21–30 of 480 posts
The arguments in the linked article all seem rooted in a traditional Western weltanschauung . This worldview is increasingly characterized (not without basis) as racist, sexist and fascist, mostly by critics whose personal positive contributions to human improvement are unclear. I'm not driving this bus; I just seem to be going under it. Maybe after the societal collapse the survivors can agree that the Critical Theo…
More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom.
I live in a single state with a tiny population that mines and ships 16x more raw iron ore, almost a billion tonnes per annum, than peak annual iron ore mining in the entire USofA ever. We also mine a millions of tonnes of other resources. This is entirely down to bigger machines, smarter technology, and factors that don't require more people.
The arguments presented here for even more people on the globe are sketchy at best, no weight at all is given to the downsides of truly challenging levels of resource extraction currently at play to meet the high consumption demands of a small proportion of the large population we already have on the planet.
Maybe if we had off world colonies this would be a good opinion, but this blog post is just a bad argument
I really believed this argument growing up in a white, middle class household in the 1980s. I’m more skeptical now, after two decades of helping build our current technocracy. I think there is a sweet spot between the dystopian lawlessness of prehistory and early human history, and the dystopian future of rapacious consumption and late stage capitalism.
If you ask people in the third world, they badly want and need higher levels of consumption. And they will attain it, barring some global catastrophe.
You want the largest viable population. That is, a population below carrying capacity.
A population over carrying capacity just consumes the environment that sustains it and dies off collectively.
Today we are over carrying capacity at a global level, and many regions are also over carrying capacity at a local level.
The population centers built around groundwater aquifers pumped aggresively, overfishing, or dying topsoil, which are most of them, are doomed.
Unless there is an innovation that unlocks rapid topsoil regeneration, freshwater replenishment, and plentiful food sources covering the growing global demand for fish, at scale and meeting market demand at low prices, humanity is bound to have a conflict over the remaining resources.
The population growth rate needs to be controlled, even reduced, to reduce the pressure on natural resources and slow down the climate change. John Baez, mathematician at UCR, talks about this approach among a number of others, such as, reducing air travel for conferences.
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Jason Crawford...
More ambitious projects need a certain critical mass of resources behind them. Ancient Egyptian civilization built a large irrigation system to make the best use of the Nile floodwaters for agriculture, a feat that would not have been possible to a small tribe or chiefdom. This doesn't mean people, we're no longer bound by labour intensive solutions. I live in a single state with a tiny population that mines and ship…
The population growth rate needs to be controlled, even reduced, to reduce the pressure on natural resources and slow down the climate change. John Baez, mathematician at UCR, talks about this approach among a number of others, such as, reducing air travel for conferences.
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