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[martinuzz]

We should relocate the entire world population to temperate climate zones only to cut down on cooling costs in summer and heating costs in winter 

[Cruxador]

We should relocate the entire world population to temperate climate zones only to cut down on cooling costs in summer and heating costs in winter 

Either that, or stop making people from warmer climates conform to temperate standards of appropriate dress and daily activity.

As a side note, being facetious like that is really  pretty silly. How many people do you think actually live in deserts? Off the top of my head, it's mostly in parts of Australia, the southwestern US, and some people around the Sahara who were actually doing fine for centuries without air conditioning. People who would be displaced are a drop in the bucket compared to the population problem, but are disproportionately important in resource consumption.

[alway]

I don't understand people for population control. There is plenty of resources for everybody, but corrupt people in power are usually the reason why it isn't given to those people.

I think you're underestimating just how many people 7 million is. It's true that there's inequality which leads to wealthy regions like Europe and the Americas using vastly disproportionate resources, but that doesn't change the fact that we've got a massive amount of people. The only reason we're even able to maintain current populations levels this long is because of techniques of the green revolution that are proving to be less sustainable than originally advertised. That's not to say nothing good came out there, but monocultures screw up the soil and there's only so much you can ramp up fertilization before it becomes less feasible, meanwhile the resultant eutrophication is destroying waterways that are already subject to massive overfishing, meanwhile coastline development is destroying forage fish spawning grounds, meaning that even if all oceanic fishing stopped right now, populations still couldn't return to their original levels. I mean, this is just food, to say nothing of the decadence of petroleum products, the loss of biodiversity, and the slow but inexhorable march of global warming. There are enough resources right at this specific instant in time, true, but we can't freeze time right now. Time is proceeding forward, and will continue to do so regardless of the actions of "people in power".

This isn't really correct though, and none of it has to do with population regardless. Lack of sustainability is due to capitalism focusing on tiny short term gains at massive long term expense, and its traditional denial of available-but-untapped resources having value.

With proper incentives and techniques like vertical farming, Earth could probably support 50 billion humans or more. It would be incredibly energy intensive, but entirely doable by human civilization. If we globally decided that sustainably supporting as many humans as possible was what we wanted to attain, and put resources towards accordingly, we could support a very much larger population than even the most extreme forecasts for peak human population numbers. Capitalism, of course, has simply decided we should be using those resources to build billionaires bigger yachts.

[origamiscienceguy]

We've seen this everywhere. Right after a country properly industrializes, the population explodes. But then it tapers out, and even starts to shrink. That will happen globaly. Population won't continue to grow exponentially.

[Greiger]

Maybe I'm off here but didn't we largely un-desertify much of the sw US with the hoover dam?  We can just do that, build dams everywhere!  No need to relocate if there are no more deserts!

Being partially facetious here, but surely that isn't the only place in the world where that can work.

[wierd]

Does not need to, if energy/resource use per person continues to do so, which seems to be what is supported by the data.

Admittedly, there is a slight dip recently in US energy use per household, but this is mainly due to widespread adoption of better lightbulbs, (which was done by mandate, rather than public desire), rather than from some suddenly grown ecological conscience in corporate america.

It does not matter if you drop the world population down to 1 million. If people are consuming millions of watts of power to drive their futuristic hoverbikes, or leveling whole forests just so they can have a cheaper widget--- the end is just as inevitable.

[MrRoboto75]

You could start solving overpopulation and over-consumption today by murdering yourself, for example.

[wierd]

That seems to be suggested frequently, but personally, I prefer my option:

Actually *ALLOW* me to leave modern life, and live a more 1800s ish lifestyle. I cant afford healthcare NOW anyway, about the only things modern society offers to me are roads (which I wont be using), running water (which I would not be using) and education (which I already have.)

The capitalist system cannot permit people to do that though. People that are not slavishly consuming more and more product, are worse than "untapped resources" are in their eyes. 

[MrRoboto75]

]Actually *ALLOW* me to leave modern life, and live a more 1800s ish lifestyle.

http://amishamerica.com/becoming-amish/

[wierd]

Nopey nope. Not even close to the same thing.

Amish people still have to make a profit every year, because they still have to pay for many goods, and still need to pay taxes.

I would be perfectly content with the following arrangement:

I will live 24/7 in that stupid fire spotting hut you have, Mr BLM guy-- and I will gladly tell you all about any fires I see, and will perform forestry services for you without delay. In exchange, I want you to never demand taxes out of me, and I want you to otherwise leave me alone.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yes, populations taper out, but that's not the point. It's an important detail, to be sure, but it aside to the Real Question of:

By what method do we ensure our resource usage both benefits the lives of humanity and does not destroy the world?

