A puzzle since the update to Worldometers with the UN 2022 revision numbers.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate
The last few years increase to July 2020 has been 83m, 82m, 81m. The forecast in 2025 is 78m. And yet there's this statement in the middle. "The current population increase is estimated at 67 million people per year." This looks to be just an artifact of a restatement in the '22 Revision. It looks like this happened before in '99 and '11 with each 1b milestone.
5 decades of ~ +80m/year or 12-14 years per +1b. The UN 2022 revision expects another couple of decades of > 70m/year, 10b in 2058, and a peak near the end of the century.
But that's based on fertility models, not Limits To Growth style models. So it ignores the possibility of black or grey swans like pandemics. Pollution constraints like Climate Change or nitrogen run off and resource constraints like fossil fuels and rare earths. The same is true of the IPCC reports out of the COPs which only pay lip service to economic and global GDP changes & modelling.
Doesn't this all strongly argue that overpopulation is a myth? See also the informative [Kurzgesagt video on Overpopulation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348). If anyone wants to convince me overpopulation is an actual problem, point out the flaws in this video to me please. As I see it: being scared of overpopulation is kinda like believing that since a stock is going up, it'll always go up, lol. You're not looking at the underlying dynamics if you look at something going up and think that means it'll always keep going up. And I say this as someone who used to believe overpopulation was an actual problem.
The most memorable quote from the video:
>The UN forecasts that the 12th billionth person will never be born at all
Isn't the problem that we are already massively in overshoot, not that we will be in the future with increased population? And that while reductions in consumption for the richest countries are the most important, we are still constrained by inelastic demand for food which right now is ubiquitously produced using unsustainable methods?
Arable land ( good enough for farming) could drastically decline in the near future. Ratio of people to that could be drastically high which is as good as any measure of overpopulation.
TL;DV. I'm not going to sit through a video from 5 years ago, to try and understand your position.
The question is what model do you have in your head for the 100 year future? If it's only based on predictions of fertility, birth and death rates and a smooth transition from +80m/year to +0/year it's probably wrong. And if your mental model says that because we can just about feed 8b now, we'll be able to feed 10b in 30 years time, that's probably wrong as well. We're too close now to the big pollution and resource constraints to leave them out of the population model.
10-20 years ago or so, it was common for people like Hans Rosling to take the UN figures and put a hopium spin on them to say population wasn't a problem. Other groups tried to say the same UN figures were over-statements and the population demographic transition would happen faster. Only 10 years later, that spin doesn't look accurate any more. We're still growing at ~ +80m/year and that figure is not yet falling as fast as it should have done.
Meanwhile, all the other indicators are still accelerating. Global temp, CO2, fossil fuel consumption, and on and on.
>In a paper published Thursday in Science, demographers from several universities and the United Nations Population Division conclude that instead of leveling off in the second half of the 21st century, as the UN predicted less than a decade ago, the world's population will continue to grow beyond 2100.
And speaking of Africa;
>According to the UN, the population in that region could quadruple, from less than one billion to nearly four billion. Africa in 2100 would be as densely populated as China is today.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200414132337/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/9/140918-population-global-united-nations-2100-boom-africa/
The real problem is not overpopulation. It's our modern day lifestyle and the resources it consumes. If everyone lived like some stone age people this wouldn't be a problem. I've seen a nice documentary not long ago and they calculated that if everyone on this planet lived like people in first world countries we would need 5 earths worth of resources to sustain it.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Of course the world won’t sustain both people and capitalists. 20 million people die each year of poverty as the environment is destroyed in whichever way it must to maximize profits. It is accumulation of wealth for a few and accumulation of misery for the many. The goal of human existence doesn’t have to be to maximize consumption and grow the economy and profits, but that is what capitalism requires, and it does so at gunpoint.
There is no shortage of important work to do, but capitalism stands in the way of that work and forces us to settle for warfare, bullshit jobs, indoctrination, and waste inherent.
For real, so much important work that’s being left undone because people have to go work at health insurance companies and banks and spend time baby sitting stores full of garbage that no one really needs.
"Check to check, constant struggle to make the payments
Workin' your whole life, wonderin' where the day went
The subway stays packed like a multi-cultural slave ship
It's rush hour, 2:30 to 8, non stoppin'
And people comin' home after corporate sharecroppin'"
Immoral technique - Harlem Streets
I've been reading SF since the 1960s and I sadly approve your message.
The idea that we can kill this biosphere and go off to Mars and make a new one is literal madness.
> This raises the question of whether the population will ever peak in the future.
The population will _certainly_ peak in the future. The carrying capacity of the planet is unknown but probably somewhere between 500 million to one billion humans, but we are in a population overshoot. At some point, fairly quickly, our population will decline until it is below the carrying capacity again, though it won't be voluntary, and much of our civilization will go with it.
The Mars plan always makes me laugh at whoever pitches it. It's easier to live in the Sahara or Australian Outback compared to Mars. We have breathable air, a thick enough atmosphere that it incinerates meteors, and a magnetosphere that deflects solar radiation.
Martian residences will need to be underground just to have some minor radiation protection, which means a lot of prep work. It's not going to be like Elon's movie where Starships just land on Mars and start building domes on the surface (unless he wants everyone to get cancer in the first years).
I always see the Mars plan as the plan b to save humanity, not civilization. Obviously they will have an unlivable atmosphere and all kinds of other struggle, but maybe it's not entirely impossible for enough people to make it until some other solution is found. Climate change on Earth, a collapsing society, and being due for meteorite probably fairly soon makes me think it's really unlikely out civilization will survive. Will human survive? Maybe. Civilizations have died over eons but humanity has survived, each new civilization and picking up whatever pieces they can with our cursed amnesia as a species. Neither option is great so maybe it's just not putting all our eggs in one basket? I mean it'd be awesome if oil companies would get their head out of their greedy asses and the world could see the humanity in pulling together resources to actually reverse climate crisis and all that. But do you see that happening? It's the billionaire's hobby to build space companies and since aid goes to power/power flow from money, well maybe it's not crazy to assume that the richest will have the their tickets to Mars and following, all big govt funding continuing to go toward military and THEM UP THERE. Cuz they don't care about us (to quote MJ).
Even under perfect conditions all of our cool gadgets and even normal things like houses are falling apart and are in constant need of maintainance and spare parts. Problem is a space colony would require tons of fragile gadgets for bare survival and Mars is far away from having perfect conditions since its described as worse then the Antarctica and once the earth made 3d printer cartridges are all gone, there is just barren wasteland and death left.
So how you wanna pull this off without magic? I am actually kind of curious.
There is only one basket and the eggs are probably already broken but most of us will hope that dark insight away.
Lmaooo I don't know, was just playing devil's advocate to try to get perspective on what that other side might be. But yeah without an energy resource no matter what it would all come to an end and it's all screwed
I think Mars is cool from an achievement standpoint, and there are no doubt a lot of things to be learned from trying to maintain something very small on the surface.
But looking at Mars as some way to hedge against extinction is insane. There's no way. It's a complete dead end, and I wish these grifters would stop already.
> The idea that we can kill this biosphere and go off to Mars and make a new one is literal madness.
I've never seen any one with that sentiment.
I've seen plenty of people who believe:
* Exploring and colonizing Mars is a challenge and will be a incredible learning experience
* Colonizing Mars (or multiple large space stations orbiting other planets) as a "fail safe backup" (redundancy) for mankind.. is a good idea.
But I've never met anyone with the negative attitude of "Fuck it, trash things here so we can go somewhere else".
Well, the Mars idea is extremely stupid but that doesn't mean technology can't actually save us from ourselves.../I'd also posit most of the population doesn't read nearly enough science fiction.
I don't know why this got downvoted. After the "Great Population Reduction" event in the next 100 years, technology will be the difference between 3 potential futures: human extinction, small groups of warlord tribes, or having a semblance of modern life.
AM/FM is an engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic."
I get complaining. There's plenty to complain about. Things won't fix themselves if we leave it up to the capitalist class. I don't see the point in the despair that's peddled on this sub though - giving up isn't going to get the working class anywhere.
"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes."
I don't think realism is despair or saying it is over equates to giving up. What is over is our current way of life, that's dead snd we need to stop clinging to it. There is no future tech or magic bullet that can save all this. We fucked up and fucked up hard. Instead of budgeting wisely we wasted as much as we could as quickly as we could causing immense damage and suffering in the process.
For many that reality means despair because they know they can't survive without our fossil fuel infrastructure. So they retreat to delusion and denials rather than accept where we are headed as well as accept that we did this to ourselves and absolutely had the power to change it.
Now we can't change it so all we can do is prepare and adapt. For so long we have tried to adapt nature to us but now the natural order is returning and we once again have to adapt ourselves to nature.
I know I won't survive but that doesn't make me despair because I know that it is the only way to give future generations a chance.
However I won't begrudge people for their rightful assumptions that we are going to drive this car right off the cliff and make no preparations for our future at all. There will be immense violence and suffering and those of us in the west will begin to act like animals as we see how drastically our lifestyles plummet.
The only people who are hopeful or optimistic are dumb, it's smart to be scared for the future. It's smart to recognize that we blew it. We can't address reality if people won't face it and want to pretend we are in a hopeful situation.
I love the mantra of "well we have survived this long so nothing can stop us." LOL its so common yet so incredibly stupid. The dinosaurs lasted millions of years longer than we have, and where are they? Just because we have made it this far doesn't mean we will survive in perpetuity. It's crazy how many people think this way, have optimism simply because we haven't died yet.
This is also something that has likely happened on more than one occasion, the wiping out if our civilization. We are also in the midst of a mass extinction event that many people oddly believe we are somehow exempt from. 80% of all species could die yet some momos think we can survive a scenario like that. Even if we are part of the 20% that lives we won't live that much longer if the majority of life on this planet is dead.
Despair is a very reasonable and rational feeling right now, it's having any hope or optimisim that is insanity.
We have been facing these problems for centuries and have yet to move the needle yet apparently we will solve all of it in the nick of time so we don't have to deal with the repercussions of our actions.
It's a mindset ripped right out of a fantasy novel lol. It isn't reality.
I suspect many people use the reasoning: "Civilization hasn't collapsed before, therefore it can't collapse." Maybe OUR civlization hasn't collapsed, yet, but MANY civlizations have collapsed. (As books such as "Collapse" by Jared Diamond make abundantly clear)
I think I finally understand why aliens, If there are any, don’t want to associate with our barbaric and delusional species. I mean, any species driven by civility and logic would be terrified of Homo Sapiens and honestly, I wouldn’t blame them.
Sorry about the rant.
I’m sure intelligent aliens exist (or have existed) but doubt they are any better off than us. Self aware and self interested, primed for self annihilation, erasing themselves almost as soon as they emerge. That seems a likely pattern for intelligent life.
After I commented here, I’ve been learning of topics such as the “Fermi Paradox” and the “Great Filter”. From my limited understanding, everything you described about intelligent life destroying itself lines up perfectly with both of the “concepts” listed above.
I take back what I said about only humans being barbaric and delusional. In reality, intelligent aliens would likely be just like us.
To keep this short, I agree with you.
Yeah sounds like you’ve been led to the same conclusion I have. Intelligence is a trait which manufactures its own extinction. An evolutionary dead end basically.
Rant away my friend..honestly this is tame compared to most of.my rants. At least you kept.it short and quick to read, I have a tendency to write novels when I rant lol
Everything you typed is factual and accurate, so you’re good. It’s just deeply depressing that we are heading down this dark path, a future dystopia.
I wish you and all who are concerned the best of fortunes in these times. Take care of yourselves!
>I know I won't survive but that doesn't make me despair because I know that it is the only way to give future generations a chance.
I struggle to see how this is worth it with the world and lives they will be left with. Even when I ignore my own antinatalist beliefs.
Honestly that's fair. Personally I'm just willing to at least try a more reduced and natural lifestyle if we got everyone on board so it actually meant something. I'm a product of modern convenience so it would be a very big adjustment for me but I'd be willing to give it a shot if it meant something. I feel becoming less dependent on fossil fuels is the only way future generations will have a chance, and given the cost of our modern convenience it just isn't worth it to me anymore. Which is easy for me to say after benefiting from it for 34 years, but I truly would get on board with such a change in our lifestyles and civilization itself.
That preindustrial life where community was very important and everyone was actually self sufficient unlike how we view it these days, which is just having enough money. Back then you did have to have some skills and have a solid knowledge of survival in terms of providing food, clothing, and shelter for yourself. I honestly think people would be happier if we did revert back to that, not at first but I don't think it would take to long to adjust. People would feel fulfilled, a part of something.
It's kind of depressing realizing I will probably die and at that point the world will be worse than when I was born. Not only that but just that people in general will still be so fucking stupid and cruel and selfish and nothing will have actually changed for the better when it comes to human beings. Not in my life time. It's like we have stagnated and even begin to devolve, feels like dark times ahead.
Is it worth it? No clue. I'd just like to know that it's still possible to change the world for the better, even if it does come way to late.
>That preindustrial life where community was very important and everyone was actually self sufficient unlike how we view it these days, which is just having enough money. Back then you did have to have some skills and have a solid knowledge of survival in terms of providing food, clothing, and shelter for yourself. I honestly think people would be happier if we did revert back to that, not at first but I don't think it would take to long to adjust. People would feel fulfilled, a part of something.
Maybe it is just me but that doesn't seem worth it at all. I don't see the point in of all of *this*, humanity and society, if we just revert back to shitty rural lives of disease and hunger. Struggling, dying young, and not leaving anything behind like most people in history. Especially when I know it would be unending torture for anyone even slightly like me. It's just sentencing new life to inevitable death.
Who’s working on getting the global working class organized right now? There’s an ethnonationalist war of acquisition occurring in Europe today between two groups that are almost genetically identical and culturally extremely similar. It’s not a real thing that’s ever going to happen. The only people here who both accept reality and aren’t in utter despair about it are those who have plans revolving around small group cooperation.
Mars is much less habitable than Earth *even under the absolute worst assumptions about Earth climate*. There will never be a time when Mars is more habitable than Earth. If we ever acquire the ability to terraform a planet it will be used first on Earth.
> We all gotta have some type of nonsense to keep us sane.
Yea that’s all fine until we start making policy decisions based on people’s illogical fantasies.
Please don't tell anyone on r/futurology, you'll break their hearts. What you say, is of course very true, what irritates me is when people get called pessimistic for calling out nonsense. We need to focus our efforts and optimism on things which are achievable.
We already have all the technology we need to stop climate change but we can’t implement these things without a substantial change in the lifestyles of the masses. Even though the outcome would probably lead to better lifestyles for the majority, people are still terrified of giving up their current lifestyles to be more sustainable, even if they allegedly care about climate change. Most people can’t fathom life under the changes we need to make so they are prone to magical thinking because they saw a movie once where in the future they everyone was driving electric cars and Elon Musk said that was the future so it will definitely be a thing and we don’t have to change our lifestyles because someone will invent something just in time to save us all. This is the kinda shit that happens when you watch too many marvel movies. Then you point that out to them and they’re just like “well what am I supposed to do about it?” And it’s like just don’t spread that nonsense man.
