My great-grandma was born in 1920 and died in 2020. She was lucid to her final breath. I spent a lot of time talking to her about the ‘before times’.
She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s.
However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was.
We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a single (long lived) individual.
My grandad was born in 1925 - he remembers them installing the electric streetlights in Birmingham.
The main difference seemed to be car traffic and tourism. It's just unrecognisable nowadays (and even from the 1980s tbh).
Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
> Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
I think about this, perhaps more than I should. My great-grandmother was born under monarchy, in a mud hut, somewhere along the Danube. When she was 14, she got stolen on a horse by the son of a band of real highwaymen. She and the son built a house by hand (that still exists, modernized). They had no electricity, no cars anywhere around. Her husband traveled for maybe some tens of miles out of town to the nearest towns. Herself, not even that.
The first time she saw a car, it was passing by, and all the children were running after it smelling the fumes; they had no idea what it was or that there was a human inside. It belonged to an industrialist from the nearest city who made a chicken farm in the area.
World wars came and went, biplanes, radar, the transistor... the village was bombarded, and the state became a popular republic, then a socialist one. Industrialization started. The beginning of globalization, cinematography, and mass media. They still had lights only on the main street. She became a sort of accountant for the collectivized farm and raised her sons and granddaughters.
The Berlin wall fell, and the regime changed again. Democracy. She discovered capitalism, global mass production, and consumerism. Post-communist corruption tore down the town and sold it for scraps. By this time, yours truly came, and she went to the city to help my parents while they were studying and working.
Together, we discovered the contemporary world. Quickly traveling to other countries, computers, internet, QR codes, VoIP, HD media, WiFi, social media, mobile devices, global media streaming, mRNA vaccines, and probably so much more that I can't remember now.
God, this post got long, and it teared me up. I've considered not posting, but I will. I'm unsure if I'm terrified or comforted by the thought that I might not live through so much change, though it feels like the world is changing even faster.
Love it. Just before my grandmother died (89), I asked her what the biggest change was on the planet in her lifetime. She was silent for a moment and then gleefully blurted out "PLASTICS!".
She explained that when she was a girl "everything was made of something and someone knew how to do it". Now everything is just plastic.
> She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it.
Glad to read that, I'm a sucker for Gen Z's world and I like the adult ones a lot!
Every counterculture thing I was into is normal with them! Like, broadly attractive people are totally into things that only socially maladjusted and visually unattractive people were into prior. That is perfect for me!
Depends on the region where your grandma lived, the two villages where my parents grew up (and where my grandparents used to live their entire lives) are almost empty now, especially when it comes to young people. You’d think that everyone fled to the towns/cities, and you’d be correct, but that happened starting with the 1960s and continued for about twenty years. But when we (I’m from Romania) joined the European Union back in 2007 even those cities and towns started to empty out.
Might as well say it: 8 billion is too many, and it’s a good thing that population growth is levelling off. A decline down to ~1 billion would be fine. If we have to change retirement planning, so be it.
No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to avoid that check.
Why? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einstiens, Newtons, Da Vincis etc.
I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not the end.
No other species can grow it's population exponentially. True. However, we aren't any other species (that we know of at least). The planet can support far more people, it truly can, and more so, the rest of space awaits. We can spread further and further. Is it really good to wish for a reduction of our species? of the only life we know that can truly observe and appreciate the beauty of creation?
What things though? It is mostly materialistic, isn't it? We are more comfortable than ever. We can talk to a person on the other side of the planet anytime we want. Yet, we don't know our neighbors. More people are lonely, more people are single etc. We live longer today, yet my generation seems less happy than my parents' generation. When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today? We can't even be sure kids are safe in schools (though this particular problem is just American one).
On one side, we are relentlessly moving ahead, mostly materialistic. Fantastic communication tools, medical equipment etc. On the other side, people are obese, unhappy, unhealthy (mentally and physically).
We can't even a significant portion of the people accept that climate change issues are real and maybe slightly alter their lifestyle (eat less meat, less dairy, use less plastic...). How are you proposing to achieve any kind of cooperation between people when the population keeps going up?
> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things.
More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
That's a very selfish view. More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Watch Earthling to see only one part of human needs.
All the advances are due to exploitation all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
That's illogical thinking: should we increase our population by a factor of 10? To get 10x the Einsteins, Newtons, and Da Vinci's? By a factor of 100? 1000?
