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When growth is so inherent to your system that the opposite is “negative growth”.
We built a system based on continuous growth and consumption. People freeze like deer in the headlights when it gets brought up that it isn’t sustainable and get offended that maybe we should try to make some changes to it.
Well, if you used the correct mathematical term, population decay, then you’re gonna have a lot of rubes rioting about some conspiracy on how a population can’t decompose or some shit.
Scientist had to change global warming to climate change when they realized some people can’t look past the buzz words and learn something.
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I genuinely think you’re misreading that comment. I read this as an acknowledgement/warning of past human idiocy recurring, which, when we extrapolate from known data, is fucking likely.
Ironically, your misinterpretation has led to your own hyperbolic reaction, so maybe this is about self-pity.
That’s fine.
You’re wrong.
I bet the kids love you at parties 😘
I wish “a lot of rubes” were hyperbolic. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/americans-believe-climate-change-study
Fox & Co are doing a splendid job of growing rubes.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say.
You need to improve your reading comprehension, then.
Haha, good one
Hey man, either you’re playing stupid or you are stupid.
Which is it?
What is the bad news?
The economic system built on infinite growth will also collapse and leave most of those people in inescapable cut throat poverty and starvation
We won’t starve if we eat the rich. Once they are gone, we can build a new economic system.
We’ll be lucky if it goes that smooth. Usually the whole thing at least partially collapses, followed by is a few hundred years of dark age to sort things out and then rebuilding starts with a new system in place for another go.
Personally, I’m counting on Zephram Cochran flagging down some Vulcans to help us out. Rebuilding should take 100 years tops
What if Cochran turns out to be a drunk disillusioned Musk in this timeline?
Wasn’t he kinda in that timeline? But he had Lilly to keep him in line, and I wouldn’t want to cross her!
He was a selfish drunk, but he had the spirit where it counts. Musk has no spirit, hes just a man child.
The worse the world becomes, the more I wonder if Posadas was right.
The problem with cannibalism is that once you develop a taste for it, it becomes difficult to stop
Last time they did it in africa… well I’m sure the following starvation was just a coincidence.
Someone wants people to believe we need to grow… The environmental impact says otherwise.
They won’t care. The investors can’t think past next quarter.
So you’re saying we should sharpen the national razor?
Current difficulties caring for elderly will continue to get worse, as the population of working age people continues to shrink faster than the population of elderly
We could do like Logan’s run
True. Exemplify the YoLo lifestyle and go out in a big celebration when you’re at the top of your game
More submarines for the rich!
Only bad for nations that are shrinking too fast, like some nordic nations and South Korea. But most other nations will benefit from the less population growth rate.
Cool
That’s good. Infinitely growing populations aren’t sustainable, and I don’t know that there are any viable arguments for continued population growth.
The problem is the word “significant”
We can all agree the population can’t continue to grow. We can also agree it probably needs to shrink, especially by the time this starts making a difference.
However, if it shrinks too rapidly, there’s a lot of potential disruption of society and economy. If it continues to shrink, it could be a serious problem for all of humanity.
We should make changes now to encourage more people to have kids. The goal should be a slow, controlled decrease, to level off, without major disruption
Personally, I like 6B as a good place to plateau. We’re probably already beyond the planet’s carrying capacity so need to be less than today. However a lot of the advancements in society (technology, space, medicine, science, innovation) really require a fairly large population. Establishing a number ought to be someone’s thesis, but in the meantime: 6B
Maybe society needs to be disrupted. There is lots of room for improvements
Maybe, but I think of disruption sort of like mutation. We all like to think it creates superhuman but most same actually negative , and reality is we get more improvements with continuous increments
Mutation is random and if as people we cant do better than random change we deserve the hardships it brings.
The math says that the planet could sustainablely support 10B humans and the supporting ecosystems. Just not with the current system in place.
sonally, I like 6B as a good place to plateau. We’re probably already beyond the planet’s carrying capacity so nee
With the current food growing technologies, we can handle 10 billion comfortable well. We will obviously not reach that number anytime soon. But we are on track to shrinking rapidly in many nations. That will destroy these nations.