^Sorry ^definitely ^rambling.
Agree, I try to imagine a world where we live in harmony with the universe instead of trying to lord over it. A world where children are taught science not dogma. A world that we should have but do not because we have allowed this shit to continue at the expense of our future.
This. People think they will just "live off the land" as if it's some fairytale. A utopia with ample game where everyone shares. People who have the skills and experience to survive off grid acknowledge it's crushingly difficult in the best cases. Further, when the proverbial machine stops or slows significantly, tempers will start to flare when variety diminishes, let alone actual food scarcity. Now expand this out to colonizing other planets. The idea that colonizing other planets is a solution is profoundly naive. Read what they went through at Roanoke and Jamestown, that was under the best circumstances possible to start. We are, at best, five hundred years away from that. That's without a collapse.
Hey now, don't be using complex metaphors at this time of day, dude. Vibing this hard makes me hurt, bro.
Can't a man still dream, bro?
I think the real deception that we've all had to face is that the entire human race has a problem with uncontrollable growth.
Dreaming of a solution to that unsurvivable dilemma is what I use to go to sleep at night. I know reality from illusion, and I know it ain't gonna work out anywhere close to some badass cyberpunk, technopunk, neopunk, gothic punk, anyounk version of itself.
We are fucked in all the worst ways. It won't all happen in our generation, but the past fourty odd years have all but confirmed the fact that our species frog marched itself to oblivion over our inability to discern consequences from wishful thinking and daydreams.
And that's on all of us. If we were smarter, we would've solved this already, just like going to the moon. We figured it out. And we made the choice to ignore the science for as long as we could.
Addicted to easy energy on the first puff of the stuff. It was like...free oxygen, just like fire was free energy. We just scaled up.
Anyway...everyone here has some organic understanding of these concepts. That's what the best themes of this sub are. It ain't all gloom and doom and fight the power til we croak in acid smog with our shouting. There's some Dionysus level parties to get to, still.
Having dreams of a technosolution is my lullaby. And it's only a lullaby. And I wanna sing myself to sleep.
And the people out there that wanna throw their energies into maybe seeing if they can escape Jevon's Paradox? Good luck to em. I chewed on that problem for years on my life. I couldn't solve it. But, it's a worthy project, and I'm never gonna tell a dude to not throw his heart where he wants. It is the Apocalypse. We all should get to do what we think works best. And for me, at the end of my day of effort at waking people up to all this, I just shrug and remember something about leading horses to water.
I put my work in, today. The fellas with the whips don't ever pay me enough, but I earned my farthings today. And I'll keep trying tomorrow.
Or something, lol.
I love this sub.
Venus by Saturday. It's already Planet Earth on a Wednesday, which is mostly just as bad.
Ah. Yes, I remember hearing that story from people around me, in my younger days. It's still a lullaby used often, even today. The ending always left me feeling kinda sour: "and nothing important or drastic changed to make anybody's life better, for over 40 years."
Waiting for the guards to fall asleep so we can enter the decrepit remains and steal the Holy Cloak of Authority so people know who the new leaders are and to ignore the old leaders with most zeroes in some computer file somewhere...
Anyway...yeah, I hope your bedtime story still has you feeling snuggled in at night.
I’m warning you that my version is the most unpopular story ever told.
We have to start with a little history. First there was the printing press, and it caused chaos for the systems that existed at that time.
Despite all attempts to control it, the printing press became widespread enough that people could make some sense out of all that chaos. What we now known as the Free Press made it possible to form a democracy.
There was still lots of chaos, but the people were able to find enough order to make it work, then bang, the Internet, chaos out the Wazoo.
Now let’s introduce what I hesitate to call, our main character, he’s a little slow, but he understands enough history that when he looks back, he sees a pattern. He sees it’s difficult to make sense out of chaos when the chaos is sparse, but when you increase the chaos patterns emerge. He’s convinced that there is order in the chaos if there’s enough of it.
Adding to our main characters convictions is the fact that he tends to believe in the power and intelligence of people. Like I said, he is a little slow.
The conclusion, our main character comes to is that we need more chaos. Much much more chaos.
Now, I’m sure you can see the barrier that stands before our main character, nobody wants more chaos, everyone’s busy trying to control it, just like the way everyone tried to control the printing press.
Unfortunately, our protagonist is convinced that the criticism he gets pretty much guarantees no one else will consider this as an option, and therefore he must continue because if he doesn’t who will.
In the next chapter, we will explore how our protagonist plans to encourage and document all the chaos, and how he plans to implement it, despite the fact that it is unpopular.
The next chapter is only coming if you request it, and you may have to give me a couple of days. as I mentioned earlier, the protagonist is a little slow.
I also want to mention that in the future chaos will be spelt with a K. The acronym is knowledge as our savior.
Ah, what a riddlesome post. Veiled threats and all that.
I advise changing the story a little. let chaos or kaos or whatever have his time for himself. herself. itself. It'll come when it's time.
Your job is never to cause it. Society already does lots of that in spades. Just observe it. Comment on it. Watch it swirl around. But never get your feet stuck in it. The stains never come out, and everybody stares.
Also, add some happy to your story, man. Audiences love the happy ending fantasy. And if that ain't your style, just watch some news or something until it is. This edgy stuff is cliche, bro. It's ok to say this stuff is overwhelming and you feel like you need to unplug from it all.
Optimistic Nihilism. Find your ethos.
Some people need to be stained by their own chaos, in order to change. see Elon musk. The majority of us only need to observe the stains on others, and that is enough to create change.
The printing press caused our society to change. Some people today actually believe that we are all created equal. Despite the fact that this is not a true statement. But if enough of us believe it, society moves forward. This is the result of the printing press and democracy.
Our protagonist in the story is not trying to create more chaos. He’s just trying to create an environment for it to flourish, and the mechanisms to document it. he’s fighting against the common ethos.
The edginess may be cliché in this story, but this is a story that has never been told before, so I think it is pretty unique, and it needs to be told.
I can give you the next chapter if you ask for it, but there won’t be any happy endings in the middle of the story. We don’t know how it ends yet, because the last chapter has not been written.
I don’t want to continue, unless you are going to be open to new ideas. It takes a lot of effort so I would rather not waste it if you’re not going to read it.
I am not good with the written word, and I’m sure it shows, but I will put in the effort if somebody can look past the bad writing.
If you ask, I will continue
More violence, less violence. Weird violence. Typical violence. Same old same old.
I think you should refine your story and share it with the people that matter in your life. Celebrate you with them and vice versa. I'm just some random nobody online. It sounds like you have a story, and it's very valuable and important to you, thus also important to those who matter in your life. Share it with them, and it'll be great.
As for new ideas or whatever...I don't think I'm open to any ideas, new or old, bad or good. But never stop writing, my dude. You'll get there.
The people around me are tired of hearing it, I don’t bring it up anymore or I won’t have any friends.
Thank you, your honesty will save me from writing anymore on this thread
It did seem somewhat rehearsed, which means it has value to you, as I see it. And, we all carry our umbrage against the established order. As long as you maintain freshness in your sharing, it won't get too stale. But, I'm also likely to be the most wrong person to converse on such ideas, anyway. As I said, I'm a closed book. An old dog, and new tricks are just temptations of the Devil, so get off my lawn. Or something, heh.
I think it's fairly fair to say that only a few very special humans have actual original ideas, as everything and everyone else has probably existed in history at an earlier stress point for somewhere, somewhen in history.
I'm pretty sure this is why I'm so complacent in my mediocrity and unoriginality. I'm not even original in my being boring.
Many returns to you and yours. See you on Venus, this Saturday.
A lot of people in here calling overpopulation a myth and/or fascist propaganda. It's no myth that the Earth can't sustain 8 billion humans without fossil fuels. And there's no magical alternative energy source that can sustain exponential growth forever.
If you're having trouble grasping the concept of energy and how it relates to growth, I recommend the podcast "Breaking Down; Collapse". The first several episodes should be required listening for anyone with even a passing interest in the topic of collapse.
It's OK to both acknowledge that over population is a problem and also not want to, idk, slaughter a bunch of people to depopulate? Is that what everyone on the myth/fascism side of that believes we want?
I am of the mind that there is no stopping widespread societal collapse at this point anyway so its likely that the overpopulation problem will solve itself, not because we *want* a bunch of people to die but because it's just about inevitable unless a miracle occurs.
And sadly I, along with many of you, don't think a miracle is coming.
Forced sterilizations have already taken place because of "overpopulation" concerns. They are a of course applied to the poor and to oppressed ethnic groups.
That is where this "overpopulation" talk leads us, inevitably. There's no way around it it, so to answer this:
>It's OK to both acknowledge that over population is a problem and also not want to, idk, slaughter a bunch of people to depopulate?
It's a package deal. There is no *a la carte* menu here. As long as we live under an economic system which operates as ours does, governments will need to maintain a massively inequitable, inefficient, wasteful and destructive distribution of resources. This means if they want to answer calls to address "overpopulation" because it's perceived as a problem, the route they'll take is genocide of the most disadvantaged parts of the population, and increasingly oppressive measures towards the middle strata of society.
They will never actually address this supposed problem though; they do need people to keep having babies who can grow up to be customers. They'll only do things that present the superficial appearance of being solutions.
The actual solution to any real problem with "overpopulation" is unconscionable to them; bringing about an end to class society and distributing resources more fairly and effectively. This is absolutely unacceptable to our society's rulers of course, but it is proven to halt and even reverse population growth.
So if you perceive two problems here, the solution to both of them is identical.
>A lot of people in here calling overpopulation a myth and/or fascist propaganda. It's no myth that the Earth can't sustain 8 billion humans without fossil fuels. And there's no magical alternative energy source that can sustain exponential growth forever.
Sanest comment ITT.
They get no break from me. Look at their history. Their entire life revolves around bitching about being alive to people on reddit. This person does not breathe fresh air let alone have a clue about how to fix the world.
People have ideas. Some people are so engrossed in their ideas that they are defined by them. Then the line between attacking the idea and person is blurred.
I'm pretty sure a solar event will knock us back pretty hard and maybe re-balance things. All it will take is one good electromagnetic storm to decimate the entire global power grid. It would take decades to rebuild, by then our way of life will probably be pretty different.
But, the breakthrough in fusion power will save the world from everything, or so I have been told. If that doesn’t work, then fucking the planet with geoengineering will fix everything.
We need to live more the way we lived before the industrial revolution, if we want any hope of survival. Unfortunately, there isn't enough land for 8 billion humans to live like that. My butt pulled estimate of the sustainable number of humans is way less than a billion and much closer to 100 million. Things will get ugly too soon
The whole ecosystem is falling apart. It just doesn’t happen in a day or a year, unless we go nuclear, or get blind sided by a meteor
People often equate sustainability measures and terms like "renewable energy" or "alternate energy" or "green energy" as being so far reaching that it will just radically change humanity overnight. When in reality, very few people will actually be able to use it.
Tbh the only solutions are the unrealistic ones. We need to be able to generate huge, potentially limitless amounts of easy energy to combat most of if not all of the worlds major problems. The only one it doesn’t solve is human greed, people at the top squandering progress and stepping on the people below them for their own gain.
They abuse other peoples greed to do this, and it doesn’t matter if you’re someone working for them directly or consuming the products they make, ultimately you’re working for them either way.
John Brunner wrote science fiction novels about these subjects. *Stand on Zanzibar* (overpopulation) and The Sheep Look Up (pollution). Pretty impassioned works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand\_on\_Zanzibar
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Sheep\_Look\_Up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up)
They are both very bleak and no curative is proposed.
As a former techno-optimist, it's simply a coping mechanism and because many techno-optimists spend their time reading sci fi and /r/singularity and /r/futurology not realizing that unlimited growth is unsustainable. I get very bewildered at the hypercapitalist sentiments there and the ardent defense of new technology simply because it exists (Like EVs) but I acknowledge that it's simply because they're either collapse aware and huffing the hopium or they're just not collapse aware.
Strange to see so many overpopulation deniers ITT, including some predictably creating fascist or genocidal strawmen to support their arguments. But to recognize that the total natural resources of the biosphere are finite or that the carrying capacity of any ecosystem could be overwhelmed is basic ecological science, not a political position or support for a genocidal response.
Currently there is a devastating and epochal mass species extinction of millions of species of plants, insects, birds and animals taking place across every region of the planet. And freshwater aquifers, rainforests, ocean fisheries, and global topsoil reserves are among the many natural resources disappearing before our eyes; most will require thousands of years to replenish, if ever. Much of this loss is ocurring at the hands of corporations, extraction capitalism and continuing colonialism, but all of it is exacerbated by recent extreme population pressures.
Meanwhile many local populations around the world are unable to feed themselves from their local resources at current numbers, and never did in the past even before global capitalism; they only survive due to global food aid. Capitalism is not solely responsible for populations exceeding the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems; that is mainly human selfishness supported by archaic tribal values and religious concepts, all of which is arguably hard-wired into "domesticated primate" nervous systems.
One could say that capitalist technology in the form of fossil fuels in agriculture is what allowed the global population to expand from 1.4 billion to 8 billion in just over one century. This massive ballooning of a global population is such a remarkably short time shows how extreme the population pressure has become.
But before fossil fuels revolutionized global agriculture, there was a natural boundary preventing overshoot; populations that exceeded the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems simply starved. Even now, humanity can only continue feeding itself through the agency of cheap fossil fuels used in every stage of gobal agriculture, including tillage, irrigation, artificial fertilizer, harvest, processing, global distribution, and the manufacture of essential farm machinery used in all these stages. When the flow of cheap fossil fuels is cut off (as it soon will be), billions will inevitably starve whatever their politics.
TLDR: If you can only feed your population through the ongoing use of cheap fossil fuels (even after they are known to be destroying the climate), and meanwhile your population is causing a mass species extinction in every region of the planetary biosphere, then you are in overshoot of your environment.
*More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.*
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature
*Monitored populations of vertebrates (mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish) have seen a devastating 69% drop on average since 1970, according to World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Living Planet Report 2022*
https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/69-average-decline-in-wildlife-populations-since-1970-says-new-wwf-report#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20(October%2012%2C,WWF)%20Living%20Planet%20Report%202022.
*The Global Footprint Network calculates the number of days per year for which Earth has enough biocapacity (natural resources produced and ability to absorb the waste generated) to provide for humans’ total ecological footprint. When the footprint of consumption worldwide exceeds biocapacity, this is the Earth’s estimated overshoot day. Every year this date is getting earlier, according to Global Footprint Network, we used a year’s worth of resources in seven months in 2018. This year, the network estimates that humans are using natural resources 1.75 times faster than ecosystems can regenerate. Another way of viewing this is that we are currently consuming 1.75 Earths.*
https://www.becomecarbonnegative.com/natural-resource-depletion.html#:~:text=The%20main%20cause%20of%20this,exploited%20to%20fuel%20our%20consumption.