There will always be smart people and brilliant artists. If we reduce population, they will just come at a slower rate, which is fine. Will just make them more special when they do come.
I hate people and definitely would love to see fewer of them.
This makes no sense whatsoever. 8 billion is too many, for what, for whom? Next to 8 billion of us, we also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals, which is enormously expensive and horrible for the environment.
Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow that is out there.
IMHO 8 billion is too many for the size of the earth. With a total of 150 million km2 in land, each person corresponds to 0.018 km2 or 18000m2 which is equivalent to a 130x130 meter space. That includes sleeping, eating and "food growing" spaces. And the 150 million also includes inhospitable places.
I think that no matter how efficient our food generation processes get, this is very little space per person. That's why people live in the air and on top of each other.
8 billion is too many to also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals. If we had 10x fewer people and kept 10x fewer cattle (and more generally, consumed 10x fewer resources), the environment would be doing just fine. But it’s not doing fine, and that’s why 8 billion is too many.
Where does this kind of thinking lead us? Should we not be even more proactive, then, and start reducing our population as fast as possible to avert the catastrophe that you predict? If less is more, and time is running out, will you live by your own belief, and volunteer for euthanasia? To save the planet, for our children, and our children's children?
Every generation has it's soothsayers that are absolutely certain we are near the population limit and heading for certain doom. And every one of them was wrong. Our population soared past those limits, no problem.
I share the opinion that earth can sustain about 100B of us, with a bit of planning and thoughtful engineering. So long as most people don't mind living in sky scrapers. More people = more brains to solve the type of problems that I assume you are worried about.
I don't actually believe we will continue growing like we have, as nothing in human affairs follows a strait line for long. Every great kingdom has fallen, every empire divided. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. We don't need to try and control it, but only observe and adapt to it.
My grandfather (1931) has 7 grades of education and a lifetime history of building and repairing radios and television sets. He worked for the army and spent some time on submarines, instructing navy officers on how to use radio equipment -- with his 7 grades of formal schooling.
Once, during a autumn storm (we're in Estonia), I remember him stating on a business-as-usual tone: "I was 15, when I first got to know electricity."
Man, I thought. Here, in front of me, is a living person who spent the first 14 years (!) of his life completely off-grid. No electricity, period.
That was also the moment I realized that this same person -- my grandpa -- has accumulated all of his knowledge by first-hand, hit-and-miss experiments. The contemporary model of "theory first" was and is almost completely alien to him, along with book-knowledge of any kind. The result of this? Even at age 90, you can be 99% sure that everything my grandpa states is true -- simply because he only speaks or proposes things that he has tested out himself.
As a person with lots of "book knowledge", I find this absolutely fascinating. Obviously, all the technological solutions he has in his household are 1) rock solid and 2) dead simple.
It almost appears that if you somehow manage to maintain decent work ethic (and the ethic of being human), a modest amount of formal schooling may have its benefits.
For how long? Being recent (on evolutionary timescales), evolution has created selection pressures on previously irrelevant variables (the desire to have children, in particular). Without contraception or female labor force participation, people didn't decide how many children to have before urbanisation: everyone who didn't die just kept having kids. The poorest places are still like this. But in evolutionarily novel urban contexts, people choose how many kids to have; if this decision has a genetic component, that means the current urban millieu selects for people who want more kids. Basic genetics tells us that the number of people who "want more kids" will grow exponentially (so long as culture doesn't keep driving preferences for children down). The key question, of course, is "what's the exponent?". It depends on the heritability of fertility, and data from behavioural genetics indicates that it's high in urbanised societies. If your parents had more kids than average, you probably will (even if you were adopted at birth and didn't grow up with your parents). The effect is large enough that it would have a big impact on the UN population estimates by 2100. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important.
I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow.
All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.
It doesn't matter when Africa is exploding. All the low birthrate in the West does is weaken the countries trying to protect the environment. As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them.
This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.
>these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them.
I live in Latin America, in my trips to the US I get disgusted when I see hundreds of family cars with giant gas engines that we only use in construction trucks, idling all day just to run their air conditioner in a slightly hot day.
It's incredible the delusion that the first world has about how 'sustainable' their lifestyles are.
> As this continues corporations will bring in the people from these undeveloped countries who will bring their unsustainable cultures with them
Cut this xenophobic crap right now. Have a look at the facts. For example, the per capita CO2 emission in Ethiopia is 0.13 tonnes, whereas it's 14.24 tonnes in the US. That's over a factor of 100 more.