I doubt that. Current conventional food production is highly fossil fuel dependant (everything from fertilizer to processing to transport). Earth’s ariable land and top soil is decreasing quickly. Ecosystems are collapsing from the effects of agriculture and climate change. Most “advances” require more inputs and energy, which means more fossil fuel use, further accelerating resource degredation and climate change. I forget the statistic, but humans already control a significant proportion of Earth’s biomass. This chart from https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-much-of-earths-biomass-is-affected-by-humans/ might be what I was thinking of:
About 30-40% of food is wasted in the US, in India its 22%, in China 27%. These are the largest nations in the world. The reality is that we can build more efficient infrastructures that can drastically cut down on this. But we don’t need to yet, because it’s not cost efficient. That’s how much ‘free’ resources we have produced based on current technologies.
I think that there are a lot of 8 billion people who would disagree with comfortably well. That number needs to be closer to two, to be sustainable with earth’s resources. At least that’s my understanding, not disappointed if wrong.
The problem is not the resources, it’s the distribution. No political will to end global poverty, no profit in feeding the hungry.
Oh absolutely, people gonna keep being people. The truth seems to be that we don’t really know, but it’s likely somewhere between 4 and 16 from the little bit of reading up I just did.
Yeah, I tend to most notice reports of overfishing. Food from land sources is almost entirely farmed but we still get a lot of seafood from wild sources plus don’t have aquaculture anywhere near as advanced as agriculture: there’s not much we can do. Loss of a marine food source is a big deal, and we keep doing that with more species. One solution is fewer people
A lot of the higher estimates assume we can overcome limitations like this with better management of resources, but that is against human nature and our current incentives. It’s not going to happen, even if lives depend on it
Let’s not forget water… And eventually, oxygen… But keep buying/selling those trinkets people, for the economy.
And well, how much of these resource estimates leave enough for other life too, or does all other life just exist to feed us?..
There is the repugnant conclusion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox but I don’t really buy it.
I can’t initially agree that A+ is better than A. I think A is better. So his argument falls apart right there.
Median happiness is the important factor not average happiness.
The basic paradox is that you’re better off with more miserable people who barely want to live than with less people who enjoy their lives a tiny bit more than that.
I ultimately think it’s a load of bunk, but that’s the supposed paradox.
That’s like saying perpetual war isn’t sustainable and you have to make peace. Formally true, but in practice:
Your country (a developed one, with virtually universal literacy, functional school education, water and electricity everywhere, universities, internet, etc) stops growing in population.
Some another country (with basically nothing except for dirt and dirt-poor people who mostly can’t read, sometimes burn witches and kill infidels) doesn’t fscking stop.
That’s a good thing right?
It will be very tough economically as fewer people will need to work to support those in retirement. Economic problems, in turn tend to lead to social unrest and a turn to extremist political positions and solutions.
But it should at least take some pressure off the planet. Maybe AI can pick up the slack. Time will tell.
This is exactly why Japan is investing so much in robotics. They have a rapidly aging population without enough young people to replace them or care for them when they’re too old to work.
They will probably eventually have to relax their immigration policies, but that will be a last resort for them.
In indeed is an economical and political issue. It seems like there is enough money and resources to support the elder people. It is just accumulated in the hands of corporations that are only valued by their growth. I hope that the negative growth can rub off onto companies too, so that they are valued for their stable income instead of needing to grow
All the incentive structures in capitalism reward growth. It’s true in all levels of all companies. It will be excruciatingly hard to change.
Yes. We have realized as a species that we are beyond max capacity and it just affects us negatively. It’s one of the most amazing things that we realized just as nature does.
I agree with you, that ecologically, this will probably be a good thing. Economically, we will need a different system as i doubt that any increase in consumption per capita could outweigh the increase in people we currently see. And our economic system is dependent on growth.
kind of like "“Children of Men” but people just choosing not to have children. I see people my age in their 40’s having only 1 or 2 children and people in their 30’s just not deciding to have children at all.
Luckily, it’s still within our power to choose not to reproduce.
Perfect example of Newspeak gaslighting.
“negative growth” instead of diminuition, population-recession, reduced population, or ANY proper rendition of the concept.
Nobody in mainstream media speaks plainly anymore, because … money requires befuddlement instead of clear-understanding?
Or is there some/any other explanation??
The proper term is decay.
Growth and decay. We learn this in elementary school.
(As time goes on, I realize I received a much better education than the vast majority of people on the planet.)
Apparently the proper term, 'natural decrease ', is much less sensational. It’s all about clicks and views now, not delivering good content.
Is it natural if it’s bought on by low wages and high prices making it impossible for most to afford a family?