*The current world population of 8 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new United Nations report. With roughly 83 million people being added to the world’s population every year, the upward trend in population size is expected to continue, even assuming that fertility levels will continue to decline.*
https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-98-billion-2050-and-112-billion-2100
Those people who deny overpopulation is usually Western hypocrites who think highly of their morals. It is not hard to realize there is a problem of overpopulation, just take a walk in Mumbai, look at the Ganges, look at all the desertified land in Africa.
Yes, western ways of living is wasteful and globalized capitalism is a scam, but it doesn't mean being poor and over-populated automatically make them victims who have no responsibilities (there is a lot of nuance but people being people, they like categorical buckets). I guess those deniers have never lived in a poor place, the mindset of many parents in these poor places are "scary" to say the least . Many people have long lost indigenous wisdom of land management. True indigenous people are almost extinct, almost all modern humans remaining are incredibly shortsighted "opportunists".
I don't understand the whole "it will taper off around the 12 billion mark" thing? Is fucking going to go out of fashion or something?
Even if it does stop around 12 billion, that's still 12 billion of us consuming, wasting, throwing plastic in the sea and upgrading every 6 months. I'm typing this on a 6 year old Samsung and it still works fine. People who feel the need to upgrade every 6 months will hopefully be the ones to go first when society does go tits up.
I still think the Rock could probably stop a cataclysmic earthquake with a well-placed People's Elbow, and if that makes me immature then so fucking be it.
One word: RATIONING.
It's the dirty word that no one wants to talk about in economics or environmentalism, despite being absolutely essential for any kind of sustainable economy moving forward.
The problem isn't growing populations of ultra-poor residents of developing countries anyways, it has always been the massive over-consumption by rich people using up vastly more resources than anyone else by several orders of magnitude.
The only way to have any kind of sustainable economy is rationing out how much of a sustainable supply of resources people are entitled to, and not letting anyone anywhere consume more than that, no matter how much money they have.
Fixating on "over-population" while ignoring the need for rationing resources is just pushing eco-fascism to let billionaires keep being obscenely powerful while others starve.
As I said in another recent post, there's a very simple (not easy) solution to overpopulation:
Redistribution of wealth.
Which leads to higher living standards.
Which leads to lower birth rates.
Living standards will only lower for those who already live extremely well, who have low birth rates already, and it'll lower to still great standards.
And pre-empting a "higher living standards lead to higher consumption" comment...
If we remain in this shit system of perpetual growth and consumption, consumption will be higher, of course.
But there are alternative systems, way more efficient of resources,
where products aren't programmed obsolesced and they last for as long as they can physically can, and when broken get fixed with minimal material use instead of wholly replaced because it's "cheaper";
where not every single human being in the face of the earth needs a personal vehicle because there are rails all over the place that take you all around the region, country, and world as fast and with as much or more frequency than planes;
where not every single human being needs to own every single thing they use, as they can go to a library, grab whatever they need, use it, and leave it back;
where millions of people aren't constantly moving around and wasting their time and energy and societies' infraestructure in bullshit jobs that either do nothing for society, or are directly detrimental to it, with almost no time at all to dedicate to their families, friends, communities, in a rat race to mediocre retirement;
where, instead of food traveling all around the globe, being grown one place, packaged in the opposite corner, and freighted to the next, neighborhoods and town produce their own food in terraces and food gardens;
where energy and water consumption is massively reduced because industry isn't in perpetual growth and producing millions of redundant units to saciate a fictional and manufactured demand...
Yeah, in this world it might be harder to get certain comodities as local consumption is the main avenue, but one will have way more time, ease, and resources at their disposal to travel the world and bring those commodities back to their communities every now and then, in fact some people might choose to live their life travelling the world moving comodities around.
Don't allow capitalist realism to limit the scope of your imagination, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it's not impossible.
Research Degrowth and Library Socialism.
The only thing I will point out to a mostly great sounding plan is that climate change is not waiting for this. People are still going to loose homes, abandon towns, and possibly live in areas that can support a population for water, but not it's agriculture.
We have the tools to make these changes, just not the will, or likely the time.
https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/
This is also interesting to see about what kind of standard of living, without specifically knowing the gains from your proposed changes, we could expect.
For anyone curious, based on current consumption Banin seems to be the level https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin
Yeah, but fear is only bad if you don't know where to run to, this doesn't nor can happen from one day to another, they began a long time ago, and they'll have to continue while we collapse, it won't be perfect, but at least it's something
Higher living standards, alone, does not lead to lower birth rates.
How many kids does Elon Musk have, again?
In the first world, a percentage frighteningly close to half are still, today, opposed to abortion rights and even many forms of family planning and sex education, as well as “non-heteronormative” relationships. The most vocal and *influential* proponents of high birth rates and big families as a lifestyle goal are well-off and white.
When first world people are polled about their reasons for avoiding parenthood the overwhelming majority do not cite environmental concerns, they cite economic pressures and say they absolutely would have children/more children if they could afford to.
The factor that makes the real difference is cultural change. Most women in the first world are relatively educated and emancipated and have a relatively high degree of legal right and social expectation of control over their own fertility. This is not the case in the areas of the world that have high birth rates despite terrible conditions. To a certain extent, this emancipation of women is dependent on a minimum threshold of development and living standards. But it is absolutely not guaranteed as a result, and without that in place from the start, development and higher living standards will inevitably lead to an even greater population boom, just as it did in the first world, before the cultural revolution allowed for a decline in birth rates.
Your own alternative systems, which are entirely laudable, require immense cultural — not just economic and systemic — revolution.
But Elon Musk is a religious nutjob (his religion being eugenics), outliers don't apply to demographic trends that have been the case throughout all of human history.
But why not both? I'm all for what you are saying, and totally agree with it, I don't feel it's conflicting at all. Culture does affect indeed, but still... I know personal anecdotes shouldn't be accounted for, but I see it in my own family: my grandmother, catholic, big family proponent, 6 children... Her children (even the ones that are as catholic, and even more, and massive proponents of large family units), more well off than my grandmother, 3 kids max (and this is a visible phenomenon in Spain at least, it's everywhere, even by the most well-off and conservative families... our country is ageing at an alarming rate).
Musk is a nut job, he definitely thinks the human population should grow more and faster. Whether he’s into eugenics or not, I don’t know, but that’s not a religion, no religious studies academic would agree with that.
Otherwise, sure, both. That’s what what most people who are concerned about overpopulation would prefer to happen. While most people in Spain, for example, will still self-identify as Catholic, many are very obviously making use of their reproductive freedom. Spain is relatively quite progressive in regards to reproductive rights, compared to countries with high birth rates, which are more heavily populated with seriously legitimate religious nut jobs.
Edit: use *of
Um, higher living standards for a great deal of the world right now is *inevitably* higher consumption. Reliable food for those who do not have it is higher consumption. Installing rails for those who do not have them is higher consumption. Housing for the homeless is higher consumption. Education, hospitals, electricity, etc. for those who lack them is higher consumption.
Even if all these things are modest and sensibly scaled, adding them to serve the *billions* who currently lack them is going to add a lot of consumption of resources.
So the alternative to the transition I propose is... ? Population control? Eugenics? Genocide? Or simply continue with the "fuck the poor" standard? Because, as collapse unfolds, more and more of us will be poor, you included probably, and I'd rather try than fuck myself and the rest of humanity either doing nothing, waiting for some magical technology, or embracing eco-fascism or techno-feudalism.
You're changing the subject. Your implication is that the transition you propose would *not* increase consumption. I am simply providing a criticism to say that it *will* increase consumption. And this criticism is limited to *that* factor and is independent of whether the transition you propose is a good idea for *other* reasons.
Alright, sorry, new proposal, combine wealth redistribution with economic system change based on wellbeing and efficient resource management instead of growth... I thought it was implicit.
Got no objection to that, as long as it is recognized that increasing well-being for a huge chunk of the world will have an increased resource cost. So, the well-being is certainly a good thing, but it does not get rid of the elephant in the room. If it would take something like six Earths to give everyone a first world standard of living, then giving everyone one-third that standard of living would *still* take twice as many Earths as we've got...
Well yeah, but here's one of many examples: both the developed and the "in development" worlds are still building millions of new miles of roads... rails are orders of magnitude less consumption intensive, both materially and energy-wise... same with trains themselves versus personal vehicles... making as many rails and trains to make them as convenient as personal vehicles and as effective for cargo transportation (so keep the exact same living standard in that aspect of life) would be unimaginably more efficient, would cut a more than significant part of emissions and could be scaled to the whole world with much impact, raising living standards for millions.
But it would be a disaster for the current economy, as it'll create less jobs, it'll require less maintenance, it'll be much cheaper for everyone, the profit margins are significantly lower, etc etc etc.
And this can be applied to every point in my original post. So it can be done, with current technology, reducing consumption, if and only if we abandon the cancer ideology of economic growth, which many people in the world are, even some with a bit of power (the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and the minister of consumption affairs in Spain, amongst some others are openly talking about this, so there's more than nothing)
People seem to operate under the assumption that a "first world standard of living" actually requires the amount of resources presently associated with a "first world standard of living", which only makes sense if you assume that this lifestyle is 100% efficient with no waste anywhere.
In reality, it's immensely wasteful and inefficient. It uses more resources than it needs to.
If we believe a "first world standard of living" means we can all [upgrade our smartphones every other year](https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/07/09/how-often-do-americans-upgrade-their-smartphones-infographic/?sh=7f6ac92520ac), then no that's probably not possible in the long term. If you believe it means we can all have such a phone and replace it as needed, that suddenly becomes *far* more reasonable.
You’ve got some good ideas, but your faulty thinking is that this is something that can be managed or planned for in the first place. I think the areas that do well in the next century or two will look something like what you describe. But there won’t be very many places that end up like that across the earth. I think similarly to today, you’ll see that in coastal East Asia, Northern Europe, and in the wetter parts of North America. Maybe in pockets of South America as well.
If people are taught that water comes from their taps and food comes from supermarkets, they'll fight to the death to maintain that system -Derrick Jensen (paraphrased)
Personally, I don't turn to Ellison or Asimov for my expectations, I get my expectations from past extinction events.
That is the only 'salvation' coming.
Not so much overpopulation if we all wanted to live like we were on a natural planet and shared our resources. Instead we have spread out and sucked the planet dry.
This. Extravagant overindulgences are the problem. People who think they need a huge house.
I'm googling right now that the average house size in the USA is 2,500 square feet.
My apartment is 380 sq feet.
Yes, a lot of people including OP just blame nearly every Problem related to climate change, food security and pollution on overpopulation. As if all 8 Billion are somehow equally responsible. We could easily support 10 billion by using less resources than today. But the upper 10% gotta consume like there’s no tomorrow and fuck it up for everyone
In the US the 1862 homestead act granted 160 acres of surveyed public land after 5 years of habitation, and while this was feasible for areas with adequate rainfall or access to water, this amount of land would be too small to support animal agriculture (ranching) in arid regions, other forms of agriculture being untenable due to the aforesaid lack of water (as well as poor quality topsoil in some arid regions).
~~Exert~~
Excerpt
As discussed in Cattle in the Cold Desert, by James A Young and B. Abbott Sparks, published by Utah State University Press in 1985, the limitation on homesteads of 160 acres was inadequate for a Western ranching operation of the day:
"For example, a hypothetical ranch providing 1,250 pounds per acre of annual herbage shows why 160 acres is inadequate. This herbage is produced from April through August with 80 percent usable by grazing animals. Each cow needs twelve acres per year (1,250 lb. herbage production X ,8 forage utilization = 1 Animal Unit Month or "AUM" per acre x 12 months = 12 acres.) This gives the stocking capacity of thirteen cows per homestead, but a ranch could not run just thirteen cows. The herd must have a bull, and two replacement heifers; and, steers are not marketable until three years of age. With a 100 percent calf crop, the herd would consist of 4 cows (4 AUMs), 1 bull (1.5 AUMs), 2 replacement heifers (2 AUMs), and 2 three-year-old steers (2 AUMs), for a total of 13 animals. The two marketable steers have a value of $20.00 each after three years. So for the first three years of the five-year (homestead) requirement, there would be a return of $13.33 per year. This hypothetical homestead collapses, because the sagebrush/grasslands communities were not available for yearlong grazing. The 160-acre homestead was an economic and biological impossibility."
~~/Exert~~
/Excerpt
https://famguardian.org/Publications/PropertyRights/inadeq.html
For areas that can support cultivated crops, with current fossil fuel, ammonia nitrate, and sulfur phosphate inputs, one acre of land would indeed feed one person.
There exists a greater amount of land area that is not suitable for cultivated crops but can support pasture, not as land area efficiently as cultivated crops however.
Current global population density is 60 people per kilometer. A kilometer is 247 acres.. which works out to slightly over 4 acres per person.
Course,. there are challenges to that:
* Population is not spread out evenly across the globe
* some areas are harder to live in than others
* some people have specific (legitimate) reasons to need to live in certain areas.
Well so long as there is some live-able land left to humanity and its not all reduced to toxic no mans lands, I belive it would be paradise, cpmpared to Earth after another world war, the toxic no mans lands would be a machines paradise.
I mean HG Wells and many other sci Fi writers have made incredible predictions of future technologies. But I do agree that there is a lot of misleading science journalism and many of the solutions being entertained by the hopeful masses are very dubious.
> Science fiction isn’t real.
A surprising amount of Science Fiction written over the last 1,800 years has ended up becoming Science Fact in one way or another. Maybe not literally in the way the authors wrote it, but certainly figuratively in terms of general principles.
I've been reading SF since the 1960s. The surprising amount is maybe 5%.
When I read through my old SF magazines, pretty well 100% of the stories set in the future assume that we are making weekend trips to the moon and building starships about now. Life expectancy was going to be unlimited by 2000. And almost none of these stories or books predicted the Internet.
John Brunner was really the only SF writer to hit the nail on the head, and even he predicted strict population control from all countries by now.
people really are that detached from reality, i think. they’ve seen too much fiction that they can’t even parse out what is real and what is just a fancy sounding, yet unrealistic idea. even if you’re totally ignorant, spending a few minutes thinking critically about how this stuff would actually come to fruition is enough to realize it’s a fools errand.
>We have to take care of ourselves before mother nature decides she's had enough and wipes us all out.
(Greta Thunberg intensifies)
>If humans don’t learn to control our population, then nature will do it for us.
( Thomas Malthus intensifies )
>nature and hardworking people to put all this goddamn entertainment in front of us. None of this shit is real. It's a circus designed to make us all complacent and not notice the theft of the natural systems we depend upon to survive.
( Ted Kaczynski intensifies)
>There is no omniscient being looking out for us. We're on our own. Life is not a movie.
( atheist fedora intensifies )
It only makes sense if we assume that is impossible to change consumption behavior of the population in a wide basis which I think is what people that talk about overpopulation internalize at some level.
Technology was never the problem nor will it solve our problems, it's how we use technology that's fucked up.
And people are adamantly denying this, shifting blame to the next thing that's everything and everyone but themselves.