There are two fulcrum points to resource usage. One is population, and the other is quality of life. Yes, technology and efficiency are important. In our theoretical equation they come right after the fulcrum points and reduce the per capita as A(B). But to focus on "technology and social reform will fix it, we don't have to do any difficult work" is to ignore what's right in front of you. Fuck the future resource consumption, we're in the red now. That draw is sure to get worse due to the population increases. Not only that, but not focusing on population control opens the door to the world's powerful people deciding to focus on quality of life instead. Welcome to cyberpunk hell.

And if we don't just shake the system, but shatter it, you can forget any tapering off a hundred years from now. That is your gigadeath scenario, when our resource chains are broken in chaos and mass deprivation ensues. We are never more than three meals away from the fall of night. Constantly. That gets a lot more likely the more people there are on this Earth.

Sure. Maybe not. Maybe we breakthrough into cold fusion tomorrow and all of this goes away. But irresponsible isn't even the right word for assuming that. We don't even have a word for that. It's playing Russian Roulette with the gun to everybody's head at once.

Population control is a rational policy to pursue given we're in a lot of places ready for reaching the end of the S-curve. We can easily arrest population growth technologically. Like other traditional attitudes, the main thing maintaining this problem is inertia.

[Frumple]

I will live 24/7 in that stupid fire spotting hut you have, Mr BLM guy-- and I will gladly tell you all about any fires I see, and will perform forestry services for you without delay. In exchange, I want you to never demand taxes out of me, and I want you to otherwise leave me alone.

Or they could just pay you a bit, and you use that to pay the taxes. Functionally the same thing as having you perform service to stay on the land. You could actually manage that with a fair degree of probability, really, iirc. There's occasionally job openings for live-in type park rangers and whatnot. Folks make a life out of living in fairly shitty conditions mostly detached from civilization, even these days.

Pretty sure there's other places you could have a go at that, too, though. Just tend to be in areas where you'd be a bit more likely to be shot by non-government people instead of evicted by the folks claiming charge.

Maybe I'm off here but didn't we largely un-desertify much of the sw US with the hoover dam?  We can just do that, build dams everywhere!  No need to relocate if there are no more deserts!

Being partially facetious here, but surely that isn't the only place in the world where that can work.

Heh. It's amusing, but there's plenty of places that just won't work, iirc. Takes a lot more than that to get back farm converted rainforest after it finishes becoming unusable for growing most things of note, ferex.

If we globally decided that sustainably supporting as many humans as possible was what we wanted to attain, and put resources towards accordingly, we could support a very much larger population than even the most extreme forecasts for peak human population numbers. Capitalism, of course, has simply decided we should be using those resources to build billionaires bigger yachts.

Well, and some chunk of us smaller people things like climate controlled houses and computers and whatnot. Non-septic water, stuff like that. We can certainly keep a lot more people alive than our current population, but I'm not sure how much of a point there would be after a certain extent. Bloody everybody would be miserable, and if we wanted that we could just bomb the major population centers, wreck civilization, and call it a species. Lot faster, roughly the same results save it being inflicted on a lot less people.

As a side note, being facetious like that is really  pretty silly. How many people do you think actually live in deserts? Off the top of my head, it's mostly in parts of Australia, the southwestern US, and some people around the Sahara who were actually doing fine for centuries without air conditioning. People who would be displaced are a drop in the bucket compared to the population problem, but are disproportionately important in resource consumption.

... fine in the sense of staying alive, anyway. Somewhat. You can survive in a desert or a swamp, often fairly indefinitely for a small enough group, but life is frankly kinda' shit. We'd really kinda' like things to not go to shit on top of the whole staying alive thing.

Though that said, the statement wasn't aimed at people in deserts, methinks, but people in tropical (and otherwise extreme) zones that takes artificial heating/cooling to be particularly comfortable in. Which is somewhat more than a few people. Approaching half the human species more, heh, though plenty of that is in the less intense parts of the regions. Can survive in those places without the stuff, but there ain't any degree of dress or lifestyle change that can match an AC in those kinds of environments... unless you go underground, I guess.

