The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion

For example make energy cheap enough, and we can desalinate enough water to re-green the Sahara desert.

That's not something we can do today, but the future is bright, and not limited.

People say this all the time, but it's simply not true. There is no limit to our resources because they can be recycled endlessly. The atoms don't wear out.

The only input necessary is energy, and we are working hard to make that cheaper and cleaner.

If the recent trend of Chinese and Indians immigrating to the U.S. continues and the decline of birth rate for U.S. Caucasians continues, by 2050 the U.S. population may roughly reflect the world population by ethnicity, i.e. equal numbers of Caucasian, African, Hispanic, Indian, and East Asians. If there's a collapse around 2050 as predicted and the world population needs to suddenly reduce from 9 billion to 500 million, such an immigration-based country with control of the world's oceans and weapons would find it easy to convince its population that citizenship is the best determiner of who survives and who doesn't. There'd probably also be some religious overtones when the U.S. government sells the idea to its people.

Watching the video on NYT, Ehrlich wanted to add taxes for people who have children which is more accurately coersion.

What do you make of the DINK couple that has foregone their reproductive rights for the sake of "environmental concerns" but still get themselves a couple of pets and treat them as upper-middleclass children. One would say, disabled children that are never going to become productive members of this society and most likely will be dead by age 16.

Maybe there would be enough room in this world for the people we already have - at least for long enough that the correction in overpopulation comes from the fertility rate rather than otherwise - if those of us at the top of the pecking order would not insist on wasting so much real wealth in our natural but unexamined impulses.

Generally speaking, high birth rates correlate with poverty. Improve standards of living, particularly for woman and disconnect access to medical & family planning resources from religion and birthrates decline. If you don't think that 50% of your kids will die before reaching adulthood, you don't have 12 children.

The 1 million pound gorilla is our collective failure to look past our tribal/national boundaries.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/29/j...

I doubt any of these models will be accurate. But do they need to be? Either our technology will make our current lifestyles sustainable, or reality will catch up with us and cause much distress.

This is what complex systems do. Simple linear causal reasoning just breaks down... there are too many feedback loops, chaotic functions, etc. Things will look completely normal and then wham, the system will suddenly and without apparent warning undergo a radical shift.

Look at how economic bubbles pop. You'll have a roaring, humming economy collapse within hours or days and nobody knows why. The postmortem generally takes years. Sometimes the reasons seem 'obvious' but that is only in hindsight. Nobody ever succeeds in calling the top of a bubble -- despite the huge financial reward of doing so -- except by sheer luck.

LTG was an attempt to apply complex systems modeling at the global scale to answer questions about the long term viability of our current civilization. So far it seems to be tracking reality in some ways, but as you correctly state we do not know whether this is spurious correlation or actual evidence for the validity of the model. We also know -- see the work of folks like Ilya Prigogine -- that it is actually impossible to predict the future of systems like this with certainty. There are strict limits on prediction in complex systems.

So we don't know. LTG is scary, but for all we know it won't come to pass.

But we'll know soon. We get to find out in the next 25 years if all the work we've done to build a better future over the past 500 years is a total mirage and all our children are all doomed to starvation, warfare, and misery. Fun times.

What a fantastic question! You're thinking in the right direction.

The explanation involves systems theory, so I'll let an expert explain. https://youtu.be/HMmChiLZZHg?t=420 1h30m, but it's the best explanation of Limits to Growth out there.

I of course hope that the predictions will turn out to be wrong or at least to pessimistic but we surly know that complex systems can unexpectedly change their behavior at the flap of a butterfly.

And we are the cause of the current mass extinction. Through the innovation of society we have conquered the planet in a way few other multicellular organisms have managed to in the past, where they gain some evolutionary advantage that enables them to in short order effectively conquer all of their habitable zone.

It isn't unique though, the only difference is we can look at it happening and have this spark of wit in the back of our heads that tells us while we individually contribute little to the event we collectively are destroying biodiversity.

That isn't to say biodiversity is particularly saintly. Its gone away before, will go away again, and all we are really doing is eliminating anything that is not beneficial to us and that cannot coexist with us, not even through attack, but just by claiming our habitat as our own. Yes, our ignorance in how we allow it to happen might be our downfall if we kill off essential species in food chains that cripple ourselves as a result, but thats the risk you take dominating an environment the way we consistently do.

Its the same way any evolving mammal 60 million years ago would have been stomped out by dinosaurs that dominated their habitat, preventing the evolution of most mammalian life we know today back then.

Humans have overcome a number of hurdles, but to say we are immune to the same pressures is just hubris.

Already populations are declining in wealthy countries, what will happen in JApan in 50 years? No one knows because it's never happened to such a wealthy technologically advanced country.

Food cost spiked several times in the 2000s leading to food riots and was a likely catalyst of the Arab Spring.

World fishing stock is over exploited and total world wild catch has flat lined the last 5 years, aquaculture has made up the difference but that is an entirely new area and the environmental effects are uncertain.

Technology may save us, but blind optimism is no different than baseless pessimism.

Global climate change is happening, no one knows how fast or have massive those changes will be, we just know it's happening. From a geological perspective we are already living through a mass extinction event, our influence has been profound and will be seen for millions of years in the fossil record.