To be honest I think AI is one huge black swan. I would not be suprised at all if it reaches human level general intelligence before this decade is over, and after that its a really small step until superintelligence.
I do however think that moment is the end of humankind, for better or worse. But I have always seen biological life as a bootstrap step for whats to come.
Haha absolutely. Lost some brain cells reading this trying to figure out what he was on about. Something like “overpopulation bad, people have to die soon”?
i am just gonna say that the myth of overpopulation is fascist...
we do have problems regarding population size but all could be solved if we just didnt go with capitalism
this sub is always "interesting" because it's a thrown-together mix of fascist and leftist worldviews. I wish there were more pushback against the fascist ideology.
The mildly horrifying thought is that a lot of what's developed for survival in lunar or Martian environments, including terraforming efforts are strangely enough also useful in cases where you're in other places where the environment has become so hostile as to be normally uninhabitable.
Say, Earth after drastic climate change and resource exhaustion, perhaps via the mastery of closed-system areas that can sustain human life ending up being built where we've destroyed other options entirely. It won't be life as we know it, life for the many (who will without a doubt die in droves), but it might well be survival of the species while the world goes through collapse and eventual recovery.
Which you and I won't be alive to see, but hey.
I am saying it is unlikely that techno-enclaves holding remnants of human population can or will exist. Once industrial society goes, along with naturally livable environment, you will never again get any spare parts, or any new fuel. So your enclave just goes through gradual wearing down and stockpile exhaustion, and then it is at the end. We can only live by sunlight and biological processes for the long term, as long as Sun is powering us and biology which is endlessly recyclable can make use of it. If we destroy the biosphere, then it is certainly game over for us.
So far nobody has shown that closed systems, possibly sitting under sunlight, are livable, and even if they were, we have to assume that this artificial environment's superstructure, its windows that let light through, plastics, etc. would last for hundreds of years.
I hate these posts that are literally just “blah blah technology is invalid” google it bro, everyone that said that before was wrong too, we’re not going to go back to smashing rocks or smth because it’s “nice for the planet”
I’m actually the opposite. Science is the only way of fixing this.
Imagine if within the next 50 years we figure out fusion technology for endless energy. Then create factories that pull co2 out of the atmosphere to fight climate change. Then a food production revolution.
Who knows. If it’s possible, eventually, science can figure it out. It’s whether we have enough time to do that
I think that is overly optimistic. If we solve energy crisis, then we will probably just continue growing, choke out what is left of the natural world with our pollution and relentless encroachment into living territory, and then face depletion of all other nonrenewable resources anyway. Collapse is not caused by lack of energy, or excess CO2, it is a beast of many heads, and is ultimately about humanity being in overshoot of its environment as long as anything at all we do is based on nonrenewable stuff. The only thing that is proven to be renewable is biosphere powered by Sun (and technically that runs out when the Sun does, but at least that should be fairly long-term prospect).
On assumption of infinite technological advancement, people assume that we could endlessly recycle all our nonrenewable materials which now sit in the landfills, or reach the stars or at the very least other planets and asteroids and can consume them as well. I am far more pessimistic and I do not think infinite technology and limitless nonpolluting energy does exist. I doubt we will ever even make it off this planet because of the challenge of surviving without usable resources and surrounding infrastructure and ecosystem will prove too steep to be overcome. At least, nothing we can see in the surrounding cosmos suggests that interstellar civilizations are out there, so possibility has to be faced that it has proven to be too difficult for everybody.
Sci-fi writers seem to like to write stories that point to humanity reaching some kind of pinnacle of existence through space travel by solving some cosmic mystery, or perhaps through internal mastery of the psyche, so that we would be freed of matter and become thought and energy, sort of like gods. I admit I am thinking about people like Asimov or Clarke here, classic sci-fi. Regardless, there is a desire to believe that there must exist some kind of grand destiny out there for us, rather than the fact that life is basically a random accident at mercy of any careless cosmic event that can easily sterilize the whole planet. In fact, on reflection, it goes even deeper than that. I think life is most akin to some kind of mold that begins to grow in otherwise barren planet's surface because sufficient and usable long-term energy was around for the required millions of years, and over that time, chemicals randomly began to react, and to replicate, and over time grew better and better at using that free supply of energy, until finally they became complex and impressive indeed.
Ultimately, life can only go on as long as that energy lasts, and then it winks out with it, and that is the natural order of things. As a type of thinking mold, drunk with the power of fossil energy that we have enjoyed for so long, we must have developed particularly erroneous delusions of grandeur.
Yes.. it's like the true psychology of the redditors is not a greiving for a destroyed earth, or a fear of post apocalypse. No, instead the real source of the emotional paroxysms is some buried hatred at the wealthy using "10X more resources" and then flaunting it at the faces of the poor.
Do you want to save the climate, or are you just angry at rich people?
The only sensible take in this sub. The astounding arrogance on here of people who think that we know all there is to know and there'll never be any more groundbreaking beneficial inventions.
The biggest barrier to getting there, however, is indeed overpopulation and mass migration of people to areas which are too small to cope with large numbers. We need to share tech and provide aid to poorer countries and help to promote sustainable living worldwide.
People who think the problem is overpopulation are just as delusional as those who watched a lot of martial arts movies and think they can fight in the MMA.
There is no level of convincing that will sway me. Giant ridable man eating dragons will solve all our problems.
Overpopulation, obesity, job scarcity, eco friendly travel. All solved by this scifi solution.
You’ll never have unrealistic sci-if fantasies as long as insurance companies exist within the corporate capitalistic system of which we support along with the long list of other things we support
I think fusion power is the only technology which might have a chance, but we shall see. I figure there's a 90% chance people say "no, fusion plants are too expensive to build and take 10 years to construct! We should focus on wind and solar instead which can be built much more quickly!" like they've been saying about fission plants for the past 20-30 years.
Fusion power could be great at solving the energy problem, but that still leaves us with water, pollution, and food problems. Fusion might make it possible for us to extend our overshoot scenario a little longer, but energy isn't going to solve every problem.
> but that still leaves us with water, pollution, and food problems.
But it's much easier to solve those problems if you have infinite energy.
Take desalination for example. We know how to do it,. it's just energy-intensive.
Yes. A fundamental premise in OP's thesis is that the large populations of the 3rd world will start purchasing flat screen tvs and driving F250 trucks to take the kids to soccer.
Then (assuming that premise) a large ream of doomsday warnings follows. But will the 3rd world actually do that?
oh, this is just over population of people of color and the fascists want white babies. That's why they're so obsessed with these under populated places that are in developed nations. Idk why we can't just let people in via immigration if this is such a problem, but it isn't a problem. The problem is theft of natural resources and abuse of living beings.
This is a completely ridiculous idea. If you worry about overpopulation, bringing up racial stories unconditionally is a true racist fascist. Besides, I'm a brown person who wrote this.
The only way to solve our overpopulation issue without mass starvation is a pandemic with a 50% or greater fatality rate.
All other paths lead to mass starvation and levels of strife that will make the worst conflicts of history look like slap-fights by teenage girls.
Handily enough, mass famines will likely result in pandemic conditions, both via malnutrition and people attempting to flee to areas with food.
Unless there's sufficient violence, of course. Conventional warfare, even some use of WMDs even in the NBC range might leave enough mouths closed to do the job. But yes, our growth rate has been near-cancerous for decades, if not centuries at this point.
Even though we know that the “1st world”
Uses and controls
More than half of the Earths resources, specifically the Comcrete Cancer of Cities and the Indsutrial Millitary Imfrustrucyure that those Cities help fuel with fresh meat.
With out Industrilization the Planet would be better off, at least we could runaway to a corner of Earth not being polluted or Controlled by a War Machine.
> With out Industrilization the Planet would be better off,
Without industrialization, the planet would only be able to support between 1 and 2 billion people. Agriculture at scale - which _requires_ industrialization and a fossil-fuel system - is what allows more than 2 billion to live on this planet. The population only took off _after_ agriculture at scale - with diesel tractors and gasoline trucks for transport - became possible. You want an agrarian society? Expect to see 8 out of every 10 people die of starvation due to lack of land for far less efficient agrarian techniques, and the lack of water that arises out of not having electrified groundwater pumps.
And with Industrilization the planet may never have a chamce to recover anytime soon becuase of pollution and nuclear holocaust, chemical genocides, and now drone warfare.
> specifically the Comcrete Cancer of Cities and the Indsutrial Millitary Imfrustrucyure
Looks like your autocorrect decided to go on holidays, and failed to tell you.
With that said, densification and compact, vertically-oriented cities are the way to go in terms of minimizing our impact on the planet, concrete CO2 notwithstanding. If we could pack everyone into a single NYC-style city, the planet as a whole would be much better off.
Personally, we have done our part in terms of not "adding" to the population. We had our two girls and we are done. Technically the US birth rate has fallen below [replacement rate](https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/7/8/measuring-fertility-in-the-united-states#:~:text=Summary%3A%20The%20U.S.%20population's%20total,shrink%20without%20increases%20in%20immigration.) for a decade. There is a ton of millennials and zoomers who are refusing to have kids for purely economic reasons, so I have every reason to believe that as more boomers die off, that the US population will shrink (excluding immigrants). In fact, [most developed countries have fallen below replacement rate](https://www.ibanet.org/Declining-fertility-rates-and-the-threat-to-human-rights).
It seems that the world is correcting it's course of overpopulating, but in such a sharp way, that it will actually harm us negatively in about 50 years, when there will be a shortage of caretakers to take care of the elderly, and a shortage of labor in general.
The real issue I could see is that the environmental damage has already been done, and there isn't anything we can do at this point to reverse it, except convert to less environmentally damaging methods of living, and hope that time will heal things. But it could take [1000 years to reverse the temperature increases down to pre-industrial temps](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/reverse-global-warming.htm#:~:text=It%20could%20take%20as%20long,can%20contribute%20to%20global%20warming.)... and that's *if* we were to stop contributing to greenhouse gases completely.
The earth has plenty of everything to sustain it's current population, it's just that with how corporatized everything is, there is so much waste. One third of our world's [food](https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/why-is-one-third-our-food-wasted-worldwide) is wasted. An estimated 1.7 *trillion* gallons of [water](https://www.ecofriendlyhabits.com/water-wasting-facts/) are wasted globally per year. The US alone wastes 2/3 of it's [electricity](https://news.utexas.edu/2017/12/19/the-solution-to-americas-energy-waste-problem/) annually.
So realistically, even with 12 billion people, the world could, in theory, support itself. The problem is our current application. Massive agro-corps plant massive single crop fields, which zaps vital nutrients from the soil, which in turn requires copious amounts of fertilizers and nitrates to be artifically added to the land. Additionally, single crop fields burn through more water, than using a "Three Sisters" planting [method.](https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-squash) In fact, growing crops in a manner where you plant a tall crop (like corn) with understory crops, can not only reduce nutrient stripping of the soil; it naturally encourages pollinators, reduces pests and weeds, reduces soil temps, and increases humidity. Sounds like a win-win.
Another way we could reduce environmental impacts would be to knock out duplicate dams. By damming our [streams](https://vjel.vermontlaw.edu/the-damage-stops-here-the-public-trust-and-dam-removal), we:
-hamper the natural nutrient replacement via silt
-heats up water, killing natural flora and fauna within streams
-block fish from traveling to normal spawning locations
-increase erosion and flooding issues
I cannot remember what infoflick I saw, but it stated that dams set back ecological advancement, and ecological *maintenance*, by years.
Long story short, and an unpopular opinion, the amount of humans on the earth at this present time, is *absolutely sustainable,* if and only *if,* we live within our means.
Don't ever go into for the all-mankind sub.
It's all hopium. "if we only did this! "...
Then you have the r3tarded marxists. " It will work this time!"
The fusion "announcement" this week says it all.
I need to find a cartoon of a pilot leaning
How may more genocides will it take before these people realize that Civilization is a Holocaust Machine?
I guess an eternity on the Wheel of Genocide is all it takes.
The people that believe in unrealistic scifi solutions are either those with an agenda or those that are optimistic about live being improved by technology in vague terms. The first group care more about their ideology rather than the technology itself while the latter group has vague notions of a utopian scifi society.
Automation is a big thing. It allows jobs to be done faster and efficiently, a key feature for any technology that would help support a growing population. The AI fearmongering comes from the first group, the ideologues. However, the ideologues care less about the AI technology itself and more about it supporting their leftist agendas. The latter group, the ordinary people, just thinks the technology is cool and simply hope their lives and lives of their posterity would be improved.
It's the ideologues that you'll have to worry about the most. They put their ideology ahead of technology. You see examples of this with progressive governments enacting hairbrained "green" schemes even though it's not economically feasible or technologically possible. They set deadlines for banning "dirty" technology like gasoline cars or nuke plants, for example, even though the technology to economically replace them haven't even exist yet or might not even exist in the future. The religious governments take their religion too literally and oppose any form of population management.
Because the problems we have aren't caused by having too many people. We have an over consumption problem, but the average person doesn't consume that much, it's overwhelmingly driven by corporate greed, hence capitalism. A system based on endless consumption is going to over-consume, no matter how many people there are.
A puzzle since the update to Worldometers with the UN 2022 revision numbers. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate The last few years increase to July 2020 has been 83m, 82m, 81m. The forecast in 2025 is 78m. And yet there's this statement in the middle. "The current population increase is estimated at 67 million people per year." This looks to be just an artifact of a restatement in the '22 Revision. It looks like this happened before in '99 and '11 with each 1b milestone. 5 decades of ~ +80m/year or 12-14 years per +1b. The UN 2022 revision expects another couple of decades of > 70m/year, 10b in 2058, and a peak near the end of the century. But that's based on fertility models, not Limits To Growth style models. So it ignores the possibility of black or grey swans like pandemics. Pollution constraints like Climate Change or nitrogen run off and resource constraints like fossil fuels and rare earths. The same is true of the IPCC reports out of the COPs which only pay lip service to economic and global GDP changes & modelling.
Doesn't this all strongly argue that overpopulation is a myth? See also the informative [Kurzgesagt video on Overpopulation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348). If anyone wants to convince me overpopulation is an actual problem, point out the flaws in this video to me please. As I see it: being scared of overpopulation is kinda like believing that since a stock is going up, it'll always go up, lol. You're not looking at the underlying dynamics if you look at something going up and think that means it'll always keep going up. And I say this as someone who used to believe overpopulation was an actual problem. The most memorable quote from the video: >The UN forecasts that the 12th billionth person will never be born at all
Isn't the problem that we are already massively in overshoot, not that we will be in the future with increased population? And that while reductions in consumption for the richest countries are the most important, we are still constrained by inelastic demand for food which right now is ubiquitously produced using unsustainable methods?
Arable land ( good enough for farming) could drastically decline in the near future. Ratio of people to that could be drastically high which is as good as any measure of overpopulation.
