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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

You seem very certain.

"Future survival of our own species"? Nah. The last human being will eat the last cockroach. We have made technology to adapt to living on the moon. We might make things painful for humanity in general, might even break civilization (although I think that's unlikely). But survival of the species? We haven't yet invented technology that can wipe out humans.

As for our "evil", "obscenely inflated population levels"... well, what do you think we should do about it? Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution. The global population is what it is, whether you like it or not. If you had Thanos' infinity glove, would you use it? Would you use it, knowing you're just knocking the population back to 1965 levels?

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>The last human being will eat the last cockroach

The evidence is not on your side.

>Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution.

Uh, the solution to do what the article suggests. Grow more food on less land so that population growth doesn't come at the expense of the last shreds of wilderness on the planet. How does one get to the point where you think "growing more food is hitler!!1" is a reasonable response?

We're already growing more calories per acre than any time in history, by a large margin. Mostly doing the very agricultural practices you decry, the ones that are "destroying the planet". That's one reason the population has grown so rapidly - famine is no longer keeping it in check.

"The last shreds of wilderness" is an absurd hyperbole. There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation. (checks google) As a matter of fact... in 1970, 4.48B hectares were cultivated. in 2008, it was 4.83B, a <10% increase over almost 40 years and a near-doubling of the population. What happened? Incredible increases in yield starting post-WWII, greatly increasing the amount of food per acre.

So where does this leave the original study? Does it assume there will be no improvement in yield? Is farming more land the only solution being tried? Obviously not. What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.

>Mostly doing the very agricultural practices you decry, the ones that are "destroying the planet".

What are you talking about? We're doing it using the increased atmospheric CO2. Slash and burn is what is destroying the planet, and it has terrible long term productivity. That's why they have to keep slashing and burning.

>There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation.

The acres currently under cultivation is entirely irrelevant. If I burn down 100 acres of rainforest every year and cultivate it, its always 100 acres of cultivated land. But I am destroying 100 acres of wilderness every year. The land that is now a barren wasteland still matters, even though I am no longer cultivating it.

>What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.

Except we're not doing that, which is the point. We accidentally did that with CO2 emissions, but we're reaching the limits of what increased atmospheric CO2 can do. Once CO2 is no longer the limiting factor for growth, no amount of extra CO2 will help. Agricultural science is not interested in producing more food with less, it is interested in producing more profit.

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