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Comment by Ilverin | Hacker News Reader

"doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster"

Over the past centuries, human life expectancy has increased greatly and yet we have a much higher quality of life. It's an extraordinary claim to suggest that the continuance of this already-existing trend is 'almost guaranteed to be a disaster'.

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Human longevity (and population) isn't just about us, it is about the impact on our environment which is turning out, already to be an unqualified disaster for our planet.

Also, if you count only people who reached adulthood and eliminate early deaths from injury which were common in adults between 25-45 yrs old, life expectancy and height are only now catching back up to the paleolithic.

>we have a much higher quality

Who is we?

well, to be fair, if not an outright disaster, we are creating a bit of mess with so many people at this standard of living...

The decline of global pirate population has correlated strongly with the rise of global temperatures, too.

While the pirate population might have something to do with the price of tea in China, it has nothing to do with this conversation. The comment you replied to did not make a correlation=causation argument. The comment did, however, make an argument that historic behavior, in this case of society as a whole, may be used to predict future behavior. I don't believe that is an entirely unreasonable argument to make (though more data from more fields is always better). It is certainly a stronger argument than was made by the previous comment, which provided no evidence to back the assertion that it would be a disaster.

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