Given the "theme song" linked to in your profile, it's quite obvious where this is coming from, but let's talk unsustainable cultures then:
Again, from your theme song and your apparent fondness for the Teutonic Order I'm assuming you're at least familiar with Germany and the German social security system, which is very much a part of their culture.
The German state pension system basically amounts to a Ponzi scheme that requires a continuous influx of new contributors in order to not implode.
Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable", but given German culture is quite averse to change (which is unsustainable, too, by the way) and it therefore isn't particularly likely they're going to abandon their current pension system anytime soon, "bringing people from these undeveloped countries" also is about their only option left to keep the system from collapsing for just a little longer.
I'm not even talking general economic and societal repercussions here. It can be argued that a society with a declining population isn't long-term sustainable and ultimately will succumb to stagnation and a lack of innovation.
All available data shows that high birthrates are linked to societal effects of poverty, low access to education and healthcare, not to culture. When Africans move elsewhere, their birth rates adapt rapidly to their new home countries, as do every other group.
As such, talking about "unsustainable cultures" here is pure xenophobia.
>will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down.
Why? intuitively it would seem that that less humans will improve the environment, but intuition is often wrong.
The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
Remember, most of the environmental damage was done by a very small number of very rich countries. The poorest countries is where most of the population lives, and those cause the least environmental impact.
> The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
"Empty" is a very biblical word, with shades of the brass age Hebrew mission of “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
It's time to drop superstitious beliefs and take a hard look at reality. For example, we're using resources at a rate that is no longer sustainable (https://www.footprintcalculator.org/home/en).
For now! They all want the quality of life of the rich nations and understandably so. I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living, let alone more. There isn’t enough land to grow feed for all the livestock we’d need for a start!
> more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
> was done by a very small number of very rich countries
And where do you think the (actionable) "intelligence" and money comes from?
It's not that poorer countries don't have intelligence, but they don't have the resources to put it to good use. One random person in a TED talk gets more attention than the people actually dealing with the issue
"More population" has always meant more misery and more conflict
is this website accurate? https://www.census.gov/popclock/world says we're notably farther away, and im inclined to trust a government over a site run by an unknown group
These stats are frightening. In the past I recall seeing several different sets of figures for the amount of food the average human consumes in a lifetime. One estimate was about 70 tons and the other was 100 tons. (If anyone has better or more definite figures then let's hear about them.)
Now, if we consider the other resources every new human will also consume during his or her lifetime - houses, vehicles, white goods, electronic tech etc., etc. - then that extra demand on the planet's resources will be enormous.
What's worried me for a long time - ever since I read Anne and Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb is that the population will outstrip our ability to find extra resources to support this population growth. Whilst the Ehrlichs overestimated the exponential growth rate I evertheless reckon the evidence supports the fact that they'd gotten the growth trend correct.
It seems to me that unless we quickly take drastic action to either limit population growth or vastly increase food resources or both - not to mention simultaneously keeping environment in a state of sustainability (climate change, etc.) - then the future is likely to be very rocky.
Yes, it's a pessimistic outlook but it looks as if the stats are pretty much against us unless there's a collective realization that something must be done urgently.
I did say that Ehrlich's timeline was inaccurate. I'm also familiar with the counter arguments. Other than comments I've already made in replies to others I've nothing futher to add as it would invite addional political criticism.
I made no moral judgment whatsoever. I only stated what many who are much more knowledgeable than I am have said about the subject over the past 50 or more years.
Moreover, it's just a fact that people have been controlling population growth since before recorded history both at a family and state level - take China's one child policy for instance. I never even mentioned this let alone take a moral stand on the matter. Presumably, you would be much more critical of those who've actually acted to control population numbers rather than those who've just mentioned the subject.
What's more, the comment I made was a logical OR statement - that is either the world has the resources OR it doesn't, if it doesn't then the world has to do something about it, especially when exponential growth is involved.
What are your objections to that? And why are you so indignant and afraid of the subject that you want discussion about it shut down?
See the book More From Less for a counter-argument. Thanks to modern efficiencies and digitization a lot of resource use has decoupled from economic growth and some has actually peaked
"Thanks to modern efficiencies and digitization a lot of resource use has decoupled from economic growth..."
I'm aware of the counter argument but in the light of exponential growth of the population at what point does the graph of 'modern efficiencies' intersect with that of the exponential growth one?
