Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

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Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion.

He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."

India got there on overpopulation. Total fertility rate around 6 in 1965. India does not have enough water for its population.[1] China would have hit similar problems if not for their one-child policy. China managed to avoid the overshoot when medicine starts to work but the economy hasn't developed yet. India didn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India

Erlich did not say "there will be scarcity." Erlich said that there would be hundreds of millions dead to starvation.

If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make all the freshwater you need, even recycle your own wastewater nearly infinitely.

This is a technological and economic problem, not an overpopulation problem.

> If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make all the freshwater you need

I don't believe that would be true on a large scale because the seaside would quickly become polluted with brine, and then having an infinite supply of uranium wouldn't help you.

Desalination only works in the long term if there is an unlimited amount of body water to dilute the brine produced by the process.

Do you have to release brine directly into the seaside? What about long pipes with holes that go 50-100 kilometers into the sea?

There's no question of polluting all the oceans with brine. They get freshwater from the rain and the salt came from the oceans in the first place. We aren't net destroying water molecules.

That's a very theoretical point of view. How to maintain those pipes? In two or three years, they will be full of small mollusks and other seafood.

There are many sewer and storm outlets just like this all around the world already

Only the outside. The inside will be full of brine. Once the salinity exceeds a certain value nothing but extremophile bacteria can survive in it.

No, you just evaporate the brine and then you have a large source of lithium for battery production.

No, just use the brine as dirty electrolyte :-)

Access to the sea, uranium, and thirty years of economic planning, money, and political will to build the infrastructure.

We'd have nuclear desalinization in Los Angeles is it was that easy.

That article says climate change is an important cause of water scarcity in India. India didn't cause climate change alone or even in large part.

India's TFR dropped below 2 in 2024.

Unfortunately a lot of people are now saying we need extreme curtailing of rights -- largely womens' rights -- because of underpopulation. The answer to every panic is always curtailing of rights. Scary thing may happen therefore we need big alpha ape to fix it for us by bashing people on head with big rock. Grunt, grunt.

Right this is what I am saying. And I think that we should be outrageously skeptical of such people and oppose them with fervor. In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe. These people were wrong in every possible dimension and has we listened to them we would have committed a world-historic evil.

Similarly, we are starting to see people say that we need to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world (this time based on gender) in order to prevent future catastrophe. I suspect that these people will be wrong in every possible dimension and that if we listen to them that we will be committing a world-historic evil.

> In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe.

What is this referring to?

Erlich (and others) said that we needed to do the following

* programs of mass sterilization in the third world

* a "triage" program where we partition the third world into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from our world order such that they will simply all starve to death.

It was all very very racist.

I kinda think this answers the question as to why these ideas get a pass: they offer a way to be racist and advocate racist eugenics policies without admitting you are racist, even to yourself.

I see racism in the population collapse panic too unfortunately, at least in the popular discourse around it. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.

Paging rayiner: I believe his dad was involved in population planning for the Ford Foundation in BD.

In the 70s, under IMF guidance, several governments of 3rd world countries implemented policies of mass sterilization.

Which people are saying we need to curtail womens' rights because of underpopulation?

It's a huge theme on the secular nationalist right. Visit Xhitter for 5 minutes.

This seems like a wild take. All that I see right wingers saying is that there are huge benefits to families when a mother doesn’t have to work, that we should not exclusively frame being a SAHM as some kind of brutal oppression, and that we should advance policies that make it easier for families to do that.

Is there some shitposting fringe that says dumb things like “abolish all BC”? Yes, just as there are matching “sOcIaLiSt” idiots who think that if we “just” confiscate all of Musk and Bezos’ net worth, it’ll pay off everyone’s student loans plus pay for UBI, free college in perpetuity, and buy all of Gen Z nice houses.

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