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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Many humans. Rich life (individual freedoms and high material quality of life). Low environmental impact. Pick two.

EDIT: this apparently is one of my most disliked comments. To clarify, my point is that we can’t have both unlimited population growth and a high quality of life without accepting environmental impacts. If a high population of people have to crowd into dense micro apartments and give up cars and face constant bans on things they like, then their environmental footprint may reduce but their quality of life will go down. On the other hand if population controls were instituted, then a high quality of life could be possible with a sustainable level of environmental impact.

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> Many humans. Rich life (individual freedoms and high material quality of life). Low environmental impact. Pick two.

I really don't buy this, it seems illogical to me.

We have technologies that can produce a rich and comfortable life with much less or zero emissions, nuclear, renewables. We don't need to fuck stuff up as bad as we have. We've fucked stuff up this bad because of lobbying, resources companies have lobbied and fought long and hard to keep selling this poison to the world. To keep us buying cars that use petroleum. To keep people believing that it's either oil and coal or you're going back to the stone age it's bull shit because oil and coal is the stone age.

If you buy into those technologies I've mentioned above, you don't really have to entirely give up the life you know, in fact you might get to keep the life you love and have cleaner, better air to breathe.

We've woken up, but we still have those cretins doing their dirty work (the Australian Government for example.

We've woken up but it might be too late now.

We're already way beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, without fossil fuel inputs.

There are only two options:

1. Split more nuclei, fuse nuclei at +EROEI, and collect more photons.

2. 4 billion people starve to death.

Population control was a fun idea in the 1970s, but that ship has already sailed. We either experience mass die-offs, or we engineer our way out. Full stop.

4 : space colonies

If we can't live comfortably on earth (even with the worst expected effects from climate change), how can we live on another planet or in outer space which has a far less hospitable environment than any climate change could cause here on earth.

I think of space colonies as being protection from some catastrophic event on earth, not as an answer to climate change.

It's not like we could move significant numbers of people off the planet... and if we can build a spaceship or habitat on another planet that people can survive (and thrive) in, it would be much much easier to build the same habitat here on earth. I would bet that even building an underwater city would be much easier than a moon colony or orbiting space station.

It means creating such an abundance of technology that we will be able to supplant the limitations that we are currently operating under so that we can fundamentally alter our opportunities as a species.

Rather than spending the next few hundred years going round and round in ever-decreasing circles, obsessing over reducing the human impact on the planet to negligible levels using limited technological advances, while remaining largely inward-looking and ensconced within our gravity well.

I find that there's a weird mixture of pessimism (billions will die of starvation within 30 years) and hubris (we need to adopt measure X so that we can achieve Y degrees of warming by 2050, rather than Y+1 degrees) that has categorised the more prominent Malthusian technocrats over the last few decades (such as the Club of Rome, and then the IPCC).

Yeah, I've had that thought often enough. If we can't make people enjoy living in (insert least popular region in your cultural environment), how would anybody want to live in space/the moon/on Mars?

These days it's flanked by a much darker counter: well at least space would provide a society that has reproduction under control with a reasonably wide moat from breeders.

Fyi you may be shadowbanned I saw a submission of yours [dead] today (not flagged) and same for your latest comment

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