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Comment by tsol | Hacker News Reader

Is humanity supposed to stop reproducing? This is such a strange take. First worlders ruin the planet and then get exasperated that others continue to reproduce, knowing it may cause the first world more problems in the future

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There were two billion humans a hundred years ago. Now we're eight billion. That means you now have to share what would have been yours a hundred years ago with three other people. Soon they will be four. Keep growing like this, you'll be sharing those resources with ten, fifteen people.

You can keep cutting the cake in smaller and pieces, for sure, but that means everyone keeps getting a smaller and smaller portion until everyone is hungry. That doesn't even factor in the fact that the cake is effectively shrinking from overfishing, droughts, and so on.

You keep expanding the human population. It'll be fine. It's probably too late to course correct anyway. Might as well do what makes you happy.

It's interesting to see Malthusianism is still alive and well.

The cake isn't a fixed size. Our agricultural innovations continue to far exceed population growth. We can produce virtually infinite energy with Renewables and Nuclear Energy. The Earth is 70% water, and that too is a renewable resource; there's more than enough for the next million years.

That's not even getting started on the fact that these sorts of prediction have been wrong repeatedly. The average world citizen has a vastly greater standard of living than they did 50 or 100 years ago, despite the increase in population. So the population is going up, and the standard of living is going up even faster.

He was just a century too early.

Most of our modern agricultural processes are about as sustainable as strip mining. They erode the top soil at a staggering rate, and that takes a very long time to regenerate, and that's not even considering the impact of climate change on the amount of arable land.

There is no process for turning energy and water into nutrient rich food. You can make macronutrients (especially carbohydrates) easily enough, but that alone just makes us sick.

Micro organisms, plants and animals literally up-cycle nutrients into proteins to do this every day, there absolutely is a process. The world was much hotter a long time ago. I'm not saying climate change is an issue, and there won't be serious problems to deal with, but the idea that we're all doomed or its all insurmountable is seriously hyperbolic. For every arid farm land that becomes a desert, some place like Alaska will start growing tomatoes. It'll fuck with eco-systems for sure, as it already is, but nature has been through much worse than us. I remind you literal meteors have fallen on the planet and half the planet was an ice block not too long ago relative to the history of the world. The conditions the dinosaurs lived in were much hotter and carbon rich.

There's a lot to be done with just the tools we have now and a lot of things that we're working on that may help.

Rezoning cities for instance making them more walk able or usable by e-bikes, etc, and encouraging people to live near where they work or work remotely at least part of the week can help. Conversion to solar, nuclear, wind, etc. I watch YT videos of third world ppl creating solar powered energy sources. I've seen articles about people developing plants that can be converted into bio polymers that capture 80% of carbon that gets turned into plastic that captures carbon and when it inevitably gets buried in a landfill, its a good thing, because that carbon was removed from the atmosphere and captured in the ground in the course of creating a disposable product.

I currently give $50 a month to cotap.org because its helping somewhat reforest the planet, which I know isn't much in the grand scheme considering how much sealed carbon we're releasing but its something, even if its just spitting in the ocean. But systemically you not having a kid isn't going to fix it any more than me. You act like someone won't just immigrate in from a less developed country to yours or someone socially conservative or traditional won't just have 5 kids, and offset whatever good you did. Honestly, raising a kid whose more environmentally conscious and equipped to handle the upcoming challenges is probably far more productive.

It will take a lot of effort, and the sooner we get on it the better. Personally, energy generation and car dependence for me are the two biggest challenges to conquer.

Right, but this process takes time. The nutrients we're upcycling is coming from a repository of millions of years worth of decayed plant matter, originally coming from dead microbes leeching minerals from solid rock. Digesting rocks is a very slow process.

Historically it hasn't really mattered, as human agriculture has been small compared to the rest of the biosphere, but right now we have so much cultivated land it covers a significant chunk of the planet. At this scale, nutrient depletion absolutely does matter. Nutrients don't just appear from nothing in the ground.

Go on Google maps if you will. Pan over to somewhere in middle of the United States and look for anything that isn't a city, a desert or cultivated land. Forests do exist, but they are really not common.

The middle of the US never was forests, or they were few and far between, they were mostly grasslands which were turned into fields, which became the dust bowl, etc. Where I live there are literally trees everywhere, and it doesn't take long for them to recapture an area if left abandoned a year or two. That said, I do agree we need to stop spreading out so much and start rezoning for less single family homes, at least in actual cities.

It takes time sure, but we compost and recapture those nutrients every day. Every time we flush our waste down the toilet, lots of those nutrients end up being recycled and processed in a water treatment plant and dumped into rivers and used by nature. We might need to stop flushing nutrients into rivers, or figure something out, but given how much food currently gets thrown out and overstocked grocery stores stay, I know there's opportunity for adjustment. Going to a more JIT system for groceries might be better, where a grocery store doesn't need to stock 50% more produce then it plans to sell. Food waste is a huge problem. We can start composting it at least and returning it back to the soil.

> Is humanity supposed to stop reproducing?

Yes. I'm not sure why people come to any other conclusion.

Then you haven’t thought very deeply at all.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on...

I honestly can't tell if that's supposed to be satire or not. Section 1 basically boils down to "Well, you live in the first world! Who cares if some farmers in Africa die from climate change? _Your_ kids will be fine!".

Besides that, all of the arguments that are presented seem to start from the perspective that having children should be the default. The author makes no claims that the world will be a better place for them, and therefore I see no reason why anyone would want to bring more suffering into the world, and cause more harm.

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