The Population Bomb? | Hacker News Reader

The Population Bomb?

retroreport.org

28 pointsyugoja38 comments

One of the things that keeps me going is a connection to nature & outdoors. When it gets severed or disrupted, perhaps by a move to a crowded area without access to trails and open spaces, I get very depressed.

Looking at footage from the video, I would be very depressed living in such crowded conditions. Maybe even suicidal.

I wonder if part of our ecological crisis is that people are so disconnected from nature, they forget or never understood how much they depend on it - not just from nutrition & ecological services standpoint, but psychologically and spiritually as well.

The world is too much with us indeed.

Have you heard of Calhoun's mouse experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experime...

Maybe we are exhibiting the attitudes Calhoun observed in the "beautiful ones". Scary.

Fascinating read. Thanks.

Truly. The concept is depressing and liberating at the same time.

Here's a video on Dr Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM

Our Disneyland isn't going to be a ride in the park.

I think I agree with you. The world seems overcrowded to me. I've never been much of an out of doors person but sometimes I'd just like to get away from it all. That seems difficult these days. Anywhere you go in the US it seems like the land is either privately owned or government owned with tons of regulations that nobody really wants to deal with. Those regulations are probably at least somewhat needed because without them the sheer number of people visiting government lands would probably do great damage. Anything above about 1 billion people on this planet seems probably suboptimal to me.

Some people think it should be 500 million:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...

Not overcrowded, just spread out too thin. The reason the US looks like it looks is that everybody wants an acre of land around their house, so they chop down forests and build suburbs instead. If people gave up on that notion and where willing to live in cities then there would be an abundance of unspoiled nature.

Every place is pretty much owned in America. Land is valuable. And there is admittedly little or no unspoiled land left.

But don't blame houses. People in America still live on a tiny fraction of the land. Its all about farming and grazing and mining.

The Feds own most of the land.

See chart "Federal Land as a Percentage of Total State Land Area"

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-ugly-facts-...

Sure, and they rent it out for grazing, mining. Still nothing like 'unspoiled'.

Personally I don't necessarily care much about "unspoiled". I just wish there was a place I could legally go without paying tribute to the world machine and be free from outside interference with my mere existence.

EDIT: In fact living in a world where such a simple act is not possible isn't a bad definition of hell in my opinion.

Well, there's all that federal land, right?

Personally I just walk out my door - I have 80 acres of rolling hills, trees, occasional waterways, deer, pheasant and miscellaneous critters. Bought by selling my quarter-acre in San Jose and relocating.

In Canada you can just camp out on crown land. We have so much extra space its mind boggling.

One thing to do to cure yourself of the whole the world is too crowded feeling is to take a flight from Europe to Either Vancouver or Japan and just marvel at how many hours you'll spend flying over Russia or Canada and not seeing any signs of civilization.

The whole essence of overshoot and die-off is due to running into limits in a finite world.

Any sophisms detracting from that basic facts are criminally insane, or just criminal.

Is this article meant to be sarcastic? The world population has quite literally doubled since 1968 when there were 3.5B people worldwide. Yes, the population has doubled since most of your parents were born.

Which implies an interesting statistic: the majority of people who ever lived, are still alive.

I don't think it does.

The Population Reference Bureau estimates that a total of 107 billion Homo Sapiens have lived (since 50,000 BC) [1].

[1] http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...

Doesn't work like that: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...

That's interesting. An optimistic guesstimate assuming uniform growth from 50KBC. But humans have been boom and bust since then, with things like ice ages putting a monkey wrench in the works. I'm thinking it could have busted to 10M repeatedly through history.

Idiotic article. It ignores the real decremental effects of overpopulation that are taking place presently. Moreover, 50 years is not that long. Consider how things will look in another 200 at any appreciable positive growth rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk

There's a nicely illustrative video by Hans Rosling here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg on the population growth.

There are a lot of unproven assumptions there, such as that the education is a decreasing factor of population growth. That is only a correlation. I don't claim to know exactly how things are revolving in this matter, but as an educated guess I can say that, outside the necessary physical conditions (like enough nourishment and such), the culture of family is the most influential here. The education and the opportunities it opened for a better life just happened to be seductive enough to attract the individuals out of that family culture, but I wouldn't take this effect for granted.

