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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

> Which resource is insufficient to support the current global population?

The Earth could support perhaps 10x or even 100x more people - but by support I mean that that amount of people would survive. The real question is how does quality of life depend on population and where's the optimum. When you have a small population (e.g. 10 million), the rate of research is slow, there are not many different products on the market (i.e. you can't choose from hundreds of cars to buy like today), etc. With a large population on the other hand, you have less resources per capita - water, oil, minerals, land, wood.

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The rate of research is orthogonal to quality of life. On an absolute timescale, yes you might reach more advancement faster, but also more people were living at the time without those advancement. So unless we are in a race with some aliens, it doesn't matter

> So unless we are in a race with some aliens, it doesn't matter

It matters to the people who die early because we didn't develop a particular medical treatment. Just to pick a random example.

But by having more people, you also have more people having more problems. In other word, the person who die early might not even exist at that year if the population was less. Instead of having an x population over y time span, you have an x/n population that span n*y period.

My point was that you need to have some kind of metric (suffering per human per year?), or otherwise the "quality of life" across different population size and time span doesn't make sense.

Surely in that case the ideal number of humans is zero, because then there wouldn't be any human suffering. This is the logic of a mad artificial intelligence from a science fiction movie.

Yeah, you're right...

But it's kind of a specific example of producing something that has fixed costs but can be "consumed" by infinitely many people. For example software, movies, music or even jokes.

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