Exponential growth has to stop somewhere as resources aren't infinite, so 'decoupling' cannot last forever.
Incidentally, I'm aware that some demographers have predicted a leveling off of exponential population growth in decades to come. For those who've implied (wrongly) that I've a hide to suggest limiting population growth I'd say that if or when exponential population growth does happen then they'd have to be critical of everyone involved in that turnaround (as it will require active participation of the population for that to happen).
Happy to see the world population growing. Unlike many here I don't believe the world is overpopulated and that we need more people to grow and expand beyond the planet.
Located in the U.S. where we could double the population without starting to feel cramped. We can and we should.
We were all born into a very fortunate time in earth's history regarding natural disasters.
The dust bowl absolutely destroyed a large part of the US. In prior centuries, massive droughts, volcanic explosions that blackened the skies, and massively deadly pandemics ravaged the world. These things happen periodically and absolutely destroy any population that's pushing the limits of its population totals.
So far we've managed to sustain huge population numbers by pumping up ground water. That's drying up across the world. We've survived off fish. Those populations are collapsing. We've diverted rivers for agriculture in deserts. There isn't enough rain to keep those flowing and hasn't been for years, plus with climate change glaciers and mountain snow that fed into rivers are increasingly a thing of the past--rivers and lakes that exist today will cease to exist within our lifetime (and long before we expect). Fertilizer let us push the land well beyond sustainable limits and vegetables are less nutritious than they've ever been due to nutrients being wiped out of the soil. Most countries are dependent on food being shipped from hundreds if not thousands of miles away and often from other countries entirely.
The world is severely overpopulated. We've just been lucky to have had a few decades of peaceful trade and a very, very, very mild environmental situation with zero major global disasters. This isn't the norm. One massive volcanic eruption, one actual plague, one massive drought and it's all over.
Because you live in the wealthiest country in the world (over 100 continuous years of highest GDP) with high salaries and lots of habitable space (from exterminating the native populace).
But that's not sustainable - the US has the highest CO2 emissions per capita when you factor in imports, etc. nevermind other environmental damage. And is also dependent on terrible conditions in Asia, etc. to produce all the cheap goods and clothes that you enjoy.
It's like the prisoner's dilemma though - the first countries that try to act responsibly with environmental policies, transitioning from fossil fuels, reducing population growth and unnecessary consumption are just at a disadvantage to those that don't.
We’re on track for electric cars to overtake gas cars in twenty years. Nuclear power is making a comeback. Even electric planes are in the wings. Best of all, lab-grown meat is here now and we’re just waiting for the price to come down. It seems as though we’ll have solved our emissions issues by the next generation.
Would you still argue against a higher population once we largely solve the emissions issues? Or is there a more fundamental reason you’re against a higher population?
Americans are saints when it comes to environmental destruction. Many African countries have very high birth rates and they do whatever it takes to survive, environment be damned, such as pouring used motor oil on the ground without batting and eye or thinking twice about the effects to their own health. Don't even get me started about the mining and deforestation.
All the issues you mentioned are problems we can and we will solve. Population growth is the best thing that happened to humanity. "Soon" we will become an inter-planetary species so it will get even better and exciting!
> But that's not sustainable - the US has the highest CO2 emissions per capita when you factor in imports, etc. nevermind other environmental damage. And is also dependent on terrible conditions in Asia, etc. to produce all the cheap goods and clothes that you enjoy.
Thanks to globalization... corporations influencing governments around the world to favor a global market. It's colonization all over again. Even back then, at the time of discovering America, for example, it was corporations that went around the world in their ships and did it for profit. The only difference today, is that there are no governments doing it explicitly (i.e. Iraq war), but rather corporations via the excuse of capitalism.
I'd be fine with buying everything local and more expensive, but often that option is not even present anymore. It's like the battle was won, and now we're all dependent on this global chain of commerce in one way or another.
Personally I'd be okay with the population being 10% its current value (though I don't see any non-apocalyptic way of that coming to be). In any case, I think we should decrease our population to whatever extent possible.
But I guess that's just my opinion.
edit: I'm not really sure why you're being down-voted. You're just expressing your opinion here.
yeah... and it would be great if decrease in quantity would come with increase of quality. People themselves, their life conditions, human life appreciation all that stuff you know. (Cause I do not understand why would somebody want 2x of fat dolts).
Overpopulation isn’t really about running out of space or feeling cramped, it’s about not having enough resources to sustainably support the population.
