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Comment by averagewall | Hacker News Reader

You mean like the low population of medieval Europe that didn't live within its tree-cutting means and destroyed nearly all its forests? Same for the ancient humans who killed off the megafauna, or the 1800's humans who nearly killed off the whales? Lower population also means lower chance of inventing new technology, and thus being harmed by smaller problems.

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>Lower population also means lower chance of inventing new technology

Really? Who do you think would have more technological advancements? 100 million Americans, or the projected four billion Africans?

Relevant: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/875692877770244096

> Lower population also means lower chance of inventing new technology, and thus being harmed by smaller problems.

Supposing current technology level + ecological constraints, what do you think the rough optimal world population level should be?

  * less?
  * 0.01 billion people
  * 0.1 billion people
  * 1 billion people
  * 10 billion people
  * 100 billion people
  * 1000 billion people
  * more?

edit: to try to answer this question myself, i think 1 or 0.1 billion people would be vastly preferable to the status quo of 7.5b and growing in terms of buying time for us to sort out how to live without damaging global ecology.

i have no idea how to actually reach that state without a lot of planned/unplanned misery.

>world population

It is a big assumption that we will be restricted to the 'world'. When we are not, it doesn't make much sense to stop a population explosion.

At present we pretty much are restricted to the world. Technically we have a few people in a space station, but I am pretty sure that isn't the answer to our overpopulation problems.

Yes it does. Assuming a constant positive reproduction rate (i.e. N children per woman with N > 2.3), the population will grow exponentially, i.e. the population growth function is O(e^t).

If you solve this with space travel, i.e. by colonizing habitable planets within our reach, then you will be limited by the speed of light (i.e., how fast people can reach new planets to colonize). Given a time t, the radius of that available region is O(t), and therefore its volume is O(t^3).

As you see, O(t^3) is much smaller growth than O(e^t). (In fact, there's a theorem in analysis that for any exponential function, there exists no polynomial function that it won't eventually outgrow.)

So, if population growth is the problem, you can buy yourself a few more years by colonizing other planets, but the same problem ultimately re-emerges.

>You mean like the low population of medieval Europe that didn't live within its tree-cutting means and destroyed nearly all its forests?

What?

Forests get destroyed because of stupidity, not because of population numbers.

And I agree with OP, I don't see what's the big deal about lack of new people. If anything I think it's a good thing.

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