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Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, which country would you want to depopulate first?
Europe, Japan and the native population of the US have elected themselves. Africa probably won’t have the population boom since education is spreading, which tends to slow reproduction rates. Problem is solved in about 30 years with the death of the boomers and the non-replacement rates.
They're already tiny af tho
Perhaps a better way to phrase the question would be: Can we have economic growth, improving prosperity and quality-of-life, while reducing our environmental impact?
That's actually the question most people have been asking for the past decades. The answer is: The world has tried and failed and there's some serious questions about the plausibility of that endeavour. The question whether growth==good or maybe just.. it's more complicated than that and we may be able to get more quality of life without growth is far more interesting.
Secondly, many of the technologies that will make this possible - renewable energy, electrification, energy storage, etc, are only just now beginning to reach the mainstream. Many of them seemed like science fiction in past decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can have sustainability and prosperity. It's a triangle: prosperity, sustainability, population. Choose 2 (and obviously if you don't choose sustainability the sh*t is going to hit the fan at some point anyway). The key issue is the global population. (Edit: We're discussing life on this planet. Colonising space obviously means that human population may continue to grow, but not on Earth and not using Earth' resou…
So, which country would you want to depopulate first?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
why can humans not expand interplanetarily? Then, inter-stellarly, then finally, inter-galactically?
Because of interplanetary transportation costs, due to physically unavoidable planetary gravity wells, the existence of other inhabited planets has essentially zero effect on the prosperity of the average Earth inhabitant. There is physically no way to build the space equivalent of cheap maritime shipping.
If, eg., products became more expensive because of limited energy (or relevant taxing of externalities) then we would grow more slowly -- we can still produce more through innovation and consume less energy.
It took a huge amount of energy in the past to make a single pair of socks -- today, it takes a tiny amount.
I think the relevant question for 'exponential energy-consumption graphs' is what the relationship is to growth (it simply cannot be assumed that there is a 'deep causal' relationship; this is fallacious equivocation).
Eg., population has been increasing exponentially. Could a static population size produce a flat (or falling) net energy use graph -- whilst still obtaining economic growth (ie., productivity improvements)?
Debt-based monetary systems will skew towards ever increasing growth.
The way I think of it is that in order for debt to exist, interest on the debt must be paid. But to pay interest, you must create more value than the debt you incurred, otherwise you'd not have enough to pay the interest! But the other side of debt is somebody's deposit. So if you summed the debt, it must be equal to all deposit. So from where would the interest come from? It must come from new production. But intere…
Not necessarily. Modern banking systems have created plenty of 'money' out of nowhere.
* our needs and deeds don't take over
* marketing stops to teach us longings for things we actually do not need --
Yes!
Debt-based monetary systems will skew towards ever increasing growth.
I'm not sure how you would fund pensions without growth
So it would eventually become a distribution problem...