Human beings represent 3% of all animals on earth by weight. At this point, 90% of all birds and mammals on Earth are human-raised livestock [1].
There is room on this planet for more humans, but taking it for our own comes at a cost. If we choose to use it for people, then it can't also be wild. So, we have a choice to make about the kind of world we wish to live in.
It's not about the space and feeling cramped. A rich human's land and ecological footprint goes way beyond than "feeling cramped" walking around in a city.
I'm not against population growth, but this whole rhetoric fueled by Musk, among others, stirring panic that the population will collapse is crazy. Sure, we would have a problem if people suddenly stopped having children. But this is not the case. World population is still growing, and it should stabilize at around 10B people. That's not too bad, why do we need to keep growing?
Sorry for the off topic reply, but I saw your post "Ask HN: Variable naming guide of matching length?" when looking for the same thing and couldn't find a way to contact you on your profile; is this what you were looking for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359214
In that case the population is dominated by the suicidally bad water management in CA. You could cut the population by 99% and you would still have a looming water crisis there.
If you build a solar energy farm on the dark side of the moon you shouldn't be blaming the people who want to use the energy, you should be blaming the people who managed the project.
Physical space is not the only issue. Your average US adult consumes more than 100 times than an adult from a developing country. Doubling that number would have disastrous consequences for the planet.
People are like Replicants: we're "either a benefit or a hazard".
If the population increases in a system where there is enough access to good education, and enough economic opportunity, to advance humanity's knowledge, we will be fine.
If the population increases in a system with too much ignorance and destitution, we are in trouble.
The root cause of this is not "overpopulation" as often proclaimed, but our mode of production, which assumes endless economic growth is possible and everyone can be lifted out of poverty - all while relying on those in poverty to generate wealth (and more wealth inequality). Steven Pinker can shift the poverty line all he wants, it doesn't make the world less unequal.
I really dislike degrowth arguments, but it needs to be acknowledged that the standard of living for the top few percent is simply impossible to scale. At least with the means we currently have, and I'd rather measure based on those than hypothetical future developments that may or may not come to be.
I'm with you on this. The world can still house a lot more people and we should stop being worried about the current population.
In terms of energy, nuclear. In terms of food, there are still large swaths of un-farmed areas. We can farm these and still maintain natural parks and not destroy the environment. Opening up immigration will solve labor issues.
We have the technology, we just have to distribute it to easily quadruple the carrying capacity of the earth
You’re being downvoted, but for rather silly reasons. There are people who wrongly assume less people means higher quality of life for everyone else. There’s simply no empirical data to back such a claim up. The most concerning growth is unsustainable growth, exponential growth that cannot be sustained which causes immediate stress on the local economy. Likewise, there’s also economic stress when the opposite happens as economies are built under the guise of population growth, not just capitalism.
What we see continually rather is a narrative of overpopulation pushed and advanced by seemingly related points about lack of food and water. In reality these are completely orthogonal points which have some correlation to, but are not directly proportional to population growth all.
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She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s. However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was.
We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a single (long lived) individual.
The main difference seemed to be car traffic and tourism. It's just unrecognisable nowadays (and even from the 1980s tbh).
Such a revolutionary time though - to go from biplanes to jet aircraft, radar, computers, mobile phones, etc. - I can't imagine we'll see a similar rate of change.
There's an even better cognitive bias than this describing your «optimism» about the future, but I fail to find its name.
I think about this, perhaps more than I should. My great-grandmother was born under monarchy, in a mud hut, somewhere along the Danube. When she was 14, she got stolen on a horse by the son of a band of real highwaymen. She and the son built a house by hand (that still exists, modernized). They had no electricity, no cars anywhere around. Her husband traveled for maybe some tens of miles out of town to the nearest towns. Herself, not even that.
The first time she saw a car, it was passing by, and all the children were running after it smelling the fumes; they had no idea what it was or that there was a human inside. It belonged to an industrialist from the nearest city who made a chicken farm in the area.
World wars came and went, biplanes, radar, the transistor... the village was bombarded, and the state became a popular republic, then a socialist one. Industrialization started. The beginning of globalization, cinematography, and mass media. They still had lights only on the main street. She became a sort of accountant for the collectivized farm and raised her sons and granddaughters.
The Berlin wall fell, and the regime changed again. Democracy. She discovered capitalism, global mass production, and consumerism. Post-communist corruption tore down the town and sold it for scraps. By this time, yours truly came, and she went to the city to help my parents while they were studying and working.
