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[MetalSlimeHunt]

Well, you found one. While in an absolutely ideal scenario the right to reproduce would be allocated by random lot, I already have renounced it. Frankly, anyone who believes in the common good of humanity and this planet's future should.

[Shadowlord]

Maybe he's in favor of a one child policy like China had. I say had because IIRC they're moving away from it due to it having begun to cause serious problems for their economy and citizens, one of which is that retiring parents don't have a sufficient safety net, previously would have been taken care of by children, now lack enough children for that to be possible, and extreme levels of corruption in government makes using anything like the american social security system to solve the problem impossible (at least until the corruption is reduced somehow).

Random lot? That's not particularly fair. Also, it doesn't sound particularly enforceable, either. What are you going to do, go in and sterilize half the country and then get the rest after they've had a couple children?

P.S. Virtually all our population growth in the US is coming from immigration - not births. Check the statistics. You'll have to send the military to mass-sterilize OTHER countries. I bet that'll go over well.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Maybe he's in favor of a one child policy like China had.

A more strict and global version thereof. We should seek to balance out at about 1 billion total humans, excepting a scenario in which we create biological immortality or accidentally/intentionally create AI God, in the later case being particularly irrelevant.

Random lot? That's not particularly fair. Also, it doesn't sound particularly enforceable, either. What are you going to do, go in and sterilize half the country and then get the rest after they've had a couple children?

As I said, that would be the ideal, and it's completely fair. What would you do, only let the wealthy and intelligent breed?

P.S. Virtually all our population growth in the US is coming from immigration - not births. Check the statistics.

P.S. That's a fucking irrelevant cop-out that all western societies try to use to push the burden of population onto the idea of all the filthy brown people over there being unable to stop having children, developed nations in general and the US specifically all use obscene amounts of resources per capita compared to the more quickly growing undeveloped societies.

The answer you don't want to hear is we're already obscenely over the line and have been for decades. You'd need an extra three Earths of resources to keep this gravy train rolling at the population we have. Population is the fulcrum point. No magic future technology is going to swoop down and save us, no amount of efficiency is going to resist the hard numbers about both resource deprivation and climate disruption.

There are too many of us. That is the true answer. But you don't want to hear that, do you?

[Willfor]

I was gonna let it drop because you were being reasonable, but every figure I've seen that looks right for sustainable populations says you're off by about an order of magnitude. 10 billion instead of 1 billion. So uh. Sources?

I would click the youtube, but I already have so much crap in my recommendeds, and I am scared that it is one of the angry white dudes who have skulls on their shelves. I've just started to not get those pop up in my recommendeds lately, and I'm not dealing with that again.

[Shadowlord]

Telling me that I don't want to hear something that I'm already perfectly aware of isn't going to be a very effective way of convincing me that we need to start sterilizing people against their will.

[Cheeetar]

I was gonna let it drop because you were being reasonable, but every figure I've seen that looks right for sustainable populations says you're off by about an order of magnitude. 10 billion instead of 1 billion. So uh. Sources?

I would click the youtube, but I already have so much crap in my recommendeds, and I am scared that it is one of the angry white dudes who have skulls on their shelves. I've just started to not get those pop up in my recommendeds lately, and I'm not dealing with that again.

I turned off all of the youtube history tracking things altogether just to avoid getting white supremacists and other assholes showing up in my recommends.

[Shadowlord]

I didn't bother to click it either, but that was because I was annoyed. :V

P.S. You can always use incognito mode and then youtube shouldn't recognize you.

[wierd]

I've found almost everyone who thinks it's a good idea also believes that they should be exempt from it. Actually, I haven't found anyone who doesn't think that. You can't all be right.

Strange how people insist I dont exist, or worse, insist I am lieing when I say that the best method for the necessary population reduction is an accross the board removal of major interventionary healthcare, and that I am OK with living in that world, and being a statistic for death from a preventable illness.

Hell, I dont even want chemo should I be diagnosed with cancer.

The major issue: The wealthy and powerful would find ways to ensure that they recieve the healthcare, while the rest of the population remains out of the loop, because money talks. This makes the plan unworkable on the grounds of being essentially plebicide, instead of impartial population reduction.

and no, the current density of world population is only sustainable through highly carbon positive nitrogen fertilizer use, which coupled with climate change induced loss of farmland, is not a viable solution.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I was gonna let it drop because you were being reasonable, but every figure I've seen that looks right for sustainable populations says you're off by about an order of magnitude. 10 billion instead of 1 billion. So uh. Sources?

I just got off of the end of the semester and drive back home, so you'll forgive me if I'm not digging through journals for peer-review quality and play this a bit more typical internet quality.

Firstly, I will establish the past viability of one billion. The last time we had that many people in the world was 1804, but rates of population growth before then had not started the S-curve pattern strongly, so we spent about 300 years going from 500 million to 1 billion (incidentally, these periods become exponentially shorter, and though they are now slowing the gross population is still the real problem). At this time we had some inkling of the problems to come with some of the larger cities, but the pattern of the Holocene extinction hadn't gotten started. The problems of this population are something our vaunted technological advancement actually can solve, since they were mostly centered around things like waste disposal we have somewhat down. As such, I don't think there's a substantial enough risk to this population point to dismiss it as too high. This is not true for higher figures.

