Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: Apologies for the rant, it isn't too relevant to the topic. Downvote deserved.

Our food is made of non-renewable resource.

Every year, we use:

* 105m tons per year of nitrogen-based (natural gas) fertilisers[1]

* 22m tons per year of phosphate-based (mineral based) fertilisers[2]

* 3m tons per year of organic (poo and pee) fertilisers[2]

Nitrogen-based fertilisers are made from natural gas, and phosphate-based fertilisers from rock. Use of fertilisers grow by 10% every couple of years.

Even if there was no further population growth from now, there's not enough resources on Earth for everyone to have a car, not enough space in cities for every couple to have a house. There's not enough food made from renewable resources.

Are you going to give up your car?

Are you going to give up having a nuclear-family home?

Are you going to give up eating meat?

Can you convince everyone on Earth to do the same?

The goal of every politician is to boost GDP, aka spending, aka consumption. How do you convince politicians they are facing the wrong direction?

Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. It's only because we've discovered a very large cache of oil and natural gas, allowing the population to continue to expand, for now.

The world is fucked.

QED.

[1] http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publi...

[2] http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_p...

>Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet.

Ah, yes he has, and so has Ehrlich and every other 'the world is ending' doomsayer that ever walked.

Does the human race have problems? Well, obviously. deep seated religion and superstitious unreason remains a key problem.

Has there never, ever been a better time to be alive as a human? Self evidently, yes. It's the best time to be alive right now.

I agree. Right now, yes. But look at the numbers. In 50 years time it's going to be a bleak time to be alive.

Said every doomsday prophet ever. No one ever comes back and says sorry we were wrong they just change to some other claptrap. Life is too short to listen to these people.

The best part of predicting the end of the world is that if you do it long enough and shamelessly enough, one day you'll get to be right.

You do realize that this attitude will lead to ignoring the one time when there is real danger. Is that what you want?

I am a wild and crazy guy, I will take the chance that bloviating windbags are full of it.

In fact, I've already said brc might be right and decided to change to some other claptrap.[1]

No one ever comes back and says they're glad they convinced someone - they just switch targets and find new people to call doomsday prophets and bloviating windbags.

Thank you for your prejudice and have a nice day.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300899

For the record I appreciated your comment but can't reply there. It shows a willingness to consider a position. I'm guessing you're probably young, and young people have a torrent of "the end of the world is nigh" thrown at them these days. It's tough to see above this and think optimistically. But the key to a calm mind is to think optimistically, tempered with rational 'what if' thinking, so if bad events do come to pass, it's not earth shattering.

How do you account for the failure of past civilizations? What is different this time?

I'm all for optimism, but optimism and ignoring problems are very different things.

This is merely recycling the argument ad infinitum.

All these predictions are wrong. They are all wrong because of an unexpected development. The OP says Malthus was right, but for the discovery of cheap energy. Maybe an Ehrlich supporter was right, but for the development of better crop yields.

The point is these 'buts' are the fatal flaw. An unknown unknown comes along and destroys the premise. (At this point we can safely classify it as a known unknown) As these are unpredictable, and down to a known factor - human ingenuity - it's safer to say things will be all right. The human genome is a successful critter because it selects for intelligence and ingenuity.

The numbers might look bleak because they're based on current assumptions, which will prove to be false. We know they will be false, the assumptions always prove to be false. It's the one thing we can rely on being constant. At the turn of the 20th century, New Yorkers were convinced the city would be rendered completely unliveable because of the amount of horse shit in the streets. The numbers were depressing. Everyone assumed that horse use was going to continue to go up in a straight line. Someone was probably looking for government grants to design a shitless horse. The assumption was wrong. its always wrong

Well, you've made good points and I hope you're right.

But hey, if the inventors of cars didn't think the horses can be improved upon there would have been less incentive to invent the cars. The problems still have to be recognised somehow.

> it's always wrong

Until it isn't.

Presumably you haven't read 'collapse' by Jared Diamond. Even if you disagree with his argument, you can't disagree with his facts - which are that all prior human civilizations have failed catastrophically, typically with environmental collapse.

Why should we believe that ingenuity will prevail this time, when it has never done before?

I note that you have no response to this.

No, he hasn't been proven wrong because the basic premise still holds: the amount of non-renewable resources does not increase, we don't know how to recycle a significant amount, the energy required for extraction keeps getting higher, and the demand for those resources continues to exist.

> Has there never, ever been a better time to be alive as a human? Self evidently, yes. It's the best time to be alive right now.

Can we stop saying this as though it's some kind of argument. It's not.

Many people are diagnosed with a fatal disease in the prime of their lives. The fact that they were doing well before they received the diagnosis doesn't mean they aren't sick.

It is an argument. Life expectancy, infant mortality, access to food and housing, education and technology have never been higher. These are all good outcomes. Things are even getting better in developing countries on these measures. The only places where this is not happening is where superstition causes people to live under autocratic regimes that use imaginary sky people to control the population through fear and miseducation.

This is inescapable fact. Peoples lives in aggregate are getting better. That it is irritating to people pushing the opposite view is understandable, but doesn't invalidate the data. You can't just hand-wave it way and say 'doesn't matter'. You can't say it's not a valid argument because it 'might end' - which is in itself a poor argument.

It does matter. Life is getting better for a very large group of people, and that's good.

It's a fact. But it is not an argument. It is also not good if it leads to a major castrophy.

The concern is not that the good outcomes don't currently exist.

The concern is that the good outcomes are unsustainable because we are an increasing population consuming finite resources and generating serious new problems.

Do you have an argument that the current level of development is sustainable, or do you simply not know?

Exactly. Hans Rosling and, well, all the data, make it look particularly dire for the neo-malthusians:

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth...

We don't have to say disproven* I guess, but maybe overshadowed? ie, I want a theory that explains not only population collapse, but also natural decreases in population growth (or sharp decreases not motivated by war or famine) that we're currently witnessing throughout the developed world.

Malthus simply can't explain it and Rosling can. I'm going with the theory with more explanatory power, because that's how empiricism generally works.

* Unless you're talking about the predictions Ehrlich made about things that didn't ultimately happen. Yeah, maybe "disproven" works.

QED means you've proven something. It's pretentious to use it when you're not discussing a proof, and embarrassing to use it you're just ranting and not even remotely proving anything.

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