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[Max White]

Over population means a species is consuming the resources in a given area at a rate that is unsustainable, either because the resource in question is not being renewed fast enough, or because it is nonrenewable.
Three possible solutions present themselves. The first is limiting population growth. Many deem this unethical.
The next is to make more efficient use of given resources. The reason that we have not yet run out of petroleum is because we have developed better cars with more distance to a given amount of fuel. The same philosophy can be applied to food. Grow crows that have higher yield per area, and your population gets to live longer.
The third solution is to dilute your population over a larger area. We need more everything. Luckily for us, there is a lot more of everything we need in space, for those with the technology to harvest it. For the record, that is nobody yet.


So, I would say the best solution that will lead to the least amount of riots and wars is to spend as much as you can in education and science. Let out best and brightest figure out how to keep the hoards alive.

[Gervassen]

Sorry, but in the midst of presenting human population growth as a massive imbalance, unprecedented and world-ending, you don't have the credibility to say that pointing out the fundamentally imbalanced nature of the earth's systems is somehow irrelevant. It goes to the heart of the matter that the earth is a roiling mass of imbalances interacting and feeding into each other positively and negatively in ways beyond our ken. And has been doing since the very start.

I see no solutions in your posts. You propose that we make room in the food supply for more people in order to lower overpopulation. In your haste to call a few perfectly good points irrelevant, you were keen to avoid responding to the obviously relevant parts that directly point out your illogic. You say greater farming efficiency is the way to go, giving up beef and other inefficient food sources, while helpfully supplying a chart that shows the population growth which greater farming efficiency since the 15th century has caused. You even managed to do this without a trace of that new-fangled irony that I hear is all the rage these days.

If we strive to achieve the greatest farming efficiencies possible, human population will eventual reach the level that this straining of food output can permit. If the increase toward the maximum does not happen in your country, then it will in some other country that buys your unwanted surplus. We hit maximum and stay there. Well and good. But then something changes, as must in all systems, and this optimised efficiency takes a sudden hit. How do you support a population level intended for greatest efficiencies when the conditions no longer allow that output? You don't. Your 15 billion is living on the new maximum output capable of feeding 10 billion. Famine occurs.

If we willingly allow inefficiencies to remain, that gives us wiggle room is a real emergency. If we all eat steak, food costs will be higher even for grains, people will voluntarily have fewer children due to economic constraints. If a drought happens, this inefficiency can be upgraded temporarily and everyone eats grain until the drought passes. By suggesting that our systems must always achieve the optimally efficient outputs, you damn us to the certainty of future famines whenever that efficiency experiences a momentary tweak by outside conditions.

This is why I say that you really don't understand the systems involved. It's better to leave some inefficiencies in the workings. You are advocating reaching a maximum at higher populations and pretending that's a solution. It isn't.

[10ebbor10]

The point was, I believe, to improve farming techniques, yet not increase production. After all, we're facing with a system that is at this point, heading for a crash. Farming is heavily reliant on water, artificial fertilizer and fertile lands. All of these are running out, and it's highly probable that when the system crashes, there won't be enough time to get the inefficiencies out of the system. Improving farming practices let's us combat land erosion, droughts*, fertilizer shortages** and many other problems.

You act like the efficiencies are some kind of a deposit bank. They are not. Eroded land is gone, you can't suddenly unerode it. You can't drain the water back out of the hamburgers, and fertilizer reserves won't restock themselves. You can however, if really needed, cultivate more land***. When faced with a drought, you can pump up an unsustainable amount of water, if there's still left. Fertilizers are going to be a limited thing anyway, but science is working on that one.

*The Mid-American aquifer is, like many aquifers world wide, drying out. Expected failure of irrigation systems within 20 years.
**15-30 years
***For example, the land that you managed to spare so much years ago. It won't last longer now, but it's a solution.

[Gervassen]

Point taken on the irrecoverability of certain wastes and inefficiencies. However, you can't have equilibrium outside of a valid equilibrium point. Improving techniques while holding production steady in the face of pressure to expand it is purely an exercise of abstract thought. We reach equilibrium when no further beneficial production is possible, not at an arbitrary point determined on paper.

I still don't see where we actually cut back world population growth while making food supply more efficient.

[shadenight123]

The problem at the end is that people shouldn't want more than what they have.
High-numbers in births are associated with not-modern, third-level countries because they need more children so that they can have more laborers to tend to their fields, and also because many die during their growth. It's cynically talking, the 'law of demand and offer'. I need a child to take care of me when I get old, but 'the World' demands most likely a tax in children. So I hand over a few in hope I can keep one or two for retirement.

