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Comment by ChrisArgyle | Hacker News Reader

People may stop dying but they won't stop reproducing. Let's make sure we master space exploration and terraforming before we start overpopulating the earth.

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Space exploration and terraforming will need a lot of manpower. We should overpopulate first to shorten the schedule!

Actually, it will need a lot of well-coordinated brainpower. We don't really need to send a 1000-man chain gang to suffocate on mars. This is likely to come from the sort of societies that have low infant mortality rates and high levels of education.

Birthrates are declining across the world. While everyone won't stop having children, lots of countries are already below replacement rate, and other countries will follow as they industrialize.

Why would you assume this? Space exploration and terraforming are absolutely never going to solve the population problem. Population problems need to be solved with (possibly government enforced) fucking restraint. You don't get to have kids if you're going to live forever. Or the option to reproduce could be handed out on a lottery basis to replace losses from people who decide to stop living forever or die from accidents / not yet cured disease.

That's the only solution. Space travel isn't it.

> You don't get to have kids if you're going to live forever.

Well, we can make it so that every human can have at most one child. If the rule is enforced perfectly, each generation will have at most half as many offspring, and the series sum of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... is 1, leading to at most a doubling of the population, even if everyone lives forever.

Another interesting idea for population control is giving every person the right to 3/4 of a child. A couple then has the right to 1.5 children, so they can have one child and sell the right to the remaining half, or they can buy the half they need to get two from another couple. Or even sell/buy 1.5. (This idea is from Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars")

It may work as long as each child has more than one parent. And the last child born is not allowed to have children, because he/she cant find partner without children.

Hah, that's interesting. But that last person is going to feel ripped off.

They can "accidentally" be born sterile. Shh, nobody tell.

Self preservation is possibly the most powerful instinctual urge humans experience. It doesn't seem very likely that child-bearing people will stick to their mortality pledge when faced with death.

I'd expect this approach would just slightly delay the population issue meanwhile creating a massive black market for pledge-breakers.

Sex is a powerful motivator. Which effects can be fairly easily mitigated by condoms and other birth control options. Maternal and paternal instinct are powerful motivators, but they seem to affect people who are already parents. First they would need to become parents. Is there some abstract force that compels people to become parents? Or is that kind of thing taken care of by simpler urges, like sexual feelings?

People might be mistaking more abstract, existential urges with more plain ones. Do you really want to, in some kind of sense, propagate yourself through time after your death? Or do you just want to fuck, and perhaps also take care of little people (they're so cute...)?

Evolution and survival happens to most species with less developed and abstract brains. I don't see why our own needs for survival would be tied to some idea of "carrying on ourselves after we die".

The technology required to cure aging is more difficult than the technology required to build food factories. The earth can support many more billions of people on far less land than we use today if there are investments into architecture and war/corruption is mitigated.

What is the point of that? Just have lots of people? That doesn't help anything. The whole idea of anti-aging is for individuals to live longer. Have their hard won expertise and skills continue to be of use longer, have them enjoy life more rather than a constant progression that ends in death.

That would be fine if we had a billion people on Earth, but whatever number ends up being stable, it's an orthogonal issue.

That's incredibly defeatist approach.

Space travel it is.

Given the latest global birth and death rates of 19.5 and 7.89 persons per 1000 respectively, we'd have to launch people into space at the rate of over 200,000 individuals per day just to keep the current population constant.

There's lots of good reasons for humanity to go into space; population control is not one of them.

I hope it's not a lottery basis... I hope there would be some intelligence to the choices.

It would be nice to reverse Idiocracy tendancies (Stupid people procreating more than intelligent leading to a general decline)

A lottery would have no selective pressure, so no Idiocracy tendancy. That was part of the reason I suggested that. But the only thing I think the system needs is to have some very basic requirements, and then choose mostly randomly among applicants that want to have children.

Anything more, like only allowing the smartest or the most wealthy is going to get dystopian pretty fast, I would think

That movie is based on a flawed premise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The movie is based on the idea that intellegence has a large inherited (~.7) component. Whatever is causing the Flynn effect is acting on the smaller non-genetic component. Interestingly the Flynn effect is only acting on the bottom half of the bell curve suggesting it is the result of the removal of environmental factors that destroy intelligence - things like lead or poor nutrition.

I think it would drastically change the way people see the world. If you slow down aging in your early 20s, you'll probably push off having a kid until way farther down the line because you now have time to do all the things you'd want to do while you're young, and still have energy for kids later on.

As long as population keeps growing exponentially, we'll have many more young people than old people. So extending the lives of old people doesn't make that much difference. To prevent overpopulation, lower the birth rate.

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