61–70 of 480 posts
> Economies of scale. In particular, often total costs are a combination of fixed and variable costs. The more output, the more the fixed costs can be amortized, lowering average cost. Except that after a certain point total costs increase again as the raw inputs become more scarce and expensive to obtain.
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…
But somehow, we need more humans to to have critical resources necessary to execute some projects.
The contradiction is lost on the OP author.
The thing that bothers me about this line of argument is...there already are a lot of people! We've had _massive_ population growth over the past few centuries, especially in the last 100 years or so. We have 8 _billion_ people now...and I personally don't see a lot of the benefits that the author talks about. I really don't think going from 8 billion to 10 billion or 16 billion or even 50 billion people would really…
At some point, your problem will be heat, not energy, because roughly speaking humans are 100 watts space heater, never mind all the heat generated from making food, transport infrastructure, industrial production and extraction.
If you take a look at cities and how they're constructed, it's really a 2.5D map. The road corridor are frequently ground level, maybe two or threes. Then we build towers and buildings. So what we created are artificial canyons in cities, but we don't build entire floor of cities.
So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.
So in that sense, space isn't probably an issue.
Humans are actually pretty space efficient. What's not space efficient is all the expensive infrastructures such as cars and roads.
What will be the most challenging for us is really political, not engineering or economics or space or energy.
Not selfish enough, sorry. Empower the human, regardless of total fertility rate decline trajectory (~40% of global annual pregnancies are unintended; assuming reproductive wishes are affirmed [less or no children], extrapolate future total fertility rate accordingly [points down]). > bigger societies are better for everyone. This does not appear to be the case based on the evidence. Bigger societies are better for t…
That does not an argument make as much as the points in TFA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The rate of the growth can be reduced. After a generation or two, so does the total size.
So we're going to see peak Earth population, and a start of its decline, in a few decades.
Sure, more people likely leads to more production of non-rival goods, but more people will also make rival goods more scarce and harder to come by. Sure, some rival goods will be replaced by non-rival goods, but it's hard to imagine eliminating them entirely.
I don't really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new/better/less-scarce resources every time we find that whatever we're using today is going to run out. As a bit of an extreme example, there is only so much matter in the universe, and even if we find a way to convert any kind of matter into any other with minimal energy expenditure, if the population keeps growing and growing, eventually there will not be enough matter for further growth. I suppose then the author might suggest that we will find loopholes in the laws of thermodynamics that allows us to create matter from nothing, but at some point you have to admit that this is the fictioniest of science fiction and isn't something we can support with what we know today.
Then there's just plain old shitty human nature. The larger an individual society is, the more people are going to be at the bottom of it, falling through the cracks. There will always be people who want more wealth and more power, and someone -- more and more someones, really -- has to suffer for it. THe idealist in me wants to imagine a post-scarcity society, but I'm not sure I have it in me anymore to believe in such a thing; we have the ability to feed every person on Earth, today, and yet we don't do it, because those in power are selfish and more concerned with their stock prices than in actually helping fellow humans (and we, the unwashed masses, constantly enable them). I don't have much optimism that this will change, ever; even if it does, I expect that to take millennia, at best.
On another tack: we have so many people in the world who are unhappy, beaten down, in poverty, hungry, unhoused today. Maybe we should fix that before working to grow our population more and more and more.
Having said that, I do agree that it's preposterous to think that the ideal size of humanity is a half billion, or even a couple billion, as the author points out others have suggested. We have, so far, overcome resource limitations, and likely will be able to continue to do so for some time. I'm just skeptical of how long we can continue to do that.
This is not education and wealth, or at least only indirectly as those are related to living in large crowded cities.
What do you suggest? Gas chambers?
Reducing population is as simple as making less babies. Not encouraging natality, large families, and reducing immigration.