Ask HN: What's the most ethical way to have less people on the planet?

It would be more ethical to have many more people on the planet. Larger denser cities. More exceptionally talented people collaborating on increasingly complex projects. higher acceleration in the advancement of science and technology, become a multi-planet species, and eventually a multi-star species. This post sounds anti-human, and lacking in vision.

Uplift our poorest people:

- improve child mortality rates so they don't feel the need to have "replacement children"

- improve education so they have fewer children with their own free will

- improve their financial situations so they don't need children for labor (this isn't some evil heartless thing that poor people do btw, a lot of child labor is for sustenance farming just to maintain the bare minimum of an existence)

- improve their access to healthcare and safe birth control

If you feel so strongly that the planet needs less people, then why isn't it ethical to kill some of the excess ones? Justify it as defending the people you like from whatever effects you think "too many people" are causing.

Having decided that "too many" is the call (and that you're the person to make that call), would it be better, ethically, to leave that distasteful task of cleansing the undeserving to someone else? *what if they don't have the same notion of "undeserving" as you?

Human Overpopulation : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation

Overcrowding : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcrowding

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Edit Add;

>ethical concerns<

The Trolley Problem : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

Probably for a few generations to not reproduce as much. I see no direct ethical concerns here as long as it is voluntary.

Tightly define the ethics system first, then it should be more obvious.

One of the biggest problems we have in the logical problem-solving space, especially with humanity-level issues, is that our soft systems (ethics, relations, morals, values) are left unstructured when in fact the opposite case is badly needed.

Just wait for WW3, and wait for all big cities and gvt building who don't care about life and nature gets destroyed. Then you'll have left the country people - the one who know how to survive with land, grow their own food - without lobbies telling them to have their seeds patented in order to sell them - and restore the landscape and the environment. Nothing to do - just wait. If that doesn't happen - then we're all doomed. All we'll have left is Matrix - or Brave new world - no freedom - which will eventually lead to human extinction.

We have a serious problem in the West where there are too few people being born. You can't replace them with immigration because that leads to political instability (plus if the birthrates are low for moral reasons you'll just be replaced with people having different morals by definition.) We've known this since at least the 80s and it's kind of frustrating to see people continuing to freak out about it.

Just a quick reminder that "ethical" is relative.

Educate everyone on the perils of over-population ?

Probably make poor people richer

A celestial impactor