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

341–350 of 480 posts

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#341

Post by lukas099 »

adrian_b wrote: post #173
ido wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people living in good conditions is also higher than it ever was. In fact the % of people living poverty world wide is decreasing while world population is increasing.

That depends a lot on how you define "good conditions". My grandparents did not have television or computers, but they (and most people from their village) had a much bigger house and garden than I could ever afford and they were eating much better food than I can find anywhere in a city now, despite having nominally much lower revenues than I have today. Some of their tastiest fruit cultivars might have completely d…

> It is true that the percentage of people who are so poor that they fear not having food enough to survive and not having where to sleep has decreased, but the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.

Assuming you're right, the utility of the former is much greater than the disutility of the latter.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#342

Post by pixl97 »

felipemnoa wrote: post #99
defrost wrote: post #22

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…

>>that don't require more people. More people does not necessarily mean more laborers. It also means more consumers. Without more consumers we humans would not be incentivized to mine so much. Without the need to mine so much engineers would not have invented more efficient ways to mine. So on and so forth...

>Without more consumers

Eh, this isn't exactly correct. While yes, owning so many pairs of socks is of limited utility to me, in general individual greed is hard to sate.

So yea while another pair of pants won't do me any good, I'll take another house, another trip, another ... whatever. But this starts to shift the resource load to other places. Such as national parks getting flooded out with people. With actual property for things to be built on to become scare. Removal of the natural world to stick in more human development.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#343

Post by kmstout »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #211
caskstrength wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be some significant tradeoffs necessary for maintaining a trillion people population on Earth no matter the energy cost. Even if you assume cheap and abundant cold fusion energy source, living in mcmansion and eating avocado toasts with wild salmon is likely out of the question.

I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question. And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.

As long as there's coffee.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#344

Post by naasking »

hef19898 wrote: post #336
anemoiac wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you didn’t finish your response… Why is depopulation terrifying? And why shouldn’t we be concerned about resource constraints? Malthus being wrong implies nothing about the future.

Depopolating is just another word for genocid, that's why it is terrifying. Or at least should br, but then some people are just too edgy to get that.

Or it's a cute term for oppressing people to a degree that they don't want to follow natural instincts to procreate. For instance, developed nations economically penalize parenthood to such an extent that native birth rate is now below replacement in all of them with only a few exceptions.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#345

Post by lukas099 »

adrian_b wrote: post #173
ido wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people living in good conditions is also higher than it ever was. In fact the % of people living poverty world wide is decreasing while world population is increasing.

That depends a lot on how you define "good conditions". My grandparents did not have television or computers, but they (and most people from their village) had a much bigger house and garden than I could ever afford and they were eating much better food than I can find anywhere in a city now, despite having nominally much lower revenues than I have today. Some of their tastiest fruit cultivars might have completely d…

> the percentage of people who must be content to live in small boxes and be content with low-quality food has increased.

Doubt it. Regular folks have access to foods like tropical fruits that would have been a complete luxury back then, even for rich people. Also diversity of cuisines; even rural towns have Thai and Indian food now.

Probably average home size is bigger now, too, and they are more comfortable. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true even in Europe and Asia.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#346

Post by hef19898 »

naasking wrote: post #344
hef19898 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depopolating is just another word for genocid, that's why it is terrifying. Or at least should br, but then some people are just too edgy to get that.

Or it's a cute term for oppressing people to a degree that they don't want to follow natural instincts to procreate. For instance, developed nations economically penalize parenthood to such an extent that native birth rate is now below replacement in all of them with only a few exceptions.

That birth rates go down withe conomic prosperity has nothing to do with government oppression... That talking point is utter BS, and close to the conspiracy theory of the great "replacement" ...

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#347

Post by naasking »

0xfaded wrote: post #330
naasking wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that we should depopulate is the terrifying perspective. People have been crying that the sky is falling since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. There is no "saving the planet as we know it now". The planet is ever-changing, and has never been static. There are certainly dangers to the path we're on that we have to mitigate, but depopulation is not one of the solutions.

This argument is equating human perspectives of the world to physical realities. Ancient populations certainly left their mask, Romans deforested Europe for the sake of glass making. But that is nothing compared to the resource extraction and ndustrial waste that support the world 9 billion people. Willing it away with "the sky has always been falling" is denialism at best.

I acknowledged the real dangers like climate change in my original post. I simply don't agree that the other issues you mention are actual dangers. Your argument that these are problems is a naturalistic fallacy.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#348

Post by AlexandrB »

savingsPossible wrote: post #295
em-bee wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but do we want to turn all that land into high density housing? (ok, i exaggerate but) there are tangible benefits from leaving spaces open and untouched.

No, and we absolutely can keep 95% of the open space for the next 200 years with much higher growth

Citation needed. All that space would need to be turned into farmland.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#349

Post by pixl97 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #340
jaysonelliot wrote: post #317

This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today. At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the…

There’s a Delta flight that is flying exclusively for the pleasure of a tiny group of people who want to watch the eclipse for multiple hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447603 The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous We have a greed, fear and distribution problem, not a production problem Nobody needs a Ferrari when…

>Don’t complain about the state of the world unless you’re actively fixing it

What kind of backwards ass thinking is this. I mean, stop and think for at least one second before typing things like this.

If I'm living hand to mouth, as in if I stop farming my own food I'll quickly starve it would be stupid to, one, stop growing my own stuff because I'll starve otherwise, and two, not complain about the situation because it's a terrible place to be.

By complaining someone with wealthy, time, and intelligence may be able to find a solution that I can implement into my life without causing a death spiral.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#350

Post by lukas099 »

adrian_b wrote: post #173
ido wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people living in good conditions is also higher than it ever was. In fact the % of people living poverty world wide is decreasing while world population is increasing.

That depends a lot on how you define "good conditions". My grandparents did not have television or computers, but they (and most people from their village) had a much bigger house and garden than I could ever afford and they were eating much better food than I can find anywhere in a city now, despite having nominally much lower revenues than I have today. Some of their tastiest fruit cultivars might have completely d…

Re: cultivars. Some have probably died out. Others have probably gotten better. Look at apples; my parents talk about how the only apples they had were red delicious and granny smith. Now we have insane diversity of delicious apples without even having to grow them ourselves.
Post reply on HN