Then again, I think that we could somehow manage to create a Virus or a Bacteria that makes women sterile after two births, and that is highly infectious.
In that way, barring mutations, population everywhere would become stable.
Of course you must first engineer it, then manage to convince people to actually not try and develop a vaccine.
And finally, you must be prepared to be lynched by your own people for the highly 'inhuman' practice of neutering the entire world population.
But that said, I'm sure Earth would truly like it.

[misko27]

The problem at the end is that people shouldn't want more than what they have.

I can state this is completely impossible. It is a foundation of Human Psychology to want more, hence why actually getting more can be unfulfilling. there are people who's circumstances are happy enough they can accept them and be happy without more, but they still want more, in the same sense there are very very few people who, say, if offered 1 million dollars, would ever turn it down, regardless of current income or status. People are happy without it, but wanting more is inherent to the human drive to better their circumstance in anyway possible.


Any solution needs, needs to be compatible with this.

[Loud Whispers]

Sorry, but in the midst of presenting human population growth as a massive imbalance, unprecedented and world-ending, you don't have the credibility to say that pointing out the fundamentally imbalanced nature of the earth's systems is somehow irrelevant. It goes to the heart of the matter that the earth is a roiling mass of imbalances interacting and feeding into each other positively and negatively in ways beyond our ken. And has been doing since the very start.

Education and humour can go hand in hand rather well.
I could point you towards:

• Eutrophication;
• Dead zones;
• Entire landscapes irreversibly excavated;
• Top soil layers irreversibly eroded;
• Fish species entirely annihilated;
• Freshwater lakes almost completely drained dry from river diversions and industrial use;
• Increases in seismic activity due to human actions like industrial mining and coal fires;
• Increases in magnitude of hurricanes due to climate change;
• The elimination of natural sulphur leading to a dependency on chemically processed phosphrous... Of which we will certainly run out of in 50 to 100 years due to agriculture having to keep up with rising demand. A product of our effective agriculture, built on an unsustainable chemical during a time where people thought oil was limitless;
• The destruction of the food chain from the bottom up as a direct consequence of invasive species introduced by humans or the loss of pollinators caused by the misuse of pesticides;
• The migration of diseases and parasites to areas of the world where such things were unheard of due to climate change;
• The areas of the world that experience growing flood risks that could leave entire populations homeless or dead;
• The loss of coral reefs due to fishing, farming and climate change that would threaten the existence of all nearby populations that rely on fishing to survive;
• The dust storms caused by topsoil being lost due to farming;
• Or the millions of deaths caused by pollution every year due to respiratory diseases.

This is all just scratching the surface and it's coming from someone who himself does not know the full extent of damage we have caused. Don't forget:

• Overgrazing.
• Air pollution.
• Urban sprawl.
• Deforestation.
• Increasing wealth disparities.
• Habitat fragmentation.
• Habitat destruction.
• Decreasing access to necessities like:

*Water;
*Food;
*Energy.

• Overpopulation;
• Soil erosion;
• Desertification;
• Soil salination;
• Land pollution;
• Heat islands.

All of which we understand and cannot deal with without a reduction in our population - before the time where our population will grow so large only an even more damaging shocking catastrophe can reduce our population.
This is because at their root they are all the result of us, our actions made, and all in an attempt to continue growing when we have not understood we crossed the threshold for sustainable growth.
Now we have caused permanent damage, but we can still have reasonable living standards close to the decadence people enjoy today simply by understanding the impacts we make on the world.

Ignorance is not an excuse.

I see no solutions in your posts.

There were solutions in the OP. Fund education heavily. For everyone.

You propose that we make room in the food supply for more people in order to lower overpopulation.

Where.

In your haste to call a few perfectly good points irrelevant, you were keen to avoid responding to the obviously relevant parts that directly point out your illogic. You say greater farming efficiency is the way to go, giving up beef and other inefficient food sources, while helpfully supplying a chart that shows the population growth which greater farming efficiency since the 15th century has caused. You even managed to do this without a trace of that new-fangled irony that I hear is all the rage these days.

