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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Assuming we can handle the "421" problems, a world population in the 1-2 billion range, purely through low fertility rate, would solve a lot of environmental problems. You could have first-world quality of life for everyone, with reasonable technology advances, and still have a much lower impact on the environment than we have now.

Under 2b seems like the right number unless space colonization is seriously in force.

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Unless we see huge advances, I think we are doomed with space colonisation, since we put more energy in than we can take out, i.e., it produces non-self-sustaining space colonies reliant on Earth.

Yeah, but I'd bet on huge advances over the next millenium, assuming we don't seriously screw things up. I'd bet on robots doing a lot of the work.

There are clearly mineral resources in space which seem worthwhile -- asteroids, and potentially fuels or consumables from some planets.

Something which consisted of U-235/Pu-239 exports from Earth to space, where space then returns some minerals.

I doubt we'd get appreciable human population off the earth and into the solar system, unless we intentionally went for that. It would probably be easier to do high-density earth colonies using resources brought in from off-world. The surfaces of Mars and the Moon don't seem particularly hospitable compared to the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans.

We may wish we're doomed to space colonization.j

"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand." - Carl Sagan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

What he's saying is that anything viable is too far away. Forget about the Moon or Mars, we cannot protect a population against radiation, and if we could we may as well build that same habitat here on our then presumably inhabitable planet that we're already on.

Don't just use the planet up and walk away from it, because there's nowhere to go.

Mostly OT:

I used this fact to consider a plausible simulation hypothesis. I had assumed you would need a universe larger than ours to simulate ours. However, assuming that since all the other places are far away, and we have found no other intelligent life, then it may be possible that we live in a simulated world in a Universe that is the same size or smaller than ours, since they would only need enough space to simulate the complexities of Earth at a low level, and the rest of the entire Universe could either be simulated at a very high level, or simply filled in.

The problem is the world isn't shrinking. It's just the wealthy educated bits of it that are. So we're going to have a shrinking number of first world citizens surrounded by ever increasing numbers of the global poor.

Now, if you wipe out poverty entirely and bring everyone up to the same standard of living and education you'll probably see a shrinking global population. But that isn't happening yet and won't happen for a long time.

Actually, it is happening. The western world's wealth has been decreasing over the past 10 years while the rest of the world has been rising out of poverty (for the most part).

You can go first.

I have already basically decided I don't want to have kids, so to that extent, I've "gone first" already.

As for going first to Mars, I think Elon is going to beat us all.

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