Those in poverty usually have more children. Woman having more rights and joining the workforce is probably a major cause; which is probably why there’s all this money backing taking away women’s rights recently. Another major cause is likely isolation and lack of community in modern life (“it takes a village…”).
Good, let’s make that happen sooner.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t account for the people that will die, directly or indirectly, from climate change.
Well that’s not where I was going with that, but you aren’t wrong…
The researcher points out that births “will increasingly be concentrated in the areas of the world that are most vulnerable to climate change, resource scarcity, political instability, poverty and infant mortality.”
Well, this can only end well …
Having 0-2 happy children vs having 8-12 children running around dirty, hungry and naked.
Yup. People naturally choose the former if they can, but a country with fewer people is weaker and may become poorer.
So it’s a government’s job to make it affordable to have children.
This part of reality is explained best via logic which may seem a bit fascist, but it does exist. It’s not a good thing to be eaten.
Lol. By then it will be done for us, unwillingly.
If you read the article, that’s basically what it says.
Good, I can’t wait!
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Technology is not going to save us - escaping to space is a pipe dream: hugely expensive and frought with technical challenges and harsh realities like cosmic radiation that will kill anyone outside of Earth’s ionosphere for too long. And even if, somehow, we solve all of that, what makes you think that we can make Mars habitable when we can’t even keep the planet we’ve already got habitable?
realistically, living in space doesnt mean making mars habitable, it means getting good enough at life support and indoor farming and building bigger structures in space to just live inside artificial habitats, be that on mars or some other planet, or in space itself, forever. Its not a solution to climate change or such though, even if simply because being able to do it at scale means that the climate changing is no longer an existential threat anyway.
Making a self-sufficient space station is not any easier, and you still need to solve the cosmic radiation problem. How many people are you expecting to live on this thing any way, and how do you propose to lift a space craft big enough to support them all into space? These projects are so pie in the sky I’m lost for words…
its much easier than terraforming an entire planet, orders of magnitude easier. Its difference between building a city and building an entire world. I dont think this is something we’ll see anytime soon mind, Id imagine the better part of a century at the earliest for even the most basic ones.
that being said, the answers to the latter two questions are actually much easier: You solve the radiation issue by putting a lot of stuff between the people inside and space, what stuff depends on where the structure is. On a place like mars, itd probably just be a lot of dirt piled on top, or you build underground to begin with. as for the latter, you dont launch it all at once, just as you dont build a colony on another continent by loading an entire city onto a ship. You harvest most of the needed materials from wherever you plan to build it, and construct it in space. You probably send people back and forth in a large number of trips with multiple smaller ships. This sounds very difficult now because we do not have much infrastructure in space yet, and launching mass is very expensive. Once one can both mine materials in space and refine and assemble them into useful forms there, the task is dramatically easier as one just has to launch the people. We wont really be doing any space colonies without building that kind of in-space economy first, which will be a slow process
Yes, that’s why we need to get into space asap. Scaling out space infrastructure to affordable support any appreciable population will take a lot longer than people think, even once we do figure out how to live off-world. We have well over a century of work to make any difference, so let’s get started already
How many people are going to live on this space station? Thousands at most. What about the rest left on a dying planet?
Cosmic radiation goes about 10kmt through the earth, so a pile of dirt won’t help. A metric fuck ton of water or an incredibly strong magnetic field would be the minimum. Earth is habitable because it has the later.
What even is the goal here? A tiny group of people are now just about surviving on a small spaceship so they don’t have to… just about survive on a dying planet? Not sure I see the win here…
The idea isn’t to build one station. A station in this case is equivalent to a city or a town, you just keep building them over time. Not just a handful, but at first dozens, later hundreds, eventually thousands or millions of them. This isn’t about some sort of sci-fi “we’re fleeing because earth is dying” plot, it’s about utilization of the extreme abundance of resources available outside of earth. Again, if you’ve reached the point of being able to build these, Earth isn’t dying, because even if you just totally ignore the climate or even if you’ve just had a nuclear war or something, you’ve proven the ability to build livable space on literal dead rocks, so worst come to worst you could build them on earth too and then you have a society for which is effectively climate-proof. Not that this is the goal mind you, it’s just a side effect.
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I disagree too.
Degrow already.
There is another way, the one we seem to have chosen already - do nothing and wait for nature to take its course. Lots of people will die, but mostly the global poor who are far enough away from the 1% for them to care.
Cosmic radiation is pretty easy to stop. 100 miles of atmosphere, about 10 feet of water, or a few feet of rock will do just fine. There is a lot of rock on the moon.
