141–150 of 191 posts
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Aircraft in general were famously predicted to be impossible by multiple credible sources. https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp... Does any science claim or even attempt to estimate its own comprehensiveness? It's all the same bias. We're living in the stone age.
I love your optimism. Fusion is only 10-20 years out, after all.
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> 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? One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased eve…
And all that innovation happened thanks to the population living a good life with excess of resources. The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all, making more people who live in poverty wont add any innovation. And even worse, if you add people until most has to live a life on the brink of starvation again that could stop innovation from ever happening again in the future, our current time i…
But as their incomes tripled and their children survived childhood, their birthdates dropped and their surviving children are better educated and less malnourished. This has been happening almost everywhere in the world, and is why world population will peak in a couple decades without mass starvation.
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> 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…
We can discover new resources though. Look at the discussions around "peak oil." Every time people think we can't get more oil we find a way. It's going to be the same for every other resource.
> It's going to be the same for every other resource.
That's superstition / survivor bias.
Is your statement that far off from "the house is on fire, but I'm not going to move from the couch because a fire crew will be here sooner or later"?
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> 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? One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased eve…
> no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.
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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 t…
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…
There is even more than that if we go proactively grab a fraction of the the billions of galaxies of resources just meaninglessly burning themselves away.
Are those changes real? I don't see any network requests/WebSocket connections.
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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…
> That's a very selfish view. Not sure how advocating for more people is selfish, but okay. > More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Energy can be practically infinite. Simply requires us to use nuclear power. Yes, Yes, there's issues of waste with that. It's overblown and a moral panic. More resources are used. Yes. However, thinki…
That's what people thought about oil, trees, etc. before.
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Overpopulation isn’t really about running out of space or feeling cramped, it’s about not having enough resources to sustainably support the population.
I think, overpopulation is a eco-facist narrative. Persons are autonomous, and if we would educate them correctly, they could help to make more of earth hospitable and use resources more efficientlly.
Fascism is generally used to describe right wing dictatorships with hierarchical structures which are opposed to democratic principles.
Do you really believe any of the people advocating for population stability are fascists?
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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.
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…
Yes and no - that is how the world, how life works!
The currently working take care of the currently too-old-to-work. No matter what layer and labels you put on top, that has always been and will always be true. Unless you create time machines, or eliminate aging (with its own huge set of issues).
So yes, the new generations have to take care of the previous ones. "Capital" is only an information layer on top of that reality used to determine who gets what, but it does not replace the reality of who and when produces goods and services. You can shift information about capital into the future (you "saved" for retirement - but only this information is transmitted to the future, not goods or services, which are always used in the present), but actual goods and services always have to be produced and provided by the working part of the population. You can shift as much "capital" (information) into the future as you want, "save" incredible amounts of money, it will change nothing.
> Not only is this pretty much a textbook case of "unsustainable",
Quite the opposite. That is the best kind of sustainable because it actually represents truth most faithfully. The "capital" based magic - that is much more problematic. It masks and attempts to hide the reality. Also a problem in the German system is the many exceptions.
The core German system is the most honest one about reality: The currently working take care of those that no longer don't. If there are too few in the new generation to take care of the expected number of old non-working people in the country, then seeing that problem is GOOD, trying to hide it behind some finance magic is bad.