Together, we discovered the contemporary world. Quickly traveling to other countries, computers, internet, QR codes, VoIP, HD media, WiFi, social media, mobile devices, global media streaming, mRNA vaccines, and probably so much more that I can't remember now.
God, this post got long, and it teared me up. I've considered not posting, but I will. I'm unsure if I'm terrified or comforted by the thought that I might not live through so much change, though it feels like the world is changing even faster.
She explained that when she was a girl "everything was made of something and someone knew how to do it". Now everything is just plastic.
Glad to read that, I'm a sucker for Gen Z's world and I like the adult ones a lot!
Every counterculture thing I was into is normal with them! Like, broadly attractive people are totally into things that only socially maladjusted and visually unattractive people were into prior. That is perfect for me!
No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to avoid that check.
I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not the end.
No other species can grow it's population exponentially. True. However, we aren't any other species (that we know of at least). The planet can support far more people, it truly can, and more so, the rest of space awaits. We can spread further and further. Is it really good to wish for a reduction of our species? of the only life we know that can truly observe and appreciate the beauty of creation?
What things though? It is mostly materialistic, isn't it? We are more comfortable than ever. We can talk to a person on the other side of the planet anytime we want. Yet, we don't know our neighbors. More people are lonely, more people are single etc. We live longer today, yet my generation seems less happy than my parents' generation. When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today? We can't even be sure kids are safe in schools (though this particular problem is just American one).
On one side, we are relentlessly moving ahead, mostly materialistic. Fantastic communication tools, medical equipment etc. On the other side, people are obese, unhappy, unhealthy (mentally and physically).
We can't even a significant portion of the people accept that climate change issues are real and maybe slightly alter their lifestyle (eat less meat, less dairy, use less plastic...). How are you proposing to achieve any kind of cooperation between people when the population keeps going up?
More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
All the advances are due to exploitation all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
There will always be smart people and brilliant artists. If we reduce population, they will just come at a slower rate, which is fine. Will just make them more special when they do come.
I hate people and definitely would love to see fewer of them.
Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow that is out there.
I think that no matter how efficient our food generation processes get, this is very little space per person. That's why people live in the air and on top of each other.
They're clearly wasting food an oxygen...
Every generation has it's soothsayers that are absolutely certain we are near the population limit and heading for certain doom. And every one of them was wrong. Our population soared past those limits, no problem.
I share the opinion that earth can sustain about 100B of us, with a bit of planning and thoughtful engineering. So long as most people don't mind living in sky scrapers. More people = more brains to solve the type of problems that I assume you are worried about.
I don't actually believe we will continue growing like we have, as nothing in human affairs follows a strait line for long. Every great kingdom has fallen, every empire divided. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. We don't need to try and control it, but only observe and adapt to it.
Once, during a autumn storm (we're in Estonia), I remember him stating on a business-as-usual tone: "I was 15, when I first got to know electricity."
Man, I thought. Here, in front of me, is a living person who spent the first 14 years (!) of his life completely off-grid. No electricity, period.
That was also the moment I realized that this same person -- my grandpa -- has accumulated all of his knowledge by first-hand, hit-and-miss experiments. The contemporary model of "theory first" was and is almost completely alien to him, along with book-knowledge of any kind. The result of this? Even at age 90, you can be 99% sure that everything my grandpa states is true -- simply because he only speaks or proposes things that he has tested out himself.
As a person with lots of "book knowledge", I find this absolutely fascinating. Obviously, all the technological solutions he has in his household are 1) rock solid and 2) dead simple.
It almost appears that if you somehow manage to maintain decent work ethic (and the ethic of being human), a modest amount of formal schooling may have its benefits.
Greetings to the grandparents of all HNers!
Africa fertility rate is dropping around 1.5% per year annually for the region as a whole.
Increasingly technologized populations drop fertility fast
Once you start increasing quality of life and education, birth rates will plummet.
It would only be “over population” because our current in-effecient systems can’t keep up and they need to evolve.
The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important.
I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow.
All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.
This whole "stop having children to save the environment" bullshit is dumber than the anti-nuclear crap and even more obviously wrong.
I live in Latin America, in my trips to the US I get disgusted when I see hundreds of family cars with giant gas engines that we only use in construction trucks, idling all day just to run their air conditioner in a slightly hot day.
