Hacker News Reader

We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.

View on HN

The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally.

Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.

We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com