This great farming efficiency was born in a time where creativity was measured in blood and iron. Until truly a century after the age of enlightenment, only now do we realize just how far high we have set ourselves out to fall.
Personally I would not recommend people give up meat to become vegetarians, for health reasons. But I find it shocking to hear of countries where meat is the meal, not bread or grains and 66% of their country is obese.
Farming will get more efficient, to be sure. Yet we still need to have radical changes in how we farm, no change in efficiency with the way we produce and distribute food will improve our predicament.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If we strive to achieve the greatest farming efficiencies possible, human population will eventual reach the level that this straining of food output can permit. If the increase toward the maximum does not happen in your country, then it will in some other country that buys your unwanted surplus. We hit maximum and stay there. Well and good. But then something changes, as must in all systems, and this optimised efficiency takes a sudden hit. How do you support a population level intended for greatest efficiencies when the conditions no longer allow that output? You don't. Your 15 billion is living on the new maximum output capable of feeding 10 billion. Famine occurs.

If we willingly allow inefficiencies to remain, that gives us wiggle room is a real emergency. If we all eat steak, food costs will be higher even for grains, people will voluntarily have fewer children due to economic constraints. If a drought happens, this inefficiency can be upgraded temporarily and everyone eats grain until the drought passes. By suggesting that our systems must always achieve the optimally efficient outputs, you damn us to the certainty of future famines whenever that efficiency experiences a momentary tweak by outside conditions.

People living in poverty have the largest families. Your proposal causes more economic damage, does nothing to mitigate the problem of overpopulation and turns a blind eye to those suffering.

This is why I say that you really don't understand the systems involved. It's better to leave some inefficiencies in the workings.

I would like you to read that quote carefully.

[Gervassen]

In the interests of bumping this, I'll reply briefly. Watching malthusian panic can be diverting entertainment.

The world is changing. That's a trivial observation that doesn't need a long list. It has been changing from the first instant. There is a personification of the earth in the minds of some people, evidenced by a few remarks in this very thread, as if the earth had a self-awareness that really wanted to have a balance and sought it out. The earth is not a person. Nothing has ever been balanced.

This thread seems a bit schizophrenic, at once decrying overpopulation, and the same time growing alarmed at very good candidates to rein in that overgrowth by opposing pressures. When food becomes scarcer because of lost farm efficiency, people will have fewer children; and if this happens soon enough, there doesn't even need to be a global famine in the aftermath, just a slow voluntary tapering off. Many natural systems begin with exponential growth and taper off into logarithmic growth.

At any rate, what will not happen in the future is various countries all pursuing a single population policy that requires the most optimal outcome of the classical prisoner's dilemma, which is fraught with failure even for the case of two prisoners, let alone 190 prisoners constantly elbowing each other in a tiny cell.

[10ebbor10]

Mostly because many of those "candidates" are self reinforcing processes. What do you think's going to happen when food gets scarce. People are not going to die quietly. In fact, they will start cultivation of fragile lands, perhaps also use overirrigation and the like in a desperate bid to produce enough food. This will then reinforce the decay rapidly, and what you get is several rapidly collapsing ecosystems, millions of refugees, largescale instability.

Food production and the like isn't going to drop logarithmically. When the water runs out, it runs out. And quite fast.

[Levi]

We just gotta engineer our humans to all be smaller.  If we were all midgets then we could have smaller houses, less food, smaller cars, etc.   

Nah, the actual short-term solution is probably just building for density.  You can fit a lot of people in a small area if you build taller buildings, and that would leave more room for farming.

The long-term solution is uploading our brains into computers so we don't need to use as much resources.

[Zangi]

My solution:
"Drink BC Cola: Birth Control In a Can!"And maybe the 'lotto'... but that is probably unnecessary overkill.

[Loud Whispers]

In the interests of bumping this, I'll reply briefly. Watching malthusian panic can be diverting entertainment.

The world is changing. That's a trivial observation that doesn't need a long list. It has been changing from the first instant. There is a personification of the earth in the minds of some people, evidenced by a few remarks in this very thread, as if the earth had a self-awareness that really wanted to have a balance and sought it out. The earth is not a person. Nothing has ever been balanced.

I don't know where you're going with this idea that you must be some sort of Gaia worshiping Pagan in order to understand the damage our actions and those of our predecessors have caused. I don't know why you seem so focused on this idea of 'balance' which no one has brought up, nor your focus on trying to turn the reality into some fantasy cult. The world is changing for the worse, quite frankly I don't care about keeping your imaginary balances or imbalances as long as it ends up with civilization that isn't worse off than it needed to be.
If your stance is you literally just enjoy watching people die around you and you can't be bothered with solutions because change happens... Well, I can't argue with that. There is nothing to argue. That is your own ideology and if the observable reality is trivial to you, nothing I say will convince you.