It's incredible the delusion that the first world has about how 'sustainable' their lifestyles are.
Cut this xenophobic crap right now. Have a look at the facts. For example, the per capita CO2 emission in Ethiopia is 0.13 tonnes, whereas it's 14.24 tonnes in the US. That's over a factor of 100 more.
Here's a good source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
I hope you are aware of the carbon footprint of an american versus someone from, say, ethiopia?!
Again, from your theme song and your apparent fondness for the Teutonic Order I'm assuming you're at least familiar with Germany and the German social security system, which is very much a part of their culture.
The German state pension system basically amounts to a Ponzi scheme that requires a continuous influx of new contributors in order to not implode.
Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable", but given German culture is quite averse to change (which is unsustainable, too, by the way) and it therefore isn't particularly likely they're going to abandon their current pension system anytime soon, "bringing people from these undeveloped countries" also is about their only option left to keep the system from collapsing for just a little longer.
I'm not even talking general economic and societal repercussions here. It can be argued that a society with a declining population isn't long-term sustainable and ultimately will succumb to stagnation and a lack of innovation.
As such, talking about "unsustainable cultures" here is pure xenophobia.
Dead Comment
Why? intuitively it would seem that that less humans will improve the environment, but intuition is often wrong.
The planet can sustain much more people, it's essentially empty. More people means more intelligence and more money and power to improve the environment.
Remember, most of the environmental damage was done by a very small number of very rich countries. The poorest countries is where most of the population lives, and those cause the least environmental impact.
"Empty" is a very biblical word, with shades of the brass age Hebrew mission of “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
It's time to drop superstitious beliefs and take a hard look at reality. For example, we're using resources at a rate that is no longer sustainable (https://www.footprintcalculator.org/home/en).
For now! They all want the quality of life of the rich nations and understandably so. I really doubt that the world can support 8bn people with the average US standard of living, let alone more. There isn’t enough land to grow feed for all the livestock we’d need for a start!
> was done by a very small number of very rich countries
And where do you think the (actionable) "intelligence" and money comes from?
It's not that poorer countries don't have intelligence, but they don't have the resources to put it to good use. One random person in a TED talk gets more attention than the people actually dealing with the issue
"More population" has always meant more misery and more conflict
With less people, each one can go further
Dead Comment
Now, if we consider the other resources every new human will also consume during his or her lifetime - houses, vehicles, white goods, electronic tech etc., etc. - then that extra demand on the planet's resources will be enormous.
What's worried me for a long time - ever since I read Anne and Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb is that the population will outstrip our ability to find extra resources to support this population growth. Whilst the Ehrlichs overestimated the exponential growth rate I evertheless reckon the evidence supports the fact that they'd gotten the growth trend correct.
It seems to me that unless we quickly take drastic action to either limit population growth or vastly increase food resources or both - not to mention simultaneously keeping environment in a state of sustainability (climate change, etc.) - then the future is likely to be very rocky.
Yes, it's a pessimistic outlook but it looks as if the stats are pretty much against us unless there's a collective realization that something must be done urgently.
I can only hope I'm wrong.
hasn’t that whole idea been proven wrong already? isn’t it a 70s myth that never materialised?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#Critici...
Moreover, it's just a fact that people have been controlling population growth since before recorded history both at a family and state level - take China's one child policy for instance. I never even mentioned this let alone take a moral stand on the matter. Presumably, you would be much more critical of those who've actually acted to control population numbers rather than those who've just mentioned the subject.
What's more, the comment I made was a logical OR statement - that is either the world has the resources OR it doesn't, if it doesn't then the world has to do something about it, especially when exponential growth is involved.
What are your objections to that? And why are you so indignant and afraid of the subject that you want discussion about it shut down?
I'm aware of the counter argument but in the light of exponential growth of the population at what point does the graph of 'modern efficiencies' intersect with that of the exponential growth one?
Exponential growth has to stop somewhere as resources aren't infinite, so 'decoupling' cannot last forever.
Incidentally, I'm aware that some demographers have predicted a leveling off of exponential population growth in decades to come. For those who've implied (wrongly) that I've a hide to suggest limiting population growth I'd say that if or when exponential population growth does happen then they'd have to be critical of everyone involved in that turnaround (as it will require active participation of the population for that to happen).
Located in the U.S. where we could double the population without starting to feel cramped. We can and we should.