Nothing in space will really help with the climate crisis, imo. It will help humanity a lot if we get past it, tho.
Yes, let’s retreat to the most hostile environment imaginable and live under the whim of sociopathic billionaires.
That seems like a good alternative to, I don’t know, actually not destroying the environment we’ve perfectly evolved to live in.
On a side note, World 3 seems to be depressingly accurate.
Let’s solve the climate crisis by launching approximately 80 billion kilos of ideologically active biomass into space. Utterly wild take
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Lol space will NOT make any difference at all. That technology is not progressing at a rate where we could have millions, let alone billions of people inhabiting space in the near future. We’d also pretty much be completely limited to our solar system, meaning planet-wise we have maybe Mars and Europa and Titan at best… but there’s absolutely no chance of any meaningful colonial activity on those planets, Mars would probably have something similar to Antarctic research facilities on it but that’s about it.
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Why do you think the planet can’t sustain some amount of people? It’s not because we don’t have enough space, we have plenty of space – especially if we prioritize car-free or low-car dense urban infrastructure design. The problem is we don’t have enough resources. Even if we could send a bunch of people into space, that doesn’t do anything for our problem at all. In fact, it just increases the strain on our resources.
Space stations require a lot of maintanence and monitoring, we can’t just make a few billion of them and then hope it’ll work out. It’s far too complicated and unsustainable without very hard-to-find professionals. And a few easy mistakes by this completely untrained and unprofessional crew of an unimaginable amount of people can put everyone in danger. Whatever habitat could fit hundreds of thousands to millions of people has a TON of failure points, with our current technology it is in a sense too big to not catastrophically fail in a short time period. Space is dangerous, death is easy, sabatoging the entire vessel carrying everyone is easy, and maintaining one is extremely difficult and it would have many easy-to-miss potential problems. It’s not as nice as video games make it out to be, especially considering those are usually hundreds of years in the future or in a totally different universe.
We’re all going to die of worldwide war before we find any use in sending a million people into space, and we’re going to die before we can even feasibly do it at all, probably. I would like to see it, but it’s just a massive waste of resources if we’re being realistic – there is nothing to achieve with it.
This article is projecting 76 years forward, that’s not the near future any more.
Near enough to be relatively confident in how much we won’t progress in terms of colonizing space. The general public severely underestimates the limits to space travel & survival. It’s not like I can tell you exactly what or when technology will be like in some exact point in the future, but it’d probably be a few hundred years until we could actually make nation-sized space colonies, and there’s pretty much no future where space habitation replaces or becomes greater than Earth habitation, unless we go ahead thousands if years. There were a few interesting astrophysics papers estimating that near-lightspeed and FTL travel tech is like 8000 years away lol.
“Future technology” can’t solve all of our problems. It’s not magic.
76 years ago was 13 years before Yuri Gagarin would become the first human in space. It was 4 years after the V2 rocket became the first artificial object to enter space. This is plenty of time for multiple technological revolutions to happen. We’re already on the verge of one with fully reusable superheavy lift rockets, most people don’t grasp just how big a change will come from having that sort of cheap bulk cargo access to space.
it’d probably be a few hundred years until we could actually make nation-sized space colonies
There’s no need to make nation-sized space colonies, just make lots of smaller ones.
There were a few interesting astrophysics papers estimating that near-lightspeed and FTL travel tech is like 8000 years away lol.
I would like to see those papers. Making technological estimates on that scale, especially for something like FTL that has no physics backing it at all, is highly dubious.
“Future technology” can’t solve all of our problems. It’s not magic.
There’s no need for magic, this is really just a question of economics.
One of the reasons setting up a base on the moon is critical. Microgravity is not conducive to long term health, so what is? Do we need planetary levels of gravity? Are we ok with moon levels or higher? We don’t even know how many solar system bodies even can conceivably support longer term living
One if the problems for declining births is cost of living and raising children. Adding expensive launches and equipment in space is not going to help with that, especially of the gains of the space race are not going to the general population but only to the few owners of the orbital infrastructure.
If we can’t make life work on the planet we were literally designed for, we won’t make it work on any of the completely uninhabitable other planets we have access to.
If capitalism continues unabated. This is far from certain.
Governments, along with the corporations who will struggle to find employees when this happens have all brought this upon themselves. Treating people like dogshit all the time doesn’t pay off in the long run.
Tiny people