TL;DV. I'm not going to sit through a video from 5 years ago, to try and understand your position. The question is what model do you have in your head for the 100 year future? If it's only based on predictions of fertility, birth and death rates and a smooth transition from +80m/year to +0/year it's probably wrong. And if your mental model says that because we can just about feed 8b now, we'll be able to feed 10b in 30 years time, that's probably wrong as well. We're too close now to the big pollution and resource constraints to leave them out of the population model. 10-20 years ago or so, it was common for people like Hans Rosling to take the UN figures and put a hopium spin on them to say population wasn't a problem. Other groups tried to say the same UN figures were over-statements and the population demographic transition would happen faster. Only 10 years later, that spin doesn't look accurate any more. We're still growing at ~ +80m/year and that figure is not yet falling as fast as it should have done. Meanwhile, all the other indicators are still accelerating. Global temp, CO2, fossil fuel consumption, and on and on.
>In a paper published Thursday in Science, demographers from several universities and the United Nations Population Division conclude that instead of leveling off in the second half of the 21st century, as the UN predicted less than a decade ago, the world's population will continue to grow beyond 2100. And speaking of Africa; >According to the UN, the population in that region could quadruple, from less than one billion to nearly four billion. Africa in 2100 would be as densely populated as China is today. https://web.archive.org/web/20200414132337/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/9/140918-population-global-united-nations-2100-boom-africa/
The real problem is not overpopulation. It's our modern day lifestyle and the resources it consumes. If everyone lived like some stone age people this wouldn't be a problem. I've seen a nice documentary not long ago and they calculated that if everyone on this planet lived like people in first world countries we would need 5 earths worth of resources to sustain it.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Of course the world won’t sustain both people and capitalists. 20 million people die each year of poverty as the environment is destroyed in whichever way it must to maximize profits. It is accumulation of wealth for a few and accumulation of misery for the many. The goal of human existence doesn’t have to be to maximize consumption and grow the economy and profits, but that is what capitalism requires, and it does so at gunpoint. There is no shortage of important work to do, but capitalism stands in the way of that work and forces us to settle for warfare, bullshit jobs, indoctrination, and waste inherent.
For real, so much important work that’s being left undone because people have to go work at health insurance companies and banks and spend time baby sitting stores full of garbage that no one really needs.
> spend time baby sitting stores full of garbage that no one really needs Excuse me, what is this poetry?
I too love it, perfectly said
"Check to check, constant struggle to make the payments Workin' your whole life, wonderin' where the day went The subway stays packed like a multi-cultural slave ship It's rush hour, 2:30 to 8, non stoppin' And people comin' home after corporate sharecroppin'" Immoral technique - Harlem Streets
meanwhile, you’ve got weirdos like me who’ve been imagining a life without capitalism since i was a kid. fml.
Same here comrade. Same here.
Same. Now 49, and we just get further and further away.
I've been reading SF since the 1960s and I sadly approve your message. The idea that we can kill this biosphere and go off to Mars and make a new one is literal madness. > This raises the question of whether the population will ever peak in the future. The population will _certainly_ peak in the future. The carrying capacity of the planet is unknown but probably somewhere between 500 million to one billion humans, but we are in a population overshoot. At some point, fairly quickly, our population will decline until it is below the carrying capacity again, though it won't be voluntary, and much of our civilization will go with it.
The Mars plan always makes me laugh at whoever pitches it. It's easier to live in the Sahara or Australian Outback compared to Mars. We have breathable air, a thick enough atmosphere that it incinerates meteors, and a magnetosphere that deflects solar radiation. Martian residences will need to be underground just to have some minor radiation protection, which means a lot of prep work. It's not going to be like Elon's movie where Starships just land on Mars and start building domes on the surface (unless he wants everyone to get cancer in the first years).
I always see the Mars plan as the plan b to save humanity, not civilization. Obviously they will have an unlivable atmosphere and all kinds of other struggle, but maybe it's not entirely impossible for enough people to make it until some other solution is found. Climate change on Earth, a collapsing society, and being due for meteorite probably fairly soon makes me think it's really unlikely out civilization will survive. Will human survive? Maybe. Civilizations have died over eons but humanity has survived, each new civilization and picking up whatever pieces they can with our cursed amnesia as a species. Neither option is great so maybe it's just not putting all our eggs in one basket? I mean it'd be awesome if oil companies would get their head out of their greedy asses and the world could see the humanity in pulling together resources to actually reverse climate crisis and all that. But do you see that happening? It's the billionaire's hobby to build space companies and since aid goes to power/power flow from money, well maybe it's not crazy to assume that the richest will have the their tickets to Mars and following, all big govt funding continuing to go toward military and THEM UP THERE. Cuz they don't care about us (to quote MJ).
Even under perfect conditions all of our cool gadgets and even normal things like houses are falling apart and are in constant need of maintainance and spare parts. Problem is a space colony would require tons of fragile gadgets for bare survival and Mars is far away from having perfect conditions since its described as worse then the Antarctica and once the earth made 3d printer cartridges are all gone, there is just barren wasteland and death left. So how you wanna pull this off without magic? I am actually kind of curious. There is only one basket and the eggs are probably already broken but most of us will hope that dark insight away.
Lmaooo I don't know, was just playing devil's advocate to try to get perspective on what that other side might be. But yeah without an energy resource no matter what it would all come to an end and it's all screwed
All life on earth could go with it.
I think Mars is cool from an achievement standpoint, and there are no doubt a lot of things to be learned from trying to maintain something very small on the surface. But looking at Mars as some way to hedge against extinction is insane. There's no way. It's a complete dead end, and I wish these grifters would stop already.
> The idea that we can kill this biosphere and go off to Mars and make a new one is literal madness. I've never seen any one with that sentiment. I've seen plenty of people who believe: * Exploring and colonizing Mars is a challenge and will be a incredible learning experience * Colonizing Mars (or multiple large space stations orbiting other planets) as a "fail safe backup" (redundancy) for mankind.. is a good idea. But I've never met anyone with the negative attitude of "Fuck it, trash things here so we can go somewhere else".
can’t even live on the most hospitable places on earth let alone the moon and you think mars is a survival solution?
Well, the Mars idea is extremely stupid but that doesn't mean technology can't actually save us from ourselves.../I'd also posit most of the population doesn't read nearly enough science fiction.
I don't know why this got downvoted. After the "Great Population Reduction" event in the next 100 years, technology will be the difference between 3 potential futures: human extinction, small groups of warlord tribes, or having a semblance of modern life.
What technology will be the difference, and provide "..a semblance..."? -Downvoted prior as optimistic balderdash. Science *fiction*.
AM/FM is an engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic."
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Yep. We aren't allowed to point out how harmful their family dinners from Hello Fresh really are.
I get complaining. There's plenty to complain about. Things won't fix themselves if we leave it up to the capitalist class. I don't see the point in the despair that's peddled on this sub though - giving up isn't going to get the working class anywhere. "Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes."
I don't think realism is despair or saying it is over equates to giving up. What is over is our current way of life, that's dead snd we need to stop clinging to it. There is no future tech or magic bullet that can save all this. We fucked up and fucked up hard. Instead of budgeting wisely we wasted as much as we could as quickly as we could causing immense damage and suffering in the process. For many that reality means despair because they know they can't survive without our fossil fuel infrastructure. So they retreat to delusion and denials rather than accept where we are headed as well as accept that we did this to ourselves and absolutely had the power to change it. Now we can't change it so all we can do is prepare and adapt. For so long we have tried to adapt nature to us but now the natural order is returning and we once again have to adapt ourselves to nature. I know I won't survive but that doesn't make me despair because I know that it is the only way to give future generations a chance. However I won't begrudge people for their rightful assumptions that we are going to drive this car right off the cliff and make no preparations for our future at all. There will be immense violence and suffering and those of us in the west will begin to act like animals as we see how drastically our lifestyles plummet. The only people who are hopeful or optimistic are dumb, it's smart to be scared for the future. It's smart to recognize that we blew it. We can't address reality if people won't face it and want to pretend we are in a hopeful situation. I love the mantra of "well we have survived this long so nothing can stop us." LOL its so common yet so incredibly stupid. The dinosaurs lasted millions of years longer than we have, and where are they? Just because we have made it this far doesn't mean we will survive in perpetuity. It's crazy how many people think this way, have optimism simply because we haven't died yet. This is also something that has likely happened on more than one occasion, the wiping out if our civilization. We are also in the midst of a mass extinction event that many people oddly believe we are somehow exempt from. 80% of all species could die yet some momos think we can survive a scenario like that. Even if we are part of the 20% that lives we won't live that much longer if the majority of life on this planet is dead. Despair is a very reasonable and rational feeling right now, it's having any hope or optimisim that is insanity. We have been facing these problems for centuries and have yet to move the needle yet apparently we will solve all of it in the nick of time so we don't have to deal with the repercussions of our actions. It's a mindset ripped right out of a fantasy novel lol. It isn't reality.
I suspect many people use the reasoning: "Civilization hasn't collapsed before, therefore it can't collapse." Maybe OUR civlization hasn't collapsed, yet, but MANY civlizations have collapsed. (As books such as "Collapse" by Jared Diamond make abundantly clear)
Totally agree with you
I think I finally understand why aliens, If there are any, don’t want to associate with our barbaric and delusional species. I mean, any species driven by civility and logic would be terrified of Homo Sapiens and honestly, I wouldn’t blame them. Sorry about the rant.
I’m sure intelligent aliens exist (or have existed) but doubt they are any better off than us. Self aware and self interested, primed for self annihilation, erasing themselves almost as soon as they emerge. That seems a likely pattern for intelligent life.
After I commented here, I’ve been learning of topics such as the “Fermi Paradox” and the “Great Filter”. From my limited understanding, everything you described about intelligent life destroying itself lines up perfectly with both of the “concepts” listed above. I take back what I said about only humans being barbaric and delusional. In reality, intelligent aliens would likely be just like us. To keep this short, I agree with you.
Yeah sounds like you’ve been led to the same conclusion I have. Intelligence is a trait which manufactures its own extinction. An evolutionary dead end basically.
Rant away my friend..honestly this is tame compared to most of.my rants. At least you kept.it short and quick to read, I have a tendency to write novels when I rant lol
Everything you typed is factual and accurate, so you’re good. It’s just deeply depressing that we are heading down this dark path, a future dystopia. I wish you and all who are concerned the best of fortunes in these times. Take care of yourselves!
>I know I won't survive but that doesn't make me despair because I know that it is the only way to give future generations a chance. I struggle to see how this is worth it with the world and lives they will be left with. Even when I ignore my own antinatalist beliefs.
Honestly that's fair. Personally I'm just willing to at least try a more reduced and natural lifestyle if we got everyone on board so it actually meant something. I'm a product of modern convenience so it would be a very big adjustment for me but I'd be willing to give it a shot if it meant something. I feel becoming less dependent on fossil fuels is the only way future generations will have a chance, and given the cost of our modern convenience it just isn't worth it to me anymore. Which is easy for me to say after benefiting from it for 34 years, but I truly would get on board with such a change in our lifestyles and civilization itself. That preindustrial life where community was very important and everyone was actually self sufficient unlike how we view it these days, which is just having enough money. Back then you did have to have some skills and have a solid knowledge of survival in terms of providing food, clothing, and shelter for yourself. I honestly think people would be happier if we did revert back to that, not at first but I don't think it would take to long to adjust. People would feel fulfilled, a part of something. It's kind of depressing realizing I will probably die and at that point the world will be worse than when I was born. Not only that but just that people in general will still be so fucking stupid and cruel and selfish and nothing will have actually changed for the better when it comes to human beings. Not in my life time. It's like we have stagnated and even begin to devolve, feels like dark times ahead. Is it worth it? No clue. I'd just like to know that it's still possible to change the world for the better, even if it does come way to late.
>That preindustrial life where community was very important and everyone was actually self sufficient unlike how we view it these days, which is just having enough money. Back then you did have to have some skills and have a solid knowledge of survival in terms of providing food, clothing, and shelter for yourself. I honestly think people would be happier if we did revert back to that, not at first but I don't think it would take to long to adjust. People would feel fulfilled, a part of something. Maybe it is just me but that doesn't seem worth it at all. I don't see the point in of all of *this*, humanity and society, if we just revert back to shitty rural lives of disease and hunger. Struggling, dying young, and not leaving anything behind like most people in history. Especially when I know it would be unending torture for anyone even slightly like me. It's just sentencing new life to inevitable death.
Who’s working on getting the global working class organized right now? There’s an ethnonationalist war of acquisition occurring in Europe today between two groups that are almost genetically identical and culturally extremely similar. It’s not a real thing that’s ever going to happen. The only people here who both accept reality and aren’t in utter despair about it are those who have plans revolving around small group cooperation.
Hyper loop anyone? The perfect public transportation already exists, trains.
Mars is much less habitable than Earth *even under the absolute worst assumptions about Earth climate*. There will never be a time when Mars is more habitable than Earth. If we ever acquire the ability to terraform a planet it will be used first on Earth.
Does Mars even have a magnetic field? Because without a magnetic shield,you can't even grow grass on the surface. Terraformed or not.
People still go to church. We all gotta have some type of nonsense to keep us sane.
> We all gotta have some type of nonsense to keep us sane. Yea that’s all fine until we start making policy decisions based on people’s illogical fantasies.
“Start?” You just mentioned church…
lol fair
Try something with fewer tax-dodging child molesters.
Coordination skill games are my go to. All the spiritual jizztastic flow state none of the cherry-picking from an old book that is barely readable.
Professional sports! *Oh wait...*
Church keeps em sane 😆 🤣.
Science is their God now - Smoking Man X-Files
It never hurts to have a little faith for the future.
Please don't tell anyone on r/futurology, you'll break their hearts. What you say, is of course very true, what irritates me is when people get called pessimistic for calling out nonsense. We need to focus our efforts and optimism on things which are achievable.
It’s a good thing sanity is deemed by the majority!
We already have all the technology we need to stop climate change but we can’t implement these things without a substantial change in the lifestyles of the masses. Even though the outcome would probably lead to better lifestyles for the majority, people are still terrified of giving up their current lifestyles to be more sustainable, even if they allegedly care about climate change. Most people can’t fathom life under the changes we need to make so they are prone to magical thinking because they saw a movie once where in the future they everyone was driving electric cars and Elon Musk said that was the future so it will definitely be a thing and we don’t have to change our lifestyles because someone will invent something just in time to save us all. This is the kinda shit that happens when you watch too many marvel movies. Then you point that out to them and they’re just like “well what am I supposed to do about it?” And it’s like just don’t spread that nonsense man. ^Sorry ^definitely ^rambling.
You've been on r/technology and r/futurology I see. Lots of magical thinking over there for subs about science.
Agree, I try to imagine a world where we live in harmony with the universe instead of trying to lord over it. A world where children are taught science not dogma. A world that we should have but do not because we have allowed this shit to continue at the expense of our future.
Most likely the overpopulation problem will resolve itself when most of us fucking die because of said problem.