Aside from all the above, will say I get pretty twitchy when people start talking about plans that end up getting rid of cooling et al for places like this hellswamp. Ain't no amount of dress or schedule change would have kept me alive through florida weather. Bloody genetics screwed me over. Kinda' rather you just shoot me than make me suffer first, y'know? Moving'd do alright, too, though. Some places on this planet that are just kinda' unpleasant to live in without some technological assistance, and the bar for that starts a lot lower than desert. Better to just gtfo and go somewhere less troublesome.

[wierd]

Frumple:

Not as easy as you think.  Like becoming a doctor, there is a waiting list to enter the forestry educational system.

Once you become a forrester, you have to meet some absurd feild work requirements (usually in the decade or more range) before you can take a parks ranger position. After that, you need some time as a parks ranger before you can take an observation outpost position, and that is only seasonal work with a rotation schedule in most states.

So, no. The odds of getting that arrangement are not "fair."

[EnigmaticHat]

Humans have a lot of in-built population control measures.  In situations where we're unsure of the survival of our offspring we naturally tend to either avoid having kids or have massive amounts of kids; while humans who are sure of their offspring's survival will tend to have only a few.  On top of that I've heard suggestions that, for example, gay people evolved as a measure to restrict population growth.  Using as evidence that gay people are more prevalent in larger and more stable societies, presumably gay people don't emerge in societies where population decline due to hardship is a serious possibility.

I used to be a population control doomsday guy but I no longer think that way.  In the west (which is a tiny portion of the world's arable land) we had a huge population boom around the enlightenment and especially the industrial revolution.  Of course now that the rest of the world is entering the early industry phase they're going to have a huge population boom as well.  The thing about China is they had a massive population prior to attaining modern tech, of course they're going to have issues.  I don't think America is ever going to need a 1 child policy, if anything we might need to start subsidizing 1 or 2 children per couple to encourage reproduction.  Marriage tax breaks are kind of already doing that now that I think about it...

The way I look at it the real problem is population aging.  Most of the US causes of death are "something's gotta kill you eventually" kind of things such as cancer crossed with the fact that basic nutritional facts like CICO and "fat isn't satan; sugar and wheat can be bad in excess too" apparently take a long time to filter into the population.  What happens when we solve the big killers like alziemers or even aging?  The way I look at it, there's two issues.  The first is that our medical resources are already peaking and we're in the process (or about to start) of dialing back the amount of medical care the extremely elderly have access to.  Presumably if the US medical system wasn't awful this wouldn't be happening yet but eventually we're going to have resource problems keeping everyone alive.  The other problem is, well, death has done some good things for us.  Right now the oldest among us were about 40-50 when segregation ended.  And white people that age are a huge problem for the African American community.  Could you imagine if Thomas Jefferson were still alive, how much trouble we would have had ending slavery?  Moving past it?  If modern black teens had to live next to the people that literally owned their great grandparents.  Things would be so much worse than they even are now.  Plus there's the issue of, if no one ever dies, eventually we'll reach peak population support and then how will anyone new ever get to be born?

I don't have a solution but to be honest I'd prefer just like an even cutoff.  Right now poor people live much shorter lives than the rest of us.  I'd be totally down for "society will keep you alive till you're 100 and then no more meds for you."  It wouldn't be a good system but it would be a better system.  In a way less of a dystopia than the present.  This is only for a hypothetical future where our bodies don't die from long term aging anymore, obviously we don't need such drastic measures now.

[Max™]

Uh, guys... gals... escaped AI avatars discovering what it means to shitpost... I'm not sure how old you all are, but you've maybe heard of the Club of Rome and their whole project of pushing a fear of overpopulation and such since the tail end of the 60's, right?

Know why they're big fans of getting people discussing global warming? If we stopped using oil for transportation, manufacturing, fertilizer, heating, and so forth right now, how would you expect the population to behave?

Global warming and overpopulation are not different topics, fear of one can be used to push for measures which can help with the other, but this time instead of falling into the Malthusian "oh god here they come talking about us being forced to eat babies again" trap and discrediting themselves instantly they were able to keep smashing an idea into the public view until you started getting entire generations growing up with this just being how things are, fuck, there are parents sending their kids off to school and they're younger than the IPCC FAR is.

That's weird.

Artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, trickling out minor improvements with marketing tricks to make it seem like the next big thing, work, earn, purchase, consume, be productive, greed is a good thing, but having more things is the best thing, do this or risk being left behind by people you have no reason to care about but should totally want to impress, then after a few decades go find a hole somewhere so we can get a new consumer in here!


In other news, the Pope teased Milania about Trump being an animated mass of lard and cheetoh crumbs under a wig.

Best.Pope.Ever.