The Depopulation Agenda
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luka
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all over the merchandise?
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sus
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More or less. If you have the tech, Earth's carrying capacity is massive, orders and orders and orders of magnitude higher than we're at now.
Think about energy in a world of nuclear fusion. How much we get out for how little we put in.
A world with energy too cheap to meter is a world with water too cheap to meter (desalinization of the oceans). 96% of the Earth's water is effectively untapped and saline. Hell, you can start making water cheaply if you have free energy, just by glueing atoms together.
Once you have the energy, everything else comes relatively easily. You need space, to house people and grow food, but we're occupying like a tenth of a percent of the atmosphere; we can build vertically. With energy too cheap to meter, you can fill skyscrapers with farms and artificial lighting—although there will probably be cheaper ways to synthesize or grow food than plants and animals, within a century maybe two.
I think the Earth could probably sustain trillions, maybe tens or hundreds of trillions, of people, if we wanted to and had the tech for it. Given how slow current population growth looks, that could take hundreds of thousands of years to reach, maybe longer.
So, practically speaking, I don't think Earth's carrying capacity is a real concern in foreseeable human future. Even our fossil fuel reserves will carry us for hundreds or even thousands of more years; the idea that we're running out of oil is thoroughly debunked, the supplies are so much more endless than we think; we've barely tapped the surface. That doesn't mean we should, I'm all for clean energy, but carrying capacity is not the argument against fossil fuels—climate change is.
sus
Moderator
That doesn't mean that depopulation fears/agendas aren't out there though. Even though the Malthusian vision is rendered impotent by modern tech acceleration, there have been and still are many uninformed people who believe we have a terminal population crisis on their hands. Obviously they haven't left their cities and driven across the American Midwest, or visited the endless Russian tundras.
You can track it back in America to early 20th C eugenicists, e.g. Will Vogt, founder of the modern environmental movement, who was misanthropic in program and spirit. There are 100% elites who hold this attitude. They're just also ignorant, in addition to being snobs with a disgust reaction too strong for their own good etc etc.
You can track it back in America to early 20th C eugenicists, e.g. Will Vogt, founder of the modern environmental movement, who was misanthropic in program and spirit. There are 100% elites who hold this attitude. They're just also ignorant, in addition to being snobs with a disgust reaction too strong for their own good etc etc.
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shakahislop
Well-known member
i mean like, OK, in my village for example, one of the most obvious changes that's happened over the past 30 years or so is that there's probably twice the number of people living there. or at least, there's quite a lot more. and then you can say the same thing about london, i mean it's not on the same scale, but since eg the 70s there are more people there. then for example Reading. a quick and not thorough google search says that it's got about 50% more people in it since the 70s. and the UK as a whole, there's about 20% more people here than there was since the 70s. i guess the rate of growth is probably bigger in the south-east where most english people live
that's just uk obviously. bangladesh is just nuts, there's three times as many people there as there was in the 70s. there's about four times as many people in afghanistan now as there was in the 70s. kabul itself has gone from 500,000 people to 6 million. there's about 50% more people in jamaica than there was in that period. i'm just picking examples at random but its basically everywhere. and that has a lot of consequences i think. partly as you say that there are more people around. but also if you think about something like the boomer imaginary in the UK, part of what they are harking back to is a country where there were more fields, fewer housing estates, fewer A roads, you get the idea. or if you think about gentrification. or what it was like to be a backpacker going through india. it's a big background thing that's going on.
all these numbers are a bit dodgy obvs.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Lol, fancy writing all that and then acknowledging climate change in the last three words.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Do any of you have any sources you consider authoritative re: population growth and resources? It seems like A) a logistical nightmare to quantify this stuff and B) almost always without precedent.
sus
Moderator
Fancy ignoring the mention of nuclear fusion in the very first line.
I agree such a world is sub-ideal, but the question is, "Does the Earth, practically speaking, have a finite carrying capacity that we should be concerned about?" and the evidence overwhelmingly points to "No."
And the picture I painted was a world with hundreds of trillions of people. Even our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will live in a world with, at most, a thousandth of that number. There's no reason we can't have a hundred billion humans and still leave 80% of the planet as a nature reserve given the technology of circa 2200 AD. It would take coordination, we'd have to really care about that sorta goal, but that's not the question at hand, the question is what's possible.
sus
Moderator
Our World In Data is the best public-facing authority/compilation on almost any macro-level statistical question from COVID to population levels.
Population Growth
Explore global and country data on population growth, demography, and how this is changing.
ourworldindata.org
I think it's a little silly trying to project human behavior long-term given how many unknowns unknowns are out there, but it's certainly a pretty widespread trend that highly developed societies have low birth rates, and that parents tend to want about replacement-level # of kids. Maybe there's a massive cultural shift that changes that equation, but there's a good chance we never get past 15bil on the planet. That's so so so so far below Earth's carrying capacity that we're functionally only limited by the death of the Sun.
The point is, in any kind of long-term macro sense, population is not something that needs worrying about. Short-term, the kind of growth Shaka describes is obviously gonna come with serious growing pains.