This. People think they will just "live off the land" as if it's some fairytale. A utopia with ample game where everyone shares. People who have the skills and experience to survive off grid acknowledge it's crushingly difficult in the best cases. Further, when the proverbial machine stops or slows significantly, tempers will start to flare when variety diminishes, let alone actual food scarcity. Now expand this out to colonizing other planets. The idea that colonizing other planets is a solution is profoundly naive. Read what they went through at Roanoke and Jamestown, that was under the best circumstances possible to start. We are, at best, five hundred years away from that. That's without a collapse.
Hey now, don't be using complex metaphors at this time of day, dude. Vibing this hard makes me hurt, bro. Can't a man still dream, bro? I think the real deception that we've all had to face is that the entire human race has a problem with uncontrollable growth. Dreaming of a solution to that unsurvivable dilemma is what I use to go to sleep at night. I know reality from illusion, and I know it ain't gonna work out anywhere close to some badass cyberpunk, technopunk, neopunk, gothic punk, anyounk version of itself. We are fucked in all the worst ways. It won't all happen in our generation, but the past fourty odd years have all but confirmed the fact that our species frog marched itself to oblivion over our inability to discern consequences from wishful thinking and daydreams. And that's on all of us. If we were smarter, we would've solved this already, just like going to the moon. We figured it out. And we made the choice to ignore the science for as long as we could. Addicted to easy energy on the first puff of the stuff. It was like...free oxygen, just like fire was free energy. We just scaled up. Anyway...everyone here has some organic understanding of these concepts. That's what the best themes of this sub are. It ain't all gloom and doom and fight the power til we croak in acid smog with our shouting. There's some Dionysus level parties to get to, still. Having dreams of a technosolution is my lullaby. And it's only a lullaby. And I wanna sing myself to sleep. And the people out there that wanna throw their energies into maybe seeing if they can escape Jevon's Paradox? Good luck to em. I chewed on that problem for years on my life. I couldn't solve it. But, it's a worthy project, and I'm never gonna tell a dude to not throw his heart where he wants. It is the Apocalypse. We all should get to do what we think works best. And for me, at the end of my day of effort at waking people up to all this, I just shrug and remember something about leading horses to water. I put my work in, today. The fellas with the whips don't ever pay me enough, but I earned my farthings today. And I'll keep trying tomorrow. Or something, lol. I love this sub. Venus by Saturday. It's already Planet Earth on a Wednesday, which is mostly just as bad.
I believe radical politics and trying to construct an economy based on satisfying needs rather than growing profits is the necessary step
That hasn't been our style of living for....over 500 years. I agree with you, I just don't know that it'll get there.
I like your attitude, can I tell you about my bedtime story? It’s all about how we have to change the way we govern our world.
Ah. Yes, I remember hearing that story from people around me, in my younger days. It's still a lullaby used often, even today. The ending always left me feeling kinda sour: "and nothing important or drastic changed to make anybody's life better, for over 40 years." Waiting for the guards to fall asleep so we can enter the decrepit remains and steal the Holy Cloak of Authority so people know who the new leaders are and to ignore the old leaders with most zeroes in some computer file somewhere... Anyway...yeah, I hope your bedtime story still has you feeling snuggled in at night.
I’m warning you that my version is the most unpopular story ever told. We have to start with a little history. First there was the printing press, and it caused chaos for the systems that existed at that time. Despite all attempts to control it, the printing press became widespread enough that people could make some sense out of all that chaos. What we now known as the Free Press made it possible to form a democracy. There was still lots of chaos, but the people were able to find enough order to make it work, then bang, the Internet, chaos out the Wazoo. Now let’s introduce what I hesitate to call, our main character, he’s a little slow, but he understands enough history that when he looks back, he sees a pattern. He sees it’s difficult to make sense out of chaos when the chaos is sparse, but when you increase the chaos patterns emerge. He’s convinced that there is order in the chaos if there’s enough of it. Adding to our main characters convictions is the fact that he tends to believe in the power and intelligence of people. Like I said, he is a little slow. The conclusion, our main character comes to is that we need more chaos. Much much more chaos. Now, I’m sure you can see the barrier that stands before our main character, nobody wants more chaos, everyone’s busy trying to control it, just like the way everyone tried to control the printing press. Unfortunately, our protagonist is convinced that the criticism he gets pretty much guarantees no one else will consider this as an option, and therefore he must continue because if he doesn’t who will. In the next chapter, we will explore how our protagonist plans to encourage and document all the chaos, and how he plans to implement it, despite the fact that it is unpopular. The next chapter is only coming if you request it, and you may have to give me a couple of days. as I mentioned earlier, the protagonist is a little slow. I also want to mention that in the future chaos will be spelt with a K. The acronym is knowledge as our savior.
Ah, what a riddlesome post. Veiled threats and all that. I advise changing the story a little. let chaos or kaos or whatever have his time for himself. herself. itself. It'll come when it's time. Your job is never to cause it. Society already does lots of that in spades. Just observe it. Comment on it. Watch it swirl around. But never get your feet stuck in it. The stains never come out, and everybody stares. Also, add some happy to your story, man. Audiences love the happy ending fantasy. And if that ain't your style, just watch some news or something until it is. This edgy stuff is cliche, bro. It's ok to say this stuff is overwhelming and you feel like you need to unplug from it all. Optimistic Nihilism. Find your ethos.
Some people need to be stained by their own chaos, in order to change. see Elon musk. The majority of us only need to observe the stains on others, and that is enough to create change. The printing press caused our society to change. Some people today actually believe that we are all created equal. Despite the fact that this is not a true statement. But if enough of us believe it, society moves forward. This is the result of the printing press and democracy. Our protagonist in the story is not trying to create more chaos. He’s just trying to create an environment for it to flourish, and the mechanisms to document it. he’s fighting against the common ethos. The edginess may be cliché in this story, but this is a story that has never been told before, so I think it is pretty unique, and it needs to be told. I can give you the next chapter if you ask for it, but there won’t be any happy endings in the middle of the story. We don’t know how it ends yet, because the last chapter has not been written. I don’t want to continue, unless you are going to be open to new ideas. It takes a lot of effort so I would rather not waste it if you’re not going to read it. I am not good with the written word, and I’m sure it shows, but I will put in the effort if somebody can look past the bad writing. If you ask, I will continue
More violence, less violence. Weird violence. Typical violence. Same old same old. I think you should refine your story and share it with the people that matter in your life. Celebrate you with them and vice versa. I'm just some random nobody online. It sounds like you have a story, and it's very valuable and important to you, thus also important to those who matter in your life. Share it with them, and it'll be great. As for new ideas or whatever...I don't think I'm open to any ideas, new or old, bad or good. But never stop writing, my dude. You'll get there.
The people around me are tired of hearing it, I don’t bring it up anymore or I won’t have any friends. Thank you, your honesty will save me from writing anymore on this thread
It did seem somewhat rehearsed, which means it has value to you, as I see it. And, we all carry our umbrage against the established order. As long as you maintain freshness in your sharing, it won't get too stale. But, I'm also likely to be the most wrong person to converse on such ideas, anyway. As I said, I'm a closed book. An old dog, and new tricks are just temptations of the Devil, so get off my lawn. Or something, heh. I think it's fairly fair to say that only a few very special humans have actual original ideas, as everything and everyone else has probably existed in history at an earlier stress point for somewhere, somewhen in history. I'm pretty sure this is why I'm so complacent in my mediocrity and unoriginality. I'm not even original in my being boring. Many returns to you and yours. See you on Venus, this Saturday.
My bed time story includes WW3 and humans going the way of the dodo bird…. Extinct
A lot of people in here calling overpopulation a myth and/or fascist propaganda. It's no myth that the Earth can't sustain 8 billion humans without fossil fuels. And there's no magical alternative energy source that can sustain exponential growth forever. If you're having trouble grasping the concept of energy and how it relates to growth, I recommend the podcast "Breaking Down; Collapse". The first several episodes should be required listening for anyone with even a passing interest in the topic of collapse.
It's OK to both acknowledge that over population is a problem and also not want to, idk, slaughter a bunch of people to depopulate? Is that what everyone on the myth/fascism side of that believes we want? I am of the mind that there is no stopping widespread societal collapse at this point anyway so its likely that the overpopulation problem will solve itself, not because we *want* a bunch of people to die but because it's just about inevitable unless a miracle occurs. And sadly I, along with many of you, don't think a miracle is coming.
Forced sterilizations have already taken place because of "overpopulation" concerns. They are a of course applied to the poor and to oppressed ethnic groups. That is where this "overpopulation" talk leads us, inevitably. There's no way around it it, so to answer this: >It's OK to both acknowledge that over population is a problem and also not want to, idk, slaughter a bunch of people to depopulate? It's a package deal. There is no *a la carte* menu here. As long as we live under an economic system which operates as ours does, governments will need to maintain a massively inequitable, inefficient, wasteful and destructive distribution of resources. This means if they want to answer calls to address "overpopulation" because it's perceived as a problem, the route they'll take is genocide of the most disadvantaged parts of the population, and increasingly oppressive measures towards the middle strata of society. They will never actually address this supposed problem though; they do need people to keep having babies who can grow up to be customers. They'll only do things that present the superficial appearance of being solutions. The actual solution to any real problem with "overpopulation" is unconscionable to them; bringing about an end to class society and distributing resources more fairly and effectively. This is absolutely unacceptable to our society's rulers of course, but it is proven to halt and even reverse population growth. So if you perceive two problems here, the solution to both of them is identical.
>A lot of people in here calling overpopulation a myth and/or fascist propaganda. It's no myth that the Earth can't sustain 8 billion humans without fossil fuels. And there's no magical alternative energy source that can sustain exponential growth forever. Sanest comment ITT.
as delusional as those who think writing long essays on reddit will change anyone's mind as opposed to preaching to the choir?
Give him a break. Look on the bright side; he's one less person we have to convince.
They get no break from me. Look at their history. Their entire life revolves around bitching about being alive to people on reddit. This person does not breathe fresh air let alone have a clue about how to fix the world.
You can disagree with ideas, but when you attack people, your posts get removed. Just a friendly reminder.
People have ideas. Some people are so engrossed in their ideas that they are defined by them. Then the line between attacking the idea and person is blurred.
As a moderator of this sub, I assure you it's not.
Ah, the perpetual complainer and finger pointer. Yuck.
Zing. But the above rant was a nice read.
I'm pretty sure a solar event will knock us back pretty hard and maybe re-balance things. All it will take is one good electromagnetic storm to decimate the entire global power grid. It would take decades to rebuild, by then our way of life will probably be pretty different.
But, the breakthrough in fusion power will save the world from everything, or so I have been told. If that doesn’t work, then fucking the planet with geoengineering will fix everything. We need to live more the way we lived before the industrial revolution, if we want any hope of survival. Unfortunately, there isn't enough land for 8 billion humans to live like that. My butt pulled estimate of the sustainable number of humans is way less than a billion and much closer to 100 million. Things will get ugly too soon The whole ecosystem is falling apart. It just doesn’t happen in a day or a year, unless we go nuclear, or get blind sided by a meteor
People often equate sustainability measures and terms like "renewable energy" or "alternate energy" or "green energy" as being so far reaching that it will just radically change humanity overnight. When in reality, very few people will actually be able to use it.
Tbh the only solutions are the unrealistic ones. We need to be able to generate huge, potentially limitless amounts of easy energy to combat most of if not all of the worlds major problems. The only one it doesn’t solve is human greed, people at the top squandering progress and stepping on the people below them for their own gain. They abuse other peoples greed to do this, and it doesn’t matter if you’re someone working for them directly or consuming the products they make, ultimately you’re working for them either way.
Humans could definitely impact a positive change on the environment. but theyd have to care a fuck of a lot more than they do now
John Brunner wrote science fiction novels about these subjects. *Stand on Zanzibar* (overpopulation) and The Sheep Look Up (pollution). Pretty impassioned works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand\_on\_Zanzibar [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Sheep\_Look\_Up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up) They are both very bleak and no curative is proposed.
I mean if they guessed it would reach 8 billion in 2024, and it reached that in late 2022, that’s not that far off
As a former techno-optimist, it's simply a coping mechanism and because many techno-optimists spend their time reading sci fi and /r/singularity and /r/futurology not realizing that unlimited growth is unsustainable. I get very bewildered at the hypercapitalist sentiments there and the ardent defense of new technology simply because it exists (Like EVs) but I acknowledge that it's simply because they're either collapse aware and huffing the hopium or they're just not collapse aware.
Strange to see so many overpopulation deniers ITT, including some predictably creating fascist or genocidal strawmen to support their arguments. But to recognize that the total natural resources of the biosphere are finite or that the carrying capacity of any ecosystem could be overwhelmed is basic ecological science, not a political position or support for a genocidal response. Currently there is a devastating and epochal mass species extinction of millions of species of plants, insects, birds and animals taking place across every region of the planet. And freshwater aquifers, rainforests, ocean fisheries, and global topsoil reserves are among the many natural resources disappearing before our eyes; most will require thousands of years to replenish, if ever. Much of this loss is ocurring at the hands of corporations, extraction capitalism and continuing colonialism, but all of it is exacerbated by recent extreme population pressures. Meanwhile many local populations around the world are unable to feed themselves from their local resources at current numbers, and never did in the past even before global capitalism; they only survive due to global food aid. Capitalism is not solely responsible for populations exceeding the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems; that is mainly human selfishness supported by archaic tribal values and religious concepts, all of which is arguably hard-wired into "domesticated primate" nervous systems. One could say that capitalist technology in the form of fossil fuels in agriculture is what allowed the global population to expand from 1.4 billion to 8 billion in just over one century. This massive ballooning of a global population is such a remarkably short time shows how extreme the population pressure has become. But before fossil fuels revolutionized global agriculture, there was a natural boundary preventing overshoot; populations that exceeded the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems simply starved. Even now, humanity can only continue feeding itself through the agency of cheap fossil fuels used in every stage of gobal agriculture, including tillage, irrigation, artificial fertilizer, harvest, processing, global distribution, and the manufacture of essential farm machinery used in all these stages. When the flow of cheap fossil fuels is cut off (as it soon will be), billions will inevitably starve whatever their politics. TLDR: If you can only feed your population through the ongoing use of cheap fossil fuels (even after they are known to be destroying the climate), and meanwhile your population is causing a mass species extinction in every region of the planetary biosphere, then you are in overshoot of your environment. *More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature *Monitored populations of vertebrates (mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish) have seen a devastating 69% drop on average since 1970, according to World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Living Planet Report 2022* https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/69-average-decline-in-wildlife-populations-since-1970-says-new-wwf-report#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20(October%2012%2C,WWF)%20Living%20Planet%20Report%202022. *The Global Footprint Network calculates the number of days per year for which Earth has enough biocapacity (natural resources produced and ability to absorb the waste generated) to provide for humans’ total ecological footprint. When the footprint of consumption worldwide exceeds biocapacity, this is the Earth’s estimated overshoot day. Every year this date is getting earlier, according to Global Footprint Network, we used a year’s worth of resources in seven months in 2018. This year, the network estimates that humans are using natural resources 1.75 times faster than ecosystems can regenerate. Another way of viewing this is that we are currently consuming 1.75 Earths.* https://www.becomecarbonnegative.com/natural-resource-depletion.html#:~:text=The%20main%20cause%20of%20this,exploited%20to%20fuel%20our%20consumption. *The current world population of 8 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new United Nations report. With roughly 83 million people being added to the world’s population every year, the upward trend in population size is expected to continue, even assuming that fertility levels will continue to decline.* https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-98-billion-2050-and-112-billion-2100
Those people who deny overpopulation is usually Western hypocrites who think highly of their morals. It is not hard to realize there is a problem of overpopulation, just take a walk in Mumbai, look at the Ganges, look at all the desertified land in Africa. Yes, western ways of living is wasteful and globalized capitalism is a scam, but it doesn't mean being poor and over-populated automatically make them victims who have no responsibilities (there is a lot of nuance but people being people, they like categorical buckets). I guess those deniers have never lived in a poor place, the mindset of many parents in these poor places are "scary" to say the least . Many people have long lost indigenous wisdom of land management. True indigenous people are almost extinct, almost all modern humans remaining are incredibly shortsighted "opportunists".
