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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

If we have to introduce population control it will be to increase the population. All developed countries are below replacement.

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Is that bad? Surely we can manage with fewer than 8 billion people. A gradual reduction should be welcomed.

You first.

That's exactly what's happening. Lots of people are already not having any kids.

Are you suggesting I'm advocating euthanasia? I just meant natural reduction in population over time due to lower birth rates.

The more people we have the more specialization we can have. Do you want 1000 people designing a jet engine or 20?

What problems could we solve if we doubled the scientists and engineers working on it?

Plus every new birth is a lottery ticket for our civilization getting the next Einstein.

How many people is the ideal amount?

Great question. I feel more is better at this point and we’re not near any hard limit but I don’t know what a maximum would be.

Our technology is keeping up with our “hard limits”. If we were politically willing to build more nuclear reactors, we’d have zero problems with energy or water (desalination). Mineral scarcity turned out not to be. Land scarcity isn’t a thing (the entire world population could live in single family homes in roughly the same land area as Texas or Ukraine). And at our current tech level and rate of innovation, we could start have undersea domes or O’Neill cylinders by the time we ran into any of those limits.

Until per capita carbon emissions are below zero, falling population is a good thing.

I can’t think of any sentiment that I commonly hear that’s as ghoulish as that. As if the moral value of a human life is somehow less than her lifetime net carbon emissions. My only solace is the hope that people who believe that sort of thing will go extinct and be replaced by people whose values are closer to mine.

That seems to be the trend. It makes sense, people who choose a laziness born of pessimism are probably not virile enough to raise children. Surprised to see this kind of thinking here though; if you are an engineer who is good at solving problems, you should raise children that are also good at solving problems. Point them at our climate/sustainability/energy issues.

We're up against massive loss of biodiversity, loss of habitable space on the planet, and an enormous amount of human suffering and loss of human life due to the current and future effects of climate change. A smaller population will not solve these problems alone, but it will buy us more time to solve them.

FWIW, I'm not trying to promote anything extreme like population control policies, just pointing out that the current trend of population leveling off is generally a good thing.

And yet there is housing crisis almosy everywhere, prob govs will have to force people to move out from the big cities

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