You can look at the the other videos of Hans Rosling which might answer that. Whether it's a correlation and not a cause might still be up for debate, but the observation of that effect have been observed in virtually all places around the world.

India seems like a very poor example.

Instead look at Chad. It's had exponential population growth for decades without slowing. It's mostly young people. It's already flooding Italy with refugees.

I'm not convinced that "The Population Bomb" was wrong.

Forecasting is a art - I think the Population Bomb (and other predictions made ~ that era - Hubbard Peak Oil? Ozone holes? Space Travel? Robots?) are subject to the initial conditions of the prediction.

Why were mothers in India having so many children compared to to those in Europe and North America? The model assumed static conditions that would continue the trend. Economics (cost of raising children, no need for extra farm help) and social factors (women's education and access to birth control) changed trends.

Population growth does continue to be a problem and concern for the future - both from over-use of resources and pollution of the environment.

But I think this does show an important point of not putting too much weighting into future predictions. The process of planning is very important, but the plans themselves are useless.

People worry about running out of oil. While not an excuse to be wasteful, I think its likely we will move to alternative energies before supply becomes overly constrained. Mega-batteries (reported today in Japan and proposed by Tesla) could be a key to make other energies feasible, and would not have been predicted even a few years ago. The future is exciting times!

For more statistics and a historical look at world population growth (including references), see the "World Population Growth" charts at OurWorldInData [ http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-stati... ]

Pure propaganda and manipulation. Guess it goes with the medium.

If the worry is "not enough young people", what is the logical continuation? When we produce lots of young people now, and those become old, we need even more young people, and so on? So population growth is the only way forward?

Not even mentioning that today fewer people are needed to take care of other people than in former times. For example one farmer can produce food for many, many more people than one hundred years ago.

It's obvious that population can not grow indefinitely. Just think of the surface of the earth. There is a limited number of square meters. Eventually you would have so many people that there would be one person per square meter.

Maybe we could even live like that. We could live in skyscrapers, or even in little boxes Matrix style and spend our days in spacious virtual reality.

But the question is: do we want to live like that? We have to also think how we want to live, and how that can be made possible.

In the same vein, I guess the world obviously can not be overpopulated. If if were overpopulated, people would start dying until it would not be overpopulated anymore. That's presumably what is already happening in some regions of the world anyway, and has always happened. In "Collapse" Jared Diamonds describes a tribe living on a small isolated island. When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. It's not a new problem.

But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place.

re: the anecdote that was shared from Diamond's "Collapse"

> When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone.

This was an example of a society which had developed bottom-up knowledge and management of population levels. As well as cases of "virtual suicide", as described, there were also traditions dictating which siblings were allowed to have children, and which were not. From memory, they also developed appropriate agricultural practices to not damage their limited available productive land.

In my opinion, this society developed a successful reaction to the limits of their environment, although some aspects of it might seem very confronting or perhaps even unethical to us in other societies.

On a personal note, in a strange way I found it was peaceful to read "Collapse", to learn that there have been many civilisations that have collapsed in the past -- civilisations that were in some sense more successful (by lasting for a longer period) than the civilisation I am part of.

Similarly there is a sense of peace in learning more about the non-human parts of natural history. It's not all about us.

> But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place.

Exactly. It can also be argued that not reproducing is probably the most 'green' thing one can do.

The population bomb went the same way as every other doom and gloom scenario - no where, people just ignored it till the zealots finally shut up.

too many people? too little food? do people even realize how much land in this world isn't being used for people or food? most issues with food and population are caused by politics and usually bad politics. population numbers didn't cause the issues, greedy and power hungry people who went unchecked do.

By now most ecosystems are dead and many species became extinct. No matter if we eat meat or vegetables, ride cars or bikes, the biggest contributor to environmental devastation is the sheer population size. Now it is a lot, and it will be more.

Of course, once can take an anthropocentric approach. But, in my humble view, world is not only about people.