Now, the present of 7.3 billion. Our actions have brought about substantial harm already. Our industrial activities have already fucked the ocean pretty badly by lowering the collective pH, which more or less kills everything. Even the things that can resist acidity changes are dependent upon things that cannot. This alone justifies population reduction. All life is ultimately dependent upon the connections laid down in the oceans, and we're fucking up bad if we think we can last without. Even this presumes the Clathrate gun is just chasing ghosts, and it isn't.

While you're between paragraphs, here's some backing of the obscene ignorance of how we collectively treat this issue. We're multiple levels of concern below rational ones.

We're gonna need 80% more electricity and 55% more water than we have now, by the way. You aren't going to magic that up. If you throw everything in the pot together and just ignore the CO2 problem you can get near the electricity figure. And if you think the problems aren't going to impact you, think again. California is in such a state of terminal drought I have no doubt that we will soon just wipe that slate clean and declare it the new metric of normal condition, because it is. And those polar vortexes aren't going to stop either.

But you probably already believe in climate change, so here's the rub. Even if we all lived relatively poorly, we'd still just be scraping the barrel, and that's if the population never goes up again. There is an inherent inverse relationship between what quality of life we may maintain without exceeding terminal replacement and the total population of the world. All of the numbers I have brought up over this entire thing can only intensify in a world where we don't stop reproducing so damn much.

As for "10 billion", how absolutely convenient for us that the number of people who will be in the world at current growth rates come 2100 is supposedly the number we can handle, so wonderfully just outside your expected lifespan just in case. That's a point set with some intent and as far as I've seen, never meaningfully backed. Here's someone you probably respect more than me and who knows his shit's take on it.

Telling me that I don't want to hear something that I'm already perfectly aware of isn't going to be a very effective way of convincing me that we need to start sterilizing people against their will.

It's more that society at large does not want to hear it. We collectively block out the obvious truth that there are too many people on this planet, even among otherwise zealous environmentalists, because this upsets the heart of conventional and traditional forces that are still the most powerful elements of most societies. Even things like postmodern culture and accepting homosexuality are not as utterly odious and repulsive to most people as telling them to stop shitting out children.

And, in all fairness, natalism is practically a part of our DNA. Continually frustrated as I am over it, it is essentially to be expected that people will prefer to latch onto ideas of "new technology will save us", "sustainable practices will save us", "it's just Over There that's the problem", anything to avoid the final conclusion. Unfortunately, once you read the numbers it becomes clear.

Now, much as I'd truly love just to ignore the desires of ignorant eater-types and dust them with sterilizing drugs, we all know that's both inefficient and very capable of backlash even in the world where we ignore or justify all moral concerns in much the same way you can't just kidnap the children of anti-vaxxers no matter how rational that seems.

Sadly, the need for at least a plurality agreement on not reproducing means it probably won't happen. But it should.

[wierd]

The genetic imperative to reproduce is too strong.

That is why I favor increasing the mortality rate, through purposeful reductions in healthcare, and forbidding technologically assisted reproduction. (things like IVF and pals.)

People can keep making babies, if people die sooner.

[Sheb]

In  some way, I think this thread would be improved by only letting mainiac post in it.

[Flying Dice]

That's why I'm in favor of the damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead approach to overpopulation. You're not going to convince the human race to collectively stop reproducing so much, that's pretty much the fundamental biological imperative, and most people can't reason their way out of a paper bag, never mind into casting off the deepest underlying motivation they have. So we have to get the fuck off of Earth and hope that the survivors a) find a habitable Earth-like terrestrial world before their cryo equipment breaks down/ship population breeds itself to death/&c. and b) manage to not fuck it up like we did this one until they can go full bio-mechanical Von Neumann and keep expanding.

Remember the migratory locust-like tentacle aliens from Independence Day? The ones that fly around stripping other worlds of resources before moving on again? That's the best-case scenario for humanity. The realistic scenario is that we continue to shove Earth into the meatgrinder, don't muster the will to evacuate until it's too late, and end up either wiping ourselves out or with a tiny, fragmented population living in sealed arcologies desperately trying to break even on their resources for however many thousands or millions of years it takes for the planet to recover.

[mainiac]

Now, the present of 7.3 billion. Our actions have brought about substantial harm already.

Depletion of resources does not overwhelmingly correlate to economic activity.  It is in fact possible to have more economic activity in the long run in a sustainable fashion then an unsustainable fashion.

Case in point, the Dust Bowl happened when we were trying to feed a population of 100 million people in the US.  Now we are feeding three times that and have no fear of a similar event.

[wierd]

*lives in kansas, which was ground zero for the dustbowl. Feels compelled to point out error from ignorance.


The major intervention in kansas and Oklahoma to prevent massive topsoil loss, was the planting of windbreak hedge rows along section lines and roadsides.

There is an alarming trend to rip those out by the newest generation of farmers, since the 5 to 6 yard strip around the section tabulates to a sizeable area that "could be planted to wheat/soybean/corn/etc."

As they do this to be competative, the risk of dust bowl part 2 increases.  I have personally seen feilds blowing in the wind from this happening.

The typical ideology is that such things cant happen again, when they most certainly can and will, should the windbreaks be removed.

Long story short: Dont think you have seen the last of such disasters.

[mainiac]

Feels compelled to point out error from ignorance.

We just had the toad in here and you are flame baiting.