution.

For actual information rather than super-vague observation, have a look at the:

-=[UN World Population Prospects Report 2024]=-

https://population.un.org/wpp/

there are bunch of online charts and a large PDF etc.

Education, birth control and abortion access, and increased income levels. Each of these is associated with a lower fertility rate.

There is little pushback against the increase of these measures. It would be very interesting though if a fertility rate increase was warranted and folks were arguing against them in order to raise it.

I assume by "powerdown", the OP means reducing energy usage, especially of polluting energy sources, mainly fossil fuels.

This doesn't really require a lower population, it just means people need to stop expecting to live in huge McMansions with A/C blasting all the time and driving around in 3-ton SUVs. Living in dense, walkable/bikable city environments in energy-efficient dwellings, people could live quite well with a tiny fraction of the polluting energy usage.

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