351–360 of 427 posts
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They are gypsies, aren’t they?
“Gypsies [is] pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity as well as its historical use as a racial slur.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people
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Humans are resources in a general sense. More humans means more resources which you can throw at various challenges, problems. So you are right. More humans has benefits. But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. So what we need is controlled growth or at least sustainable levels. Right now we are switching into a decrease which will be very jarring and not sustainable. We've neve…
> But unfettered growth isn't sustainable, this has been proved again and again. This is vague, and assumes the conclusion. All we've ever known is unfettered growth, and it's been accompanied by people "proving" that it's "not sustainable" for a long time. So far we have not only sustained it, but thrived while sustaining it. More importantly, we have come to rely on it: We're pretty sure we couldn't have a society…
Right now, every human is on or near the Earth. Let's call this year 0.
In year 1, every human must be within one light-year of the Earth. In year 2, every human must be within two light-years of the Earth. In year N, every human must be within N light-years of Earth.
Take the volume of a sphere of radius N light-years and divide it by the population after N years of 1% growth, and you get the volume available per person if humans were spread out evenly among all possible space that humans could theoretically occupy.
At year 1, that is about 4.39 x 10^38 m^3 per person, so no problem. But at around year 11600 it is 4 m^2 per person. By 12101 it is down to 0.04 m^3 per person. The internet tells me that the average volume of a human is about 0.06 m^3 so 0.04 m^3 per person would be bad news.
What if we manage to invent Star Trek style warp engines right away, which let us go 1000x the speed of light. That makes everything a 10^9 times better. At 12101 we have 40000000 m^3 per person. But by 13524 we are down to 40 m^3 per person, and by 14000 below 0.39 m^3 per person. From there we have only got until 14192 before we are just below 0.06 m^3.
Remember, this is being ridiculous optimistic. Even with warp drive available starting tomorrow we would not be able to spread so fast that 14000 years from now we are uniformly occupying a 28000 light year diameter spherical volume around Earth. In reality we'll hit a space limit a lot earlier.
Hence, we can conclude that 1% is not sustainable for more than a few thousand years even under very optimistic assumptions.
Long term the growth rate must be one that on average declines over time, simply because a growth rate that does not do so leads to exponential growth, but we live in a universe were accessible space cannot grow faster than polynomially.
Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…
The raw population numbers were always a distraction. 10 billion people at first world consumption rates with be apocalyptic.
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I mean to solve climate change we need a lot of things. More that solar and wind. Frankly we need to be carbon negative, which will require some ccs, reforestation, land management, fixing the reefs, and more. It's a complex problem that if you treat it as being simple you're taking steps backwards.
The simple part is that we need to stop gathering geologically sequestered hydrocarbons and putting them in the atmosphere. I have made an effort to understand climate science. Personally, I think the deference to simulations and experts has been hugely detrimental. The important questions seem to not need either PhDs or simulations. Very rudimentary education for anyone who has a science background suffices. Know th…
But now not only has the problem become more difficult (as we've let the problem snowball), but others have been creating new agendas. To be clear, this confusion and misunderstanding is on a continuous scale, not binary (misinformation in the green movements is better than the misinformation in the anti-climate movements). The problem is that if you aren't in the academic spaces it is often difficult to find the actions we need to take because there's this game of telephone going on (I do think it is "the media"'s job to distill this information by talking directly to experts, but they've been failing). What's worrying here is that we often note how climate is "the most complicated crisis that humanity has ever faced" but almost everyone acts like they have an expert opinion on it (I _do not_ but I have worked close to the space and am mostly appealing to authority here).
So I want to give an example of a common myth on the pro-climate side that actually takes us a step backwards but most people think it is an obvious path forward: reforestation. This is confusing because we all learn in school that trees "breathe" CO2 and exhale O2. But in reality young forests are actually carbon sources and old forests are carbon sinks[0]. This is about 20 years and so we have a lag. But that's only the beginning of the problem[1], and things get really complicated really fast because we need to consider the whole ecosystem involved, which is why land management is so important as well.
In this example, taking the "obvious" and simple answer actually is harmful to the goal even though it is "more correct" than the other answers.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDdKOmvIKyg
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/1306221445...
> the first national family planning program An odd euphemism for a program that, in practice, involved forced sterilizations and eugenics: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30040790 According to Vox: "In 1975, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the declaration of a national emergency. She seized dictatorial powers, imprisoned her political rivals, and embarked, with the help of her son Sanjay, on a…
We were kids and had no idea what the word (Hindi for vasectomy) meant but we were still freaked out for a while, because we knew it was bad. I still remember a Hindi protest song about it to this day, almost 50 years later.
This was during the Emergency (as that time is known in India).
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Given Orban's other political proclivities, enforcing traditional gender roles is likely an intentional outcome of this policy.
What? This policy should incentivize stay-at-home mothers to re-enter the workforce after their children are grown, because no income tax is essentially a pay raise compared to people who aren't eligible.
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If the entire world had south Korean levels of fertility it would take... 70 or 80 years to end up with a couple billion people again. In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.
What’s wrong with what we’ve been doing? Emancipate and educate women, vaccinate and educate children, and suppress the worst of male-supremacy ideologues, and fertility comes down.
Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…
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This. China faces it right now, where they are rich, but not rich enough yet
What is 'rich enough'? Looking at elderly issues in UK, noone ever is