The Population Bust • Hacker News Board

Re: The Population Bust

#151

Post by _0ffh » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 12:41 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #100

_0ffh wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think western population development has gone sustainable largely due to social advancements re women. Not all parts of the world have yet had that kind of progress, and are still happily multiplying in an unsustainable way. Unless we manage to export this kind of progress, I fear we will not be able to avoid all overpopulation issues. One problem is that costly (in loss of lives) regional wars over resources and t…

> the enslavement of women as a means of replenishment for your armies What society has ever done that?

Every society that denies women independence from men. I agree this is a sliding scale, but near the extreme end is this staple: Girls belong to the parents until such time as they are married off to a husband, who is then in effect their new owner. I take the liberty to call this slavery.

Re: The Population Bust

#152

Post by credit_guy » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 12:50 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #149

kwhitefoot wrote: post #142

It's about time that people stopped regarding declining population as a threat and started treating it as an opportunity instead. As my former boss often says, we don't have problems only challenges.

If we don't want the entire earth to looked like mumbai, i'd say it's even the only way to go. Space is not going to save us any time soon, people suck at restraining themself and given our current situation we can approximate our planet to a close system with finite resources. So yeah, I'd go with less babies. Or more deaths, but one is more pleasant.

> If we don't want the entire earth to looked like mumbai

If the whole world reaches Mumbai's density (75k/sq mile), we would host 15 trillion people. Now, no matter what projections you hear from anyone, you never hear a peak population of more than 50 billion, so you are off by a factor of 300.

Here's for example the latest UN prediction up to 2100. You'll notice a 95% estimate that we'll be below 13 billion.

[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...

Re: The Population Bust

#153

Post by Barrin92 » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 12:55 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #27

esarbe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. The use of contraceptives is cultural, not biological. So we'll hit a replacement problem long before natural selection has time to catch up. The replacement issue has already real implications, this will become much more obvious in the course of the next 30 years. Any relevant change on the population size the prope…

> Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals? > Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest. Fi…

>No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals?

they will in combination with economic incentives. In a world where skilled labour is rewarded and the cost of raising a child is higher and higher, whose going to pay for your large family? When people in developed economies today date, do you think they favour high social status and intelligence or sperm count?

Fertility and some other biological traits have always been positively selected for. Is the world overrun by virile, promiscuous musclemen and women with wide hips?

Re: The Population Bust

#154

Post by sametmax » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #152

sametmax wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we don't want the entire earth to looked like mumbai, i'd say it's even the only way to go. Space is not going to save us any time soon, people suck at restraining themself and given our current situation we can approximate our planet to a close system with finite resources. So yeah, I'd go with less babies. Or more deaths, but one is more pleasant.

> If we don't want the entire earth to looked like mumbai If the whole world reaches Mumbai's density (75k/sq mile), we would host 15 trillion people. Now, no matter what projections you hear from anyone, you never hear a peak population of more than 50 billion, so you are off by a factor of 300. Here's for example the latest UN prediction up to 2100. You'll notice a 95% estimate that we'll be below 13 billion. [1] h…

I didn't express a scientific prediction, but used an image of extreme poverty and pollution to underline the caveats of overpopulation.

What's more, the vast majority of indian population consumme much less than the average american.

Democracy, health care, education, respect of the individual, peace... All that are affected, at various degree of overpopulation. There is not need to mirror your stats.

Re: The Population Bust

#155

Post by acqq » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #81

philwelch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we’re nowhere near the theoretical limits of our own solar system yet.

We're closer than most people think. Isaac Asimov's essay "The Power of Progression" from his monthly science column in the May 1960 issue of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and reprinted in the collect "The Stars in Their Courses" in 1971 [1], goes through the math for how long it would take to reach various population levels at the rate the population was growing at the time. It was doubling every 47…

Also about that Asimov's article:

http://www.triumf.info/wiki/pwalden/index.php/Issac_Asimov's...

Also, Al Bartlett's thesis:

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8

The transcript:

https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...

Re: The Population Bust

#156

Post by _0ffh » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

drivebycomment wrote: post #128

_0ffh wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think western population development has gone sustainable largely due to social advancements re women. Not all parts of the world have yet had that kind of progress, and are still happily multiplying in an unsustainable way. Unless we manage to export this kind of progress, I fear we will not be able to avoid all overpopulation issues. One problem is that costly (in loss of lives) regional wars over resources and t…

> Not all parts of the world have yet had that kind of progress, and are still happily multiplying in an unsustainable way. Unless we manage to export this kind of progress, I fear we will not be able to avoid all overpopulation issues. This is simply not true. Not even close. I recommend watching: https://www.gapminder.org/videos/will-saving-poor-children-l... or, if you can spend more time, https://www.gapminder.or…

I've watched Rosling stuff before. What part of the linked videos do you think are evidence against? I maintain there are a number of countries that still have unsustainable population growth. I wouldn't want to pick any one out. But be my guest and have a look-see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_i...