Reposting comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9765205 because it's still relevant:

This is a bit like saying that the people causing panic over Y2K were unwarranted because everyone checked their systems and sorted it out in advance. If nobody had panicked about it, then nothing would have been done.

There has been a major, coordinated effort to give women family planning information and technology worldwide, along with economic and social change. Efforts against overpopulation have been a common theme of development planning.

I think it is unhelpful to look at something like population in isolation from other deeply related issues, such as affluence, pollution per affluence, technology, unsustainable consumption of resources / production of pollution, changes in efficiency. For example, one simple way of modelling things is the `I=PAT` equation (see also the critique under "Reception") [0].

I'll quote from VHEMT [1]:

  > For example, in terms of energy consumption,
  > when a North American couple stops at two it’s
  > about the same as an average East Indian couple
  > stopping at 30, or a Bangaledesh couple stopping
  > at 97.

Maybe energy consumption is a bit abstract - it is not immediately obvious what, if anything, is wrong with that. Instead we could consider per-capita CO2 pollution, taking the 2005 statistics from Wikipedia [2]:

  United States: 19.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year)
  Bangladesh: 0.3 tonnes CO2 / (person year)

From these numbers, a 1 additional US person has the same immediate short-term impact in terms of CO2 pollution as about 64 additional Bangladeshi people [2].

CO2 pollution produced by humans is primarily the cause of recent global warming. If the current trend in greenhouse gas pollution continues to track the high end of (conservative) IPCC baseline models [3] then it will not be surprising if we end up with a world that is +3.5C -- +4C -- or more higher than baseline, by the year 2100 (from memory, we're already at about +0.6C this year). It really doesn't look like we will limit the temperate increase to the "agreed 'safe'" +2C in the real world, outside of modelling scenarios[4].

It doesn't appear that the world has experienced a temperature of +4C for quite a long time (either hundreds of thousands or millions of years, depending on which graphs you look at)[5][6]. The last time it was that warm certainly pre-dates human agriculture (~12000 years ago) [7], and perhaps the human species (100s of thousands of years ago)[8]. I.e., we are rapidly pushing the climate toward a state where humans and human civilisation have never previously existed. The result will likely be unpleasant, in the sense that many people will suffer and die, due to heat stress, natural disasters, reduced crop yields, disease, and conflict caused by displaced people / resource shortages [9][10].

I have focused here on climate change in isolation, but that is just the first hurdle. Other serious concerns are human impacts upon biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle - and those are just the impacts that we're able to measure [11]. There's reasonable evidence that the world is currently experiencing a period of mass extinction [12].

So -- bringing it back to population. From the perspective of everyone else alive right now, assuming they are well informed and rational, should they think it is a good idea for me to have a child, particularly if I live in an affluent, polluting society[13]? I doubt it very much.

Of course, it isn't all grim. There is still time for us all to get better at being altruistic, thinking clearly, predicting the future, cooperating, changing our minds about what might be important, and modifying our environment (for better or worse). But, at best, it is obviously a race between positive and negative trends. There is not much time left. But, from historical evidence, so far the metrics of biodiversity and CO2 pollution are very much going in an undesirable direction, with no sign yet of change.

edit: I'll finish by quoting David MacKay out of context. He is talking about the UK's sustainable energy debate [14]:

  > We need to choose a plan that adds up. It is possible
  > to make a plan that adds up, but it’s not going to be
  > easy.
  >
  > We need to stop saying no and start saying yes. We need
  > to stop the Punch and Judy show and get building.

I pretty much agree with this sentiment in the realm of sustainable energy, and I'd also agree with the sentiment if it were extended much more broadly, beyond MacKay's intended context, to questions of population, affluence, equality, poverty, intergenerational fairness, and how economies should be run.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT#Reception [1] http://www.vhemt.org/demography.htm [2] we're glossing over the fact that some of these additional people might choose to have children, or that annual per-capita CO2 pollution could change. [3] For 2014 data, see figure 3 (a) of https://www.lakeheadu.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/53/outl... [4] http://www.rtcc.org/2015/06/19/is-avoiding-2c-of-global-warm... [5] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page... [6] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Human [9] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-... [10] http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/ [11] See figure 6 of: http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... [12] http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jenny_Mcguire/publicatio... [13] assuming they don't have some kind of interest in driving down the cost of labour in the short term, to reduce the labour cost of producing this season's model of useless widget. [14] http://www.withouthotair.com/c32/page_250.shtml

  > For example, in terms of energy consumption,
  > when a North American couple stops at two it’s
  > about the same as an average East Indian couple
  > stopping at 30, or a Bangaledesh couple stopping
  > at 97.