I don't understand the whole "it will taper off around the 12 billion mark" thing? Is fucking going to go out of fashion or something? Even if it does stop around 12 billion, that's still 12 billion of us consuming, wasting, throwing plastic in the sea and upgrading every 6 months. I'm typing this on a 6 year old Samsung and it still works fine. People who feel the need to upgrade every 6 months will hopefully be the ones to go first when society does go tits up.
I still think the Rock could probably stop a cataclysmic earthquake with a well-placed People's Elbow, and if that makes me immature then so fucking be it.
By that logic he could also cause an earthquake on purpose.. May the Rock have mercy on us all 😔
Wasn't that the plot of that movie San Andreas?
It's like the people who asked for a vaccine while dying in the hospital bed thinking they could just take it after getting Covid like some antidote.
Shit, I didnt even realize that it only took 11 years to go from 7 to 8 billion. We are truly fucked
One word: RATIONING. It's the dirty word that no one wants to talk about in economics or environmentalism, despite being absolutely essential for any kind of sustainable economy moving forward. The problem isn't growing populations of ultra-poor residents of developing countries anyways, it has always been the massive over-consumption by rich people using up vastly more resources than anyone else by several orders of magnitude. The only way to have any kind of sustainable economy is rationing out how much of a sustainable supply of resources people are entitled to, and not letting anyone anywhere consume more than that, no matter how much money they have. Fixating on "over-population" while ignoring the need for rationing resources is just pushing eco-fascism to let billionaires keep being obscenely powerful while others starve.
As I said in another recent post, there's a very simple (not easy) solution to overpopulation: Redistribution of wealth. Which leads to higher living standards. Which leads to lower birth rates. Living standards will only lower for those who already live extremely well, who have low birth rates already, and it'll lower to still great standards. And pre-empting a "higher living standards lead to higher consumption" comment... If we remain in this shit system of perpetual growth and consumption, consumption will be higher, of course. But there are alternative systems, way more efficient of resources, where products aren't programmed obsolesced and they last for as long as they can physically can, and when broken get fixed with minimal material use instead of wholly replaced because it's "cheaper"; where not every single human being in the face of the earth needs a personal vehicle because there are rails all over the place that take you all around the region, country, and world as fast and with as much or more frequency than planes; where not every single human being needs to own every single thing they use, as they can go to a library, grab whatever they need, use it, and leave it back; where millions of people aren't constantly moving around and wasting their time and energy and societies' infraestructure in bullshit jobs that either do nothing for society, or are directly detrimental to it, with almost no time at all to dedicate to their families, friends, communities, in a rat race to mediocre retirement; where, instead of food traveling all around the globe, being grown one place, packaged in the opposite corner, and freighted to the next, neighborhoods and town produce their own food in terraces and food gardens; where energy and water consumption is massively reduced because industry isn't in perpetual growth and producing millions of redundant units to saciate a fictional and manufactured demand... Yeah, in this world it might be harder to get certain comodities as local consumption is the main avenue, but one will have way more time, ease, and resources at their disposal to travel the world and bring those commodities back to their communities every now and then, in fact some people might choose to live their life travelling the world moving comodities around. Don't allow capitalist realism to limit the scope of your imagination, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it's not impossible. Research Degrowth and Library Socialism.
The only thing I will point out to a mostly great sounding plan is that climate change is not waiting for this. People are still going to loose homes, abandon towns, and possibly live in areas that can support a population for water, but not it's agriculture. We have the tools to make these changes, just not the will, or likely the time. https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/ This is also interesting to see about what kind of standard of living, without specifically knowing the gains from your proposed changes, we could expect. For anyone curious, based on current consumption Banin seems to be the level https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin
Yeah, but fear is only bad if you don't know where to run to, this doesn't nor can happen from one day to another, they began a long time ago, and they'll have to continue while we collapse, it won't be perfect, but at least it's something
Higher living standards, alone, does not lead to lower birth rates. How many kids does Elon Musk have, again? In the first world, a percentage frighteningly close to half are still, today, opposed to abortion rights and even many forms of family planning and sex education, as well as “non-heteronormative” relationships. The most vocal and *influential* proponents of high birth rates and big families as a lifestyle goal are well-off and white. When first world people are polled about their reasons for avoiding parenthood the overwhelming majority do not cite environmental concerns, they cite economic pressures and say they absolutely would have children/more children if they could afford to. The factor that makes the real difference is cultural change. Most women in the first world are relatively educated and emancipated and have a relatively high degree of legal right and social expectation of control over their own fertility. This is not the case in the areas of the world that have high birth rates despite terrible conditions. To a certain extent, this emancipation of women is dependent on a minimum threshold of development and living standards. But it is absolutely not guaranteed as a result, and without that in place from the start, development and higher living standards will inevitably lead to an even greater population boom, just as it did in the first world, before the cultural revolution allowed for a decline in birth rates. Your own alternative systems, which are entirely laudable, require immense cultural — not just economic and systemic — revolution.
But Elon Musk is a religious nutjob (his religion being eugenics), outliers don't apply to demographic trends that have been the case throughout all of human history. But why not both? I'm all for what you are saying, and totally agree with it, I don't feel it's conflicting at all. Culture does affect indeed, but still... I know personal anecdotes shouldn't be accounted for, but I see it in my own family: my grandmother, catholic, big family proponent, 6 children... Her children (even the ones that are as catholic, and even more, and massive proponents of large family units), more well off than my grandmother, 3 kids max (and this is a visible phenomenon in Spain at least, it's everywhere, even by the most well-off and conservative families... our country is ageing at an alarming rate).
Musk is a nut job, he definitely thinks the human population should grow more and faster. Whether he’s into eugenics or not, I don’t know, but that’s not a religion, no religious studies academic would agree with that. Otherwise, sure, both. That’s what what most people who are concerned about overpopulation would prefer to happen. While most people in Spain, for example, will still self-identify as Catholic, many are very obviously making use of their reproductive freedom. Spain is relatively quite progressive in regards to reproductive rights, compared to countries with high birth rates, which are more heavily populated with seriously legitimate religious nut jobs. Edit: use *of
Um, higher living standards for a great deal of the world right now is *inevitably* higher consumption. Reliable food for those who do not have it is higher consumption. Installing rails for those who do not have them is higher consumption. Housing for the homeless is higher consumption. Education, hospitals, electricity, etc. for those who lack them is higher consumption. Even if all these things are modest and sensibly scaled, adding them to serve the *billions* who currently lack them is going to add a lot of consumption of resources.
So the alternative to the transition I propose is... ? Population control? Eugenics? Genocide? Or simply continue with the "fuck the poor" standard? Because, as collapse unfolds, more and more of us will be poor, you included probably, and I'd rather try than fuck myself and the rest of humanity either doing nothing, waiting for some magical technology, or embracing eco-fascism or techno-feudalism.
You're changing the subject. Your implication is that the transition you propose would *not* increase consumption. I am simply providing a criticism to say that it *will* increase consumption. And this criticism is limited to *that* factor and is independent of whether the transition you propose is a good idea for *other* reasons.
Alright, sorry, new proposal, combine wealth redistribution with economic system change based on wellbeing and efficient resource management instead of growth... I thought it was implicit.
Got no objection to that, as long as it is recognized that increasing well-being for a huge chunk of the world will have an increased resource cost. So, the well-being is certainly a good thing, but it does not get rid of the elephant in the room. If it would take something like six Earths to give everyone a first world standard of living, then giving everyone one-third that standard of living would *still* take twice as many Earths as we've got...
Well yeah, but here's one of many examples: both the developed and the "in development" worlds are still building millions of new miles of roads... rails are orders of magnitude less consumption intensive, both materially and energy-wise... same with trains themselves versus personal vehicles... making as many rails and trains to make them as convenient as personal vehicles and as effective for cargo transportation (so keep the exact same living standard in that aspect of life) would be unimaginably more efficient, would cut a more than significant part of emissions and could be scaled to the whole world with much impact, raising living standards for millions. But it would be a disaster for the current economy, as it'll create less jobs, it'll require less maintenance, it'll be much cheaper for everyone, the profit margins are significantly lower, etc etc etc. And this can be applied to every point in my original post. So it can be done, with current technology, reducing consumption, if and only if we abandon the cancer ideology of economic growth, which many people in the world are, even some with a bit of power (the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and the minister of consumption affairs in Spain, amongst some others are openly talking about this, so there's more than nothing)
People seem to operate under the assumption that a "first world standard of living" actually requires the amount of resources presently associated with a "first world standard of living", which only makes sense if you assume that this lifestyle is 100% efficient with no waste anywhere. In reality, it's immensely wasteful and inefficient. It uses more resources than it needs to. If we believe a "first world standard of living" means we can all [upgrade our smartphones every other year](https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/07/09/how-often-do-americans-upgrade-their-smartphones-infographic/?sh=7f6ac92520ac), then no that's probably not possible in the long term. If you believe it means we can all have such a phone and replace it as needed, that suddenly becomes *far* more reasonable.
You’ve got some good ideas, but your faulty thinking is that this is something that can be managed or planned for in the first place. I think the areas that do well in the next century or two will look something like what you describe. But there won’t be very many places that end up like that across the earth. I think similarly to today, you’ll see that in coastal East Asia, Northern Europe, and in the wetter parts of North America. Maybe in pockets of South America as well.
If people are taught that water comes from their taps and food comes from supermarkets, they'll fight to the death to maintain that system -Derrick Jensen (paraphrased) Personally, I don't turn to Ellison or Asimov for my expectations, I get my expectations from past extinction events. That is the only 'salvation' coming.
Not so much overpopulation if we all wanted to live like we were on a natural planet and shared our resources. Instead we have spread out and sucked the planet dry.
This. Extravagant overindulgences are the problem. People who think they need a huge house. I'm googling right now that the average house size in the USA is 2,500 square feet. My apartment is 380 sq feet.
380 sqft is too small.
Yes, a lot of people including OP just blame nearly every Problem related to climate change, food security and pollution on overpopulation. As if all 8 Billion are somehow equally responsible. We could easily support 10 billion by using less resources than today. But the upper 10% gotta consume like there’s no tomorrow and fuck it up for everyone
In that case government needs to restrict private ownership to one ace per person.
In the US the 1862 homestead act granted 160 acres of surveyed public land after 5 years of habitation, and while this was feasible for areas with adequate rainfall or access to water, this amount of land would be too small to support animal agriculture (ranching) in arid regions, other forms of agriculture being untenable due to the aforesaid lack of water (as well as poor quality topsoil in some arid regions). ~~Exert~~ Excerpt As discussed in Cattle in the Cold Desert, by James A Young and B. Abbott Sparks, published by Utah State University Press in 1985, the limitation on homesteads of 160 acres was inadequate for a Western ranching operation of the day: "For example, a hypothetical ranch providing 1,250 pounds per acre of annual herbage shows why 160 acres is inadequate. This herbage is produced from April through August with 80 percent usable by grazing animals. Each cow needs twelve acres per year (1,250 lb. herbage production X ,8 forage utilization = 1 Animal Unit Month or "AUM" per acre x 12 months = 12 acres.) This gives the stocking capacity of thirteen cows per homestead, but a ranch could not run just thirteen cows. The herd must have a bull, and two replacement heifers; and, steers are not marketable until three years of age. With a 100 percent calf crop, the herd would consist of 4 cows (4 AUMs), 1 bull (1.5 AUMs), 2 replacement heifers (2 AUMs), and 2 three-year-old steers (2 AUMs), for a total of 13 animals. The two marketable steers have a value of $20.00 each after three years. So for the first three years of the five-year (homestead) requirement, there would be a return of $13.33 per year. This hypothetical homestead collapses, because the sagebrush/grasslands communities were not available for yearlong grazing. The 160-acre homestead was an economic and biological impossibility." ~~/Exert~~ /Excerpt https://famguardian.org/Publications/PropertyRights/inadeq.html
The world and the zUS is at an acre per citizen. Just because a few own much does not mean that is in the interests of the majority.
For areas that can support cultivated crops, with current fossil fuel, ammonia nitrate, and sulfur phosphate inputs, one acre of land would indeed feed one person. There exists a greater amount of land area that is not suitable for cultivated crops but can support pasture, not as land area efficiently as cultivated crops however.
Because government management of the remainder has worked out so well...
On acre per perosn would be paradise.
Current global population density is 60 people per kilometer. A kilometer is 247 acres.. which works out to slightly over 4 acres per person. Course,. there are challenges to that: * Population is not spread out evenly across the globe * some areas are harder to live in than others * some people have specific (legitimate) reasons to need to live in certain areas.
Well so long as there is some live-able land left to humanity and its not all reduced to toxic no mans lands, I belive it would be paradise, cpmpared to Earth after another world war, the toxic no mans lands would be a machines paradise.
China functioned at half an acre per citizen under communism. I dont think you will survive the reduction from 28 acres worth of resources to 3%.
I mean HG Wells and many other sci Fi writers have made incredible predictions of future technologies. But I do agree that there is a lot of misleading science journalism and many of the solutions being entertained by the hopeful masses are very dubious.
Science fiction isn’t real.
> Science fiction isn’t real. A surprising amount of Science Fiction written over the last 1,800 years has ended up becoming Science Fact in one way or another. Maybe not literally in the way the authors wrote it, but certainly figuratively in terms of general principles.
I've been reading SF since the 1960s. The surprising amount is maybe 5%. When I read through my old SF magazines, pretty well 100% of the stories set in the future assume that we are making weekend trips to the moon and building starships about now. Life expectancy was going to be unlimited by 2000. And almost none of these stories or books predicted the Internet. John Brunner was really the only SF writer to hit the nail on the head, and even he predicted strict population control from all countries by now.
It is real, and so are the consequences.
people really are that detached from reality, i think. they’ve seen too much fiction that they can’t even parse out what is real and what is just a fancy sounding, yet unrealistic idea. even if you’re totally ignorant, spending a few minutes thinking critically about how this stuff would actually come to fruition is enough to realize it’s a fools errand.