This thread seems a bit schizophrenic, at once decrying overpopulation, and the same time growing alarmed at very good candidates to rein in that overgrowth by opposing pressures. When food becomes scarcer because of lost farm efficiency, people will have fewer children; and if this happens soon enough, there doesn't even need to be a global famine in the aftermath, just a slow voluntary tapering off. Many natural systems begin with exponential growth and taper off into logarithmic growth.

The countries that are expected to grow are the poorest, with exceptions like the USA, and are also the countries expected to have the largest increases in agriculture. This contributes to the growing list of problems and won't end in a voluntary logarithmic decrease in population, it'll end in everyone who can't farm on already decayed grounds dying of dehydration, disease and starvation; providing they don't choose to take resources from some other country. That following collapse will affect every nation that has major urban centers and is already seen in major cities across the new and old world as reservoirs fail to reach heights easily attained a century ago. The damage done to the natural and civilized world would be disastrous, something that could not be repaired. It can only be mitigated.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Well you se-

Watching malthusian panic can be diverting entertainment.

Oh. Never mind then. Though of course other people are still going to respond to you. This is Bay 12 after all.

[WealthyRadish]

-schnip-

Food production and population growth are only intrinsically connected in areas of the world without the social framework that inherently reduces family size, or where famine and malnutrition remain a part of everyday life or recent memory. My point about the inefficiency of western agriculture was that we're eroding the environment's robustness and diversity for the sake of people's desire for nothing more than cheap meat, when a simple diet change could significantly reduce our need for agricultural output. It's not about maximizing efficiency for more food, it's about not having to grow so much damn feed to supply the hamburger addiction of a bunch of fatasses. Industrial agriculture consumes massive amounts of fresh water, requires huge quantities of fertilizer, accelerates desertification, results in the destruction of more natural habitat than any other human activity on earth, and for what? An unhealthy and decadent lifestyle, unheard of in places where people are actually suffering? Never have I thought that someone outside of the lobbyists keeping the subsidies flowing could be so opposed to a universally positive change for humanity and the environment. It's like you're attempting to be a tough-guy Taoist who also... thinks environmental protection is worthless? Am I missing something with your philosophy here?

Even if you are a heartless bastard who doesn't care for the biological richness of the planet, the practical benefits are still dramatically in favor of a change in agriculture, and all other aspects of our wasteful society. Deliberate wastefulness for the sake of population control in a time and society where surplus has nothing to do with population growth is completely misguided. You commented on malthusian logic, but fail yourself to grasp one of the biggest flaws with it; the population size of industrialized nations is independent of agricultural output. It's not going to grow indefinitely until it hits a hard limit. The limit will be created by society, and any growth is due to economic inequality alone. If government regulation can curb the growth early, that's great, but the fact remains that we will need to consume and waste fewer resources in the future. The real problem with overpopulation is that we'll either need to continue existing in a world of disgusting inequality or, you know, change.

[Gervassen]

60 million years ago, an asteroid hit the planet. Hard. Winter for three years. That was not a balanced ecosystem. Diversity was not left in its wake. There was a bit of topsoil erosion in places, you might even venture to say.

I like the "tough guy Taoist" label on a superficial level, but unfortunately, it just proves that people here are not capable of reading correctly. Balance is opposite the actual message. I am saying that the earth does not do balances. It has been an imbalanced system from the beginning, careening from this state to that state with little equilibrium.

I realize that, compared to the great souls on this board, I am a monster who enjoys death. This is obvious, because whereas I continue to live out the small life that is allotted me, you aware people have taken the big plunge and posted your concern on an internet message board, proving that this time you're really serious. Among the many solutions proposed here, all equally valid and heartlessly ignored in a world driven to ruin by industry and lobbyists, are the extremely effective "educate everyone" and "create a virus" proposals.

The fact of the matter is, no solution here has gone past hand-waving arguments that aren't really feasible, but everyone here is unaccountably pleased at himself merely for being in a shared state of panic and depression over a crisis the likes of which the earth has rebounded from before, and much worse in addition. If you were pining for the human race in particular, I could at least understand that, since life will grow harder for us in the future, but most of the lament is couched in terms of ...

heartless bastard who doesn't care for the biological richness of the planet

But that said, I'm sure Earth would truly like it.

... where action is to be done on behalf of biological richness and the desires of the earth itself. Did I mention that an asteroid hit the earth? Will again, too.