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Comment by alephu5 | Hacker News Reader

I saw the Netflix seaspiracy documentary last night, and it made me think there's really no way to sustain such a huge human population. Every single method of food production seems unsustainable to me, it either uses too much water or land, or produces too much greenhouse gas.

Personally I'd much prefer us to lower the population through infertility rather than famine and war.

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You can feed yourself off of one acre, with primitive tools and basic agricultural practices. There are 1.9 Billion acres in the USA alone. With modern agricultural technology and power of scale, the resources in the ocean, you can feed a lot of people. This site has statistics showing that despite the population increase, the total amount of acres of farmed farm land has decreased in the last 20 years in the USA. Its about 900 million.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/196104/total-area-of-lan...

Worth considering redundancy in that as well. It’s very easy to end up with serious problems if we have even a single failed crop in one season.

I guess that problem will eventually solve itself though?

It may leave society in tatters, but some people would survive.

Correct. But it’s not going to be pretty.

A big part of the problem honestly is that a lot of the arable land is being used to raise crops for meat production rather than direct human consumption. If the population shifted to a vegetable-heavy, meat-light diet it would be much easier to feed people with less land.

> There are 1.9 Billion acres in the USA alone.

Not all acres are equal. Not even within the same state; an acre in California's Central Valley is very different from an acre in California's Mojave Desert.

And further, this presupposes that there is adequate water for all those acres, which - as Californian farmers have learned over the last couple decades - ain't quite true. Some acres therefore have to remain unused in order for the other acres to remain usable.

Not much we can do about land use. Regenerative agriculture practices use less water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Im not sure about long term but switching from traditional to regenerative practices is carbon negative as soil organic matter and soil life is built up.

I saw that Netflix documentary "Kiss the Ground" which kind of claimed the same.

I hope it's true, I didn't do much further research on it, but it gives me some hope that we can fight climate change and be more robust against crop failure at the same time.

> Personally I'd much prefer us to lower the population through infertility rather than famine and war.

There is no reason to assume there is binary choice there.

Also the infertility crisis only affects developed countries, whose birth rates were already low. Under developed countries , whose populations have been booming and already outnumber developed countries are not affected by this crisis.

> Every single method of food production seems unsustainable to me

I don't agree. Look at the statistics on food waste, resource consumption of meat production, energy consumption in developed countries in general,... We are using farmland to produce fuel...

Food production could be much more sustainable if we wanted. We are very far away from an efficient usage of the available resources. Current methods of food production look unsustainable because we are not even trying.

Edit: Just to give you a number: In 2010, the postharvest food loss was estimated to be 1250 kcal per capita per day in the US.

These days, the last remaining rulers of the world would be able to engage in a war with robots only - from their bunkers.

In 2050 the robotization of the military will likely be even more pronounced.

For the first time in history, the capacity to wage war does not directly depend on having a large count of young men at your disposal. This is likely to change the entire balance.

„No weapon has ever been frightful enough to put a stop to war —perhaps because we never before had any that fought for themselves!“

Philip K. Dick. „The Defenders.“

The social implications of this would not be pretty. Without young people in society, the purpose of tomorrow would slowly fade. No point trying to build a future if there isn’t someone to take helm of it. Children of men did an excellent dramatization of this

children of men is about no more children.

It's a bit of a jump from less children.

True, but you can already see some effect in greying democratic states in Europe.

A lot of the political attention is focused on the interests of the most numerous voter class - the pensioners - and much less on the interests of the young. Carbon emissions are the only major exception I can think of.

Everyone can have one child and the population will still decline from premature deaths.

Quite possible to sustain present levels of population on vegan diet. This is NOT counting other sources of consumption we routinely indulge in.

I wonder what the resource usage of giving everyone a diet of something like soylent for most meals. I have found the Australian clone of it to be perfectly tolerable and cheaper. Especially if you think about it as saving money so you can go get something nicer at a restaurant later.

>seems unsustainable to me

Do you have a particularly well-developed or reliable intuition for the sustainability of food production? How did you come by it?

That’s why humans of the future will eat those weird bacteria that you find in places like volcanoes, the bottom of the ocean, or acidic caves. Gruel will be a wet, raw clump of it, and we’ll call it “Beyond Bugs”, because bug eating is an unsustainable luxury.

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