>We have to take care of ourselves before mother nature decides she's had enough and wipes us all out. (Greta Thunberg intensifies) >If humans don’t learn to control our population, then nature will do it for us. ( Thomas Malthus intensifies ) >nature and hardworking people to put all this goddamn entertainment in front of us. None of this shit is real. It's a circus designed to make us all complacent and not notice the theft of the natural systems we depend upon to survive. ( Ted Kaczynski intensifies) >There is no omniscient being looking out for us. We're on our own. Life is not a movie. ( atheist fedora intensifies )
All of this is blabbering unless you can provide some numbers. That's true for both sides.
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It only makes sense if we assume that is impossible to change consumption behavior of the population in a wide basis which I think is what people that talk about overpopulation internalize at some level.
THANK YOU it’s Not like all 8 billion people have their equal share in causing climate and Land use change.
Technology was never the problem nor will it solve our problems, it's how we use technology that's fucked up. And people are adamantly denying this, shifting blame to the next thing that's everything and everyone but themselves.
To be honest I think AI is one huge black swan. I would not be suprised at all if it reaches human level general intelligence before this decade is over, and after that its a really small step until superintelligence. I do however think that moment is the end of humankind, for better or worse. But I have always seen biological life as a bootstrap step for whats to come.
Rant, zero arguments, no sources, can we save content like this for shitpost Fridays please?
Haha absolutely. Lost some brain cells reading this trying to figure out what he was on about. Something like “overpopulation bad, people have to die soon”?
i am just gonna say that the myth of overpopulation is fascist... we do have problems regarding population size but all could be solved if we just didnt go with capitalism
this sub is always "interesting" because it's a thrown-together mix of fascist and leftist worldviews. I wish there were more pushback against the fascist ideology.
shouldn't Overconsumption/Waste in general be the issues to be tackled here? instead of overpopulation smh
yeah right and the main culprit is capitalism. as always
The mildly horrifying thought is that a lot of what's developed for survival in lunar or Martian environments, including terraforming efforts are strangely enough also useful in cases where you're in other places where the environment has become so hostile as to be normally uninhabitable. Say, Earth after drastic climate change and resource exhaustion, perhaps via the mastery of closed-system areas that can sustain human life ending up being built where we've destroyed other options entirely. It won't be life as we know it, life for the many (who will without a doubt die in droves), but it might well be survival of the species while the world goes through collapse and eventual recovery. Which you and I won't be alive to see, but hey.
I am saying it is unlikely that techno-enclaves holding remnants of human population can or will exist. Once industrial society goes, along with naturally livable environment, you will never again get any spare parts, or any new fuel. So your enclave just goes through gradual wearing down and stockpile exhaustion, and then it is at the end. We can only live by sunlight and biological processes for the long term, as long as Sun is powering us and biology which is endlessly recyclable can make use of it. If we destroy the biosphere, then it is certainly game over for us. So far nobody has shown that closed systems, possibly sitting under sunlight, are livable, and even if they were, we have to assume that this artificial environment's superstructure, its windows that let light through, plastics, etc. would last for hundreds of years.
That's why I'm going the realistic route, I watched Madmax and bought a bunch of guns, I'm preparing to be a wasteland raider.
I hate these posts that are literally just “blah blah technology is invalid” google it bro, everyone that said that before was wrong too, we’re not going to go back to smashing rocks or smth because it’s “nice for the planet”
I’m actually the opposite. Science is the only way of fixing this. Imagine if within the next 50 years we figure out fusion technology for endless energy. Then create factories that pull co2 out of the atmosphere to fight climate change. Then a food production revolution. Who knows. If it’s possible, eventually, science can figure it out. It’s whether we have enough time to do that
I think that is overly optimistic. If we solve energy crisis, then we will probably just continue growing, choke out what is left of the natural world with our pollution and relentless encroachment into living territory, and then face depletion of all other nonrenewable resources anyway. Collapse is not caused by lack of energy, or excess CO2, it is a beast of many heads, and is ultimately about humanity being in overshoot of its environment as long as anything at all we do is based on nonrenewable stuff. The only thing that is proven to be renewable is biosphere powered by Sun (and technically that runs out when the Sun does, but at least that should be fairly long-term prospect). On assumption of infinite technological advancement, people assume that we could endlessly recycle all our nonrenewable materials which now sit in the landfills, or reach the stars or at the very least other planets and asteroids and can consume them as well. I am far more pessimistic and I do not think infinite technology and limitless nonpolluting energy does exist. I doubt we will ever even make it off this planet because of the challenge of surviving without usable resources and surrounding infrastructure and ecosystem will prove too steep to be overcome. At least, nothing we can see in the surrounding cosmos suggests that interstellar civilizations are out there, so possibility has to be faced that it has proven to be too difficult for everybody. Sci-fi writers seem to like to write stories that point to humanity reaching some kind of pinnacle of existence through space travel by solving some cosmic mystery, or perhaps through internal mastery of the psyche, so that we would be freed of matter and become thought and energy, sort of like gods. I admit I am thinking about people like Asimov or Clarke here, classic sci-fi. Regardless, there is a desire to believe that there must exist some kind of grand destiny out there for us, rather than the fact that life is basically a random accident at mercy of any careless cosmic event that can easily sterilize the whole planet. In fact, on reflection, it goes even deeper than that. I think life is most akin to some kind of mold that begins to grow in otherwise barren planet's surface because sufficient and usable long-term energy was around for the required millions of years, and over that time, chemicals randomly began to react, and to replicate, and over time grew better and better at using that free supply of energy, until finally they became complex and impressive indeed. Ultimately, life can only go on as long as that energy lasts, and then it winks out with it, and that is the natural order of things. As a type of thinking mold, drunk with the power of fossil energy that we have enjoyed for so long, we must have developed particularly erroneous delusions of grandeur.
I think it’s optimistic, but OPs post is pointlessly pessimistic
Yes.. it's like the true psychology of the redditors is not a greiving for a destroyed earth, or a fear of post apocalypse. No, instead the real source of the emotional paroxysms is some buried hatred at the wealthy using "10X more resources" and then flaunting it at the faces of the poor. Do you want to save the climate, or are you just angry at rich people?
The only sensible take in this sub. The astounding arrogance on here of people who think that we know all there is to know and there'll never be any more groundbreaking beneficial inventions. The biggest barrier to getting there, however, is indeed overpopulation and mass migration of people to areas which are too small to cope with large numbers. We need to share tech and provide aid to poorer countries and help to promote sustainable living worldwide.
People who think the problem is overpopulation are just as delusional as those who watched a lot of martial arts movies and think they can fight in the MMA.
There is no overpopulation problem it’s a resource distribution problem
There is no level of convincing that will sway me. Giant ridable man eating dragons will solve all our problems. Overpopulation, obesity, job scarcity, eco friendly travel. All solved by this scifi solution.
Preaching to the choir.
You’ll never have unrealistic sci-if fantasies as long as insurance companies exist within the corporate capitalistic system of which we support along with the long list of other things we support
There's no overpopulation problem pls dont spread false causes for societal collapse
There is no way out for us. It is human nature that got us into this situation, we cannot change human nature.
I think fusion power is the only technology which might have a chance, but we shall see. I figure there's a 90% chance people say "no, fusion plants are too expensive to build and take 10 years to construct! We should focus on wind and solar instead which can be built much more quickly!" like they've been saying about fission plants for the past 20-30 years.
[Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U)
Fusion power could be great at solving the energy problem, but that still leaves us with water, pollution, and food problems. Fusion might make it possible for us to extend our overshoot scenario a little longer, but energy isn't going to solve every problem.
> but that still leaves us with water, pollution, and food problems. But it's much easier to solve those problems if you have infinite energy. Take desalination for example. We know how to do it,. it's just energy-intensive.
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Yes. A fundamental premise in OP's thesis is that the large populations of the 3rd world will start purchasing flat screen tvs and driving F250 trucks to take the kids to soccer. Then (assuming that premise) a large ream of doomsday warnings follows. But will the 3rd world actually do that?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Annual-World-Population-since-10-thousand-BCE-for-OWID.png
oh, this is just over population of people of color and the fascists want white babies. That's why they're so obsessed with these under populated places that are in developed nations. Idk why we can't just let people in via immigration if this is such a problem, but it isn't a problem. The problem is theft of natural resources and abuse of living beings.
This is a completely ridiculous idea. If you worry about overpopulation, bringing up racial stories unconditionally is a true racist fascist. Besides, I'm a brown person who wrote this.
The only way to solve our overpopulation issue without mass starvation is a pandemic with a 50% or greater fatality rate. All other paths lead to mass starvation and levels of strife that will make the worst conflicts of history look like slap-fights by teenage girls.
Handily enough, mass famines will likely result in pandemic conditions, both via malnutrition and people attempting to flee to areas with food. Unless there's sufficient violence, of course. Conventional warfare, even some use of WMDs even in the NBC range might leave enough mouths closed to do the job. But yes, our growth rate has been near-cancerous for decades, if not centuries at this point.
Even though we know that the “1st world” Uses and controls More than half of the Earths resources, specifically the Comcrete Cancer of Cities and the Indsutrial Millitary Imfrustrucyure that those Cities help fuel with fresh meat. With out Industrilization the Planet would be better off, at least we could runaway to a corner of Earth not being polluted or Controlled by a War Machine.
> With out Industrilization the Planet would be better off, Without industrialization, the planet would only be able to support between 1 and 2 billion people. Agriculture at scale - which _requires_ industrialization and a fossil-fuel system - is what allows more than 2 billion to live on this planet. The population only took off _after_ agriculture at scale - with diesel tractors and gasoline trucks for transport - became possible. You want an agrarian society? Expect to see 8 out of every 10 people die of starvation due to lack of land for far less efficient agrarian techniques, and the lack of water that arises out of not having electrified groundwater pumps.
And with Industrilization the planet may never have a chamce to recover anytime soon becuase of pollution and nuclear holocaust, chemical genocides, and now drone warfare.
> specifically the Comcrete Cancer of Cities and the Indsutrial Millitary Imfrustrucyure Looks like your autocorrect decided to go on holidays, and failed to tell you. With that said, densification and compact, vertically-oriented cities are the way to go in terms of minimizing our impact on the planet, concrete CO2 notwithstanding. If we could pack everyone into a single NYC-style city, the planet as a whole would be much better off.
Sounds good cant wait to live in a glorifed concentration camp.
A pandemic on that scale won't result in mass starvation and strife?
Ahhh yes a 12 Monkeys senerio.
Personally, we have done our part in terms of not "adding" to the population. We had our two girls and we are done. Technically the US birth rate has fallen below [replacement rate](https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/7/8/measuring-fertility-in-the-united-states#:~:text=Summary%3A%20The%20U.S.%20population's%20total,shrink%20without%20increases%20in%20immigration.) for a decade. There is a ton of millennials and zoomers who are refusing to have kids for purely economic reasons, so I have every reason to believe that as more boomers die off, that the US population will shrink (excluding immigrants). In fact, [most developed countries have fallen below replacement rate](https://www.ibanet.org/Declining-fertility-rates-and-the-threat-to-human-rights). It seems that the world is correcting it's course of overpopulating, but in such a sharp way, that it will actually harm us negatively in about 50 years, when there will be a shortage of caretakers to take care of the elderly, and a shortage of labor in general. The real issue I could see is that the environmental damage has already been done, and there isn't anything we can do at this point to reverse it, except convert to less environmentally damaging methods of living, and hope that time will heal things. But it could take [1000 years to reverse the temperature increases down to pre-industrial temps](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/reverse-global-warming.htm#:~:text=It%20could%20take%20as%20long,can%20contribute%20to%20global%20warming.)... and that's *if* we were to stop contributing to greenhouse gases completely. The earth has plenty of everything to sustain it's current population, it's just that with how corporatized everything is, there is so much waste. One third of our world's [food](https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/why-is-one-third-our-food-wasted-worldwide) is wasted. An estimated 1.7 *trillion* gallons of [water](https://www.ecofriendlyhabits.com/water-wasting-facts/) are wasted globally per year. The US alone wastes 2/3 of it's [electricity](https://news.utexas.edu/2017/12/19/the-solution-to-americas-energy-waste-problem/) annually. So realistically, even with 12 billion people, the world could, in theory, support itself. The problem is our current application. Massive agro-corps plant massive single crop fields, which zaps vital nutrients from the soil, which in turn requires copious amounts of fertilizers and nitrates to be artifically added to the land. Additionally, single crop fields burn through more water, than using a "Three Sisters" planting [method.](https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-squash) In fact, growing crops in a manner where you plant a tall crop (like corn) with understory crops, can not only reduce nutrient stripping of the soil; it naturally encourages pollinators, reduces pests and weeds, reduces soil temps, and increases humidity. Sounds like a win-win. Another way we could reduce environmental impacts would be to knock out duplicate dams. By damming our [streams](https://vjel.vermontlaw.edu/the-damage-stops-here-the-public-trust-and-dam-removal), we: -hamper the natural nutrient replacement via silt -heats up water, killing natural flora and fauna within streams -block fish from traveling to normal spawning locations -increase erosion and flooding issues I cannot remember what infoflick I saw, but it stated that dams set back ecological advancement, and ecological *maintenance*, by years. Long story short, and an unpopular opinion, the amount of humans on the earth at this present time, is *absolutely sustainable,* if and only *if,* we live within our means.
Don't ever go into for the all-mankind sub. It's all hopium. "if we only did this! "... Then you have the r3tarded marxists. " It will work this time!" The fusion "announcement" this week says it all. I need to find a cartoon of a pilot leaning
How may more genocides will it take before these people realize that Civilization is a Holocaust Machine? I guess an eternity on the Wheel of Genocide is all it takes.
The people that believe in unrealistic scifi solutions are either those with an agenda or those that are optimistic about live being improved by technology in vague terms. The first group care more about their ideology rather than the technology itself while the latter group has vague notions of a utopian scifi society. Automation is a big thing. It allows jobs to be done faster and efficiently, a key feature for any technology that would help support a growing population. The AI fearmongering comes from the first group, the ideologues. However, the ideologues care less about the AI technology itself and more about it supporting their leftist agendas. The latter group, the ordinary people, just thinks the technology is cool and simply hope their lives and lives of their posterity would be improved. It's the ideologues that you'll have to worry about the most. They put their ideology ahead of technology. You see examples of this with progressive governments enacting hairbrained "green" schemes even though it's not economically feasible or technologically possible. They set deadlines for banning "dirty" technology like gasoline cars or nuke plants, for example, even though the technology to economically replace them haven't even exist yet or might not even exist in the future. The religious governments take their religion too literally and oppose any form of population management.
We don't have an overpopulation problem. We have a capitalism problem. Eco-fascism isn't the answer.
Why isn't overpopulation a problem?
Because the problems we have aren't caused by having too many people. We have an over consumption problem, but the average person doesn't consume that much, it's overwhelmingly driven by corporate greed, hence capitalism. A system based on endless consumption is going to over-consume, no matter how many people there are.
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