The dust bowl absolutely destroyed a large part of the US. In prior centuries, massive droughts, volcanic explosions that blackened the skies, and massively deadly pandemics ravaged the world. These things happen periodically and absolutely destroy any population that's pushing the limits of its population totals.
So far we've managed to sustain huge population numbers by pumping up ground water. That's drying up across the world. We've survived off fish. Those populations are collapsing. We've diverted rivers for agriculture in deserts. There isn't enough rain to keep those flowing and hasn't been for years, plus with climate change glaciers and mountain snow that fed into rivers are increasingly a thing of the past--rivers and lakes that exist today will cease to exist within our lifetime (and long before we expect). Fertilizer let us push the land well beyond sustainable limits and vegetables are less nutritious than they've ever been due to nutrients being wiped out of the soil. Most countries are dependent on food being shipped from hundreds if not thousands of miles away and often from other countries entirely.
The world is severely overpopulated. We've just been lucky to have had a few decades of peaceful trade and a very, very, very mild environmental situation with zero major global disasters. This isn't the norm. One massive volcanic eruption, one actual plague, one massive drought and it's all over.
But that's not sustainable - the US has the highest CO2 emissions per capita when you factor in imports, etc. nevermind other environmental damage. And is also dependent on terrible conditions in Asia, etc. to produce all the cheap goods and clothes that you enjoy.
It's like the prisoner's dilemma though - the first countries that try to act responsibly with environmental policies, transitioning from fossil fuels, reducing population growth and unnecessary consumption are just at a disadvantage to those that don't.
Would you still argue against a higher population once we largely solve the emissions issues? Or is there a more fundamental reason you’re against a higher population?
100 years ago people were saying we would all die from starvation after a few billion more people. Doom sayers have zero credibility.
Thanks to globalization... corporations influencing governments around the world to favor a global market. It's colonization all over again. Even back then, at the time of discovering America, for example, it was corporations that went around the world in their ships and did it for profit. The only difference today, is that there are no governments doing it explicitly (i.e. Iraq war), but rather corporations via the excuse of capitalism.
I'd be fine with buying everything local and more expensive, but often that option is not even present anymore. It's like the battle was won, and now we're all dependent on this global chain of commerce in one way or another.
But I guess that's just my opinion.
edit: I'm not really sure why you're being down-voted. You're just expressing your opinion here.
Persons are autonomous, and if we would educate them correctly, they could help to make more of earth hospitable and use resources more efficientlly.
There is room on this planet for more humans, but taking it for our own comes at a cost. If we choose to use it for people, then it can't also be wild. So, we have a choice to make about the kind of world we wish to live in.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...
I'm not against population growth, but this whole rhetoric fueled by Musk, among others, stirring panic that the population will collapse is crazy. Sure, we would have a problem if people suddenly stopped having children. But this is not the case. World population is still growing, and it should stabilize at around 10B people. That's not too bad, why do we need to keep growing?
Talk by Hans Rosling worth watching:
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_gro...
You're already running out of resources: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-11/californ...
If you build a solar energy farm on the dark side of the moon you shouldn't be blaming the people who want to use the energy, you should be blaming the people who managed the project.
If the population increases in a system where there is enough access to good education, and enough economic opportunity, to advance humanity's knowledge, we will be fine.
If the population increases in a system with too much ignorance and destitution, we are in trouble.
The root cause of this is not "overpopulation" as often proclaimed, but our mode of production, which assumes endless economic growth is possible and everyone can be lifted out of poverty - all while relying on those in poverty to generate wealth (and more wealth inequality). Steven Pinker can shift the poverty line all he wants, it doesn't make the world less unequal.
I really dislike degrowth arguments, but it needs to be acknowledged that the standard of living for the top few percent is simply impossible to scale. At least with the means we currently have, and I'd rather measure based on those than hypothetical future developments that may or may not come to be.
In terms of energy, nuclear. In terms of food, there are still large swaths of un-farmed areas. We can farm these and still maintain natural parks and not destroy the environment. Opening up immigration will solve labor issues.
We have the technology, we just have to distribute it to easily quadruple the carrying capacity of the earth
As things stand, doubling of US population would be a global disaster.
Though the US could cut emissions in the neighborhood of entire developed countries in Europe right now if they just stopped military spending.
What we see continually rather is a narrative of overpopulation pushed and advanced by seemingly related points about lack of food and water. In reality these are completely orthogonal points which have some correlation to, but are not directly proportional to population growth all.