Re: The Population Bust

#157

Post by wozniacki » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

xxxpupugo wrote: post #150

pascalxus wrote: post #4

Relying on a larger and larger population to keep supporting endless growth is not sustainable. I know this is unpopular, but: We need to find a way to sustainably live on this planet with a reasonably sized population. People keep talking about how the next generation needs to support all the debt and extravagances of the past generations but this unethical. the next generation was born without first being asked whe…

> We need to find a way to sustainably live on this planet with a reasonably sized population Well said. Let's face it. Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of our rapid technological advances comes with industrial revolution. If we think out of box, this might be as well an outlier of our history. Productivity rarely increases this much and d…

  ...Capitalism doesn't need to exist. What need to exist is
  the human race. Capitalism might as well be a byproduct of
  our rapid technological advances comes with industrial
  revolution.

What alternate system would you put in place that has fewer ills that has not been tried before?

  Capitalism is a tool we devised, now it has probably 
  fulfilled its destiny, at least for that time being. And 
  the focus of global governance should shift from being the 
  economical winner to co-exist peacefully and sustainably 
  in a controlled way.

And do you expect the developing economies who stand to greatly benefit from the continued primacy of capitalism as it exists right now, to consent to some new untested system?

Keep in mind they are just entering the phase when they can expect to greatly benefit from their favorable demographics while those in the West are facing decline.

Do you expect them to willingly come on board this new economic deal, that the West proposes? Do you see no conflict of interests?

Re: The Population Bust

#158

Post by toasterlovin » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #153

toasterlovin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals? > Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest. Fi…

>No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals? they will in combination with economic incentives. In a world where skilled labour is rewarded and the cost of raising a child is higher and higher, whose going to pay for your large family? When people in developed economies today date, do you think th…

> Fertility and some other biological traits have always been positively selected for. Is the world overrun by virile, promiscuous musclemen and women with wide hips?

Fertility is a multifaceted trait; the degree to which a woman is fertile is dependent on a multitude of other traits and characteristics. It seems pretty clear that a desire to have children was not really necessary in the past in order to end up with lots of children. Having children was just something you did, so most couples had children and, consequently, fertility was driven by other traits. Perhaps desire to have sex, ability to earn income, etc. But things have changed. Now it seems pretty clear that the most important factors in fertility are A) whether or not the woman pursues college and a white collar career path, and B) whether or not both parents have an innate drive to have children (those two traits are probably related).

So yes, fertility has always been positively selected for. But the traits that drive fertility have changed as a result of our changing environment. So evolution is selecting for different traits at the moment.

Re: The Population Bust

#159

Post by Noumenon72 » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

RyanAF7 wrote: post #73

[flagged]

Cows have increased at the same time as humans, yet all of agriculture only produces 9% of greenhouse gas emissions. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... The idea that humans breathing produces enough carbon to affect climate change seems more like something you settled on in search of a scornfully aloof position to take, than an interest in verifiable facts. Know-it-all superiority is a kind of feelings monster too, you know.

Re: The Population Bust

#160

Post by objectivetruth » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 3:55 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #41

jdkee wrote: post #5

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." -Edward Abbey

this has always seemed to be kind of a silly quote to me. it's not untrue but it seems to imply that this is something unusual about a cancer cell. growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of life itself . I don't know of any organisms that are capable of regulating their own species's growth/consumption for long term survival (although now that I've said this, I'm sure someone will respond with the odd exceptio…

What scale do you mean?

As individuals, most plants and animals will grow to a certain size, presumably an evolved optimum for their ecosystem. cf. Foster's Rule, insular dwarfism, island gigantism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster%27s_rule. Indeterminate growers are the exception.

At the ecosystem level, some species can kind of self-regulate: eating babies or siblings, lack of food driving irregular fertility cycles, etc. And two or more species interacting, like the classic predator-prey dynamic, are usually how they regulate.

Now are they consciously doing it? No, but it's arguable how consciously humans are doing The Great Contraction or our various environmental regulatory frameworks.

Presumably hunter-gatherers spread when their bands would grow large enough to split, taking more resources from their range than it could support.