Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

While the author is correct in terms of population growth, he has missed one critical point. We are heading into a population bomb not because of continued explosive population growth, but rather because of dwindling energy reserves.

Industrialization and fossil fuels are what have allowed the population to exponentially grow this far. But now that energy is more expensive to extract, food is becoming more and more expensive. We're already seeing food riots in the poorer nations, and that trend will continue to grow, leading to a massive energy shock and die-off never seen before.

This trend could be slowed by massive adoption of alternative energy, but the only currently viable alternative energy (nuclear) is not likely to be exploited in a meaningful way any time soon, considering political and weaponization concerns. If we're really lucky, we'll discover a solar energy tech + energy storage system efficient and cheap enough to see us through before too many people die off, but that's a big "if".

Malthus said the same thing - that we wouldn't be able to produce enough food because of whatever reason. And yet we humans found some way to continue living and producing food just fine. We increased our food yield and continue to do so. We found creative solutions to our problems with our available resources and there isn't any reason to think that we'll sudden lose the capacity to do this because of peak oil or lack of alternative fuels, neither of which were concepts in Malthus' time.

Malthus said that our population would eventually outgrow our capacity to produce food. What I'm saying is that we've already outgrown our future ability to produce food, and are now in a race against time to stabilize our energy supply before the population bomb goes off. And unless we do come up with a novel source of cheap energy, it WILL go off.

I read things like this because I so desperately want there not to be a population bomb, but the crux of their argument is waving their hands and saying "human ingenuity will take care of it." In essence it's a faith based argument cloaked in scientific jargon.

The only answer shy of taking state power and forcing powering down (deeply improbable) is building resilient local communities and food systems.

Novel? What about nuclear fission?

Just because one man said something back in the 18th century and was wrong does not mean that anyone who says something vaguely similar also is wrong.

World population, energy consumed, paper clips manufactured, fishes caught in the sea - all the graphs shows us a exponential growth.

There are physical limits to growth.

I would very much prefer to do something before we run into them rather then being around when it happens.

The author can't see the forest through the diaphragms. There is a bomb, and it's under-population. We've duped our daughters into equating motherhood with victimization and killed off the next generation of innovators.

There is an underpopulation problem, but it's not a global one. There's no danger to the human race if we enter a prolonged period of population decline. However, the local demographic problems can be severe. Many countries, particularly ones that don't permit a lot of immigration, are seeing their pension programs becoming insolvent because there aren't enough working people to support the retired people. And those who are worried about racial purity are always concerned with population decline, because it's always the immigrants who have higher birthrates.

If people start dying because we are not using enough nuclear power to supply our energy needs I think you will see public sentiment shift VERY rapidly.

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