Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Selfish reasons to want more humans

rootsofprogress.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 480 posts

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#111

Post by kijin »

esoterica wrote: post #33
throwawa14223 wrote: post #4

On the other hand if there are only two people you can probably pollute as much as you are capable of without worrying (too much).

If there were only two people both of you would be living in a cave and foraging for berries because you can't sustain technological civilization with two people. You wouldn't even be capable of creating pollution.

Oh, you underestimate how much damage a pair of sufficiently malicious humans can inflict, especially if we assume that they are the last remaining members of a once highly technological civilization rather than ancient cavemen.

So the cave you've been hiding in happens to be filled with long-forgotten Soviet nuclear material, which you think might help you get rid of the hungry pack of wolves outside...

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#112

Post by kiba »

kelnos wrote: post #102
kiba wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These resources are abundantly available on Earth and endlessly recyclable. It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality. 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 th…

> It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality. And we're doing a pretty poor job at solving those problems today, for many people at the lower end of the wealth & income spectrum. What makes you think adding more people will magically fix those issues? I don't think anyone is arguing that it's technically impossible to fix issues like this and have a much larger population, with everyone…

I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.

It's really not a problem of economics. It's entirely a political problem.

That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.

Not everybody care for natural sunlight. I certainly don't. Moreover, I see sunlight hitting the roof of my non-solar paneled house as uselessly bouncing and heating things up unnecessarily. Just another resources to be used and transformed into something more our liking.

If you're talking about open space for a sufficient definition of open space floor plan, then it's a question of engineering.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#113

Post by gestalte6 »

underlogic wrote: post #109

I think the best reason for a lower population is that in the age of AI having 8 billion people of every persuasion with access to a wealth of destructive information and accelerated research it's inevitable someone is going to start a fire we can't put out. Be it a grey goo scenario, a weaponized or misaligned super intelligence or a bioweapon or lab accident which I'm certain covid was. Our best shot right now at s…

[dead]

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#114

Post by andrewstuart »

"Growth" - everything in this world is about "growth" - if your economy is not "growing" it is a disaster, thus you import more people because people == "growth".

Despite the fact that growth is bad for the environment and espite constant "growth" for decades our problems have not been solved.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#115

Post by wonderwonder »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #96
wonderwonder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to decide who can reproduce and who cant?

No one has to decide. It's as simple as not actively encouraging unsustainable growth and letting people choose. No one is advocating forcing anything on anyone.

I think only a very small number of people are encouraging unsustainable growth and I doubt many people are having kids because of it. The earths population is growing because people, particularly people in the 3rd world have a good amount of kids.

Respectfully, I think you are over complicating the situation. People in many parts of the world, simply enjoy sex and having kids. Not due to lack of birth control, simply due to the desire to have children. Its that simple. Its only when you make it to the first world with our stresses and self induced neurosis does the fertility rate fall.

Humans are part of nature and one of our instincts is to reproduce.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#116

Post by doodlebugging »

y0ssar1an wrote: post #58

yeah let's trash the planet at an even higher rate. let's set up more slaughterhouses to kill animals to feed all these new people, because we sure don't have enough of those /s

OT but I was just wondering, where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#118

Post by defrost »

wonderwonder wrote: post #115
arbitrary_name wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has to decide. It's as simple as not actively encouraging unsustainable growth and letting people choose. No one is advocating forcing anything on anyone.

I think only a very small number of people are encouraging unsustainable growth and I doubt many people are having kids because of it. The earths population is growing because people, particularly people in the 3rd world have a good amount of kids. Respectfully, I think you are over complicating the situation. People in many parts of the world, simply enjoy sex and having kids. Not due to lack of birth control, simpl…

Of the 190+ countries across the globe it appears that the Central African Republic is the only (at the very least one of the few) country that does not have a fertility rate (in births per woman) that is not trending down:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...

Declining fertility rates is not confined to first world countries.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#119

Post by maxglute »

kelnos wrote: post #86
maxglute wrote: post #52

>A bigger world is better for everyone Current world isn't good enough for everyone.

Yep, maybe we should focus on fixing that first. But I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument. While there are certainly more people in absolute numbers living in poverty than there were 2000 years ago, the percentage of people in bad shape is probably lower. And many versions of "bad shape" today is probably still a lot better than the average at many points in history. That leads to a philosophical argument, thoug…

I think the argument is that the marginal utility/productivity of a person > the resources it costs to sustain a body, even if that body is minimally productive (i.e. subsistence farmer). I think we're better off trying to improve ratio of estimated 2B subsistence farmers that can be replaced with (generously) 100m farmers + machines, and try to figure out how to improve productivity of rest. IMO there are still so many existing poor people, and for purpose of this argument, non/under-consumers, that there's ample (billions of low HDI/low productive workers globally) of untapped demand that can be uplifted to drive growth in all the big things this article calls for. The argument would be different if global human capita productivity is already optimized/maximized and adding more bodies is the only way to raise ceiling, but we're not even close.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#120

Post by card_zero »

esoterica wrote: post #33
throwawa14223 wrote: post #4

On the other hand if there are only two people you can probably pollute as much as you are capable of without worrying (too much).

If there were only two people both of you would be living in a cave and foraging for berries because you can't sustain technological civilization with two people. You wouldn't even be capable of creating pollution.

Prehistoric people set fire to a lot of forests, I for one would definitely find a way to emit pollution in this scenario if I had a few spare minutes.
Post reply on HN