The Americans in this example behave like O(1) and the Bangladeshi as O(48.5^n). No matter the constants the Bangladeshis' resource consumption will eventually outstrip the Americans'.

I can see what you are saying, but I think we can both agree that the literal interpretation of families with 97 children isn't particularly realistic.

A similar objection goes for asymptotic time horizons: we don't have infinite time to work with, this is reality, we have a handful of critical decades. Climate models are typically run to year 2100, where of course the world hasn't ended, but it's probably a +3.5C ... +4C ... scenario, so options are dramatically restricted, and continuing to diminish, for the surviving people.

Another way to think about the population would be to simply consider how we might expect the US and Bangladesh populations to change over a reasonable time horizon, to figure out how many person-years of consumption (and pollution) we get for each individual and half of their descendants.

Here are some parameters and assumptions for a rather simple model:

  Parameters:
                        Bangladesh      United States
  ----------------------------------------------------------------
  Fertility rate, births per woman    2.2 (y2013)     1.9 (y2013)
  life expectancy at birth, female    71 (y2013)      81 (y2013)
  life expectancy at birth, male      70 (y2013)      77 (y2013)
  life expectancy mf geom average     70.5            79
  average age of first child birth    18 (y2011)      25.4 (y2010)

This data in itself is pretty interesting! The fertility rate for both countries is similar (although on different sides of the 2.0 fence), but the "average age of first child birth" is very different!

  Simplifying assumptions:

    assume everyone in each country behaves the same:

    everyone lives until their birth life expectancy
    everyone has same number of kids
    uniform life expectancy
    divide birth rate by 0.5, everyone gives birth
    everyone has children at the same age

    all these parameters are stationary wrt time

These are pretty severe assumptions, obviously, but let's see where they take us.

Using these parameters, over a time horizon of 100 years, starting with a 0-year old US person, and a 0-year old Bangladeshi person, we obtain [0]:

  Bangladesh: 343.8 person-years of consumption
  United States: 214.7 person-years of consumption

If we multiply this by the country specific per-capita per-year rates of CO2 pollution, we get

  Bangladesh: 343.8 * 0.3 = 103.14 tons of CO2 pollution
  United States: 214.7 * 19.3 = 4143.7 tons of CO2 pollution

The US person (and their descendants), have contributed ~40x the CO2 pollution as the Bangladeshi person (and their descendants) over this time horizon!

We can compare this to a US person who has no children over the same time horizon:

  United States, no children: 79 * 19.3 = 1524 tons of CO2 pollution

If we extend the time horizon to look at a ridiculous 900 year period, then we get the following:

  Bangladesh: 71650.5 * 0.3 = 21495.2 tons of CO2 pollution
  United States: 1308.8 * 19.3 = 25259.84 tons of CO2 pollution

The single United States person (and their finite number of descendants) have still produced more CO2 pollution than the single Bangladeshi person (and their large and growing number of descendants)!

### What, if anything, can we conclude?

Over a time horizon of 100 years, a cartoon typical US person (and their descendants) will be responsible for about 40x the CO2 emissions as a cartoon typical Bangladeshi person (and their descendants).

A cartoon typical US person can reduce the CO2 emissions they are responsible for by around 60% if they make a decision to have no children, over a 100 years time horizon.

Over a 900 year time horizon, ridiculously assuming parameters to not vary over time, a cartoon typical US person will still be responsible for more CO2 emissions than a cartoon typical Bangladeshi person.

[0] via a hastily written python script: https://gist.github.com/fcostin/2225b2a51ad8859b5d1b

Url changed from http://kottke.org/15/06/the-population-bomb-defused, which points to this. HN prefers original sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com