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Comment by fiter | Hacker News Reader

I think that neither of the historical trend models are going to be realistic except by chance. Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns. Basically, I'm not sure that the past situations and solutions will be the same as the future situation and non-/solutions.

Also, this misses a big part of what's important to me. The standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?

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> Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns.

You might want to consult the factual record of tens of thousands of years of farmers on that particular point of view. ;) You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.

>he standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?

For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over. So I'd say, if we can manage it, this trend will continue. I think thats the point of the article: there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.

(There are only psychological reasons. A fact proven, nearly, by a lot of the responses in this thread ..)

> there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.

The linked article doesn't say we can sustain our numbers indefinitely, It argues that we can grow our numbers indefinitely. Grow != sustain.

> You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.

Wouldn't science suggest we model based on the systems as they are instead of past performance? Let me hypothesize for a moment here to create a situation where the past performance may fail for predicting the future: (1) Assume that plants have traditionally been nutrient limited. (2) We are no longer nutrient limited. (3) We are now insolation to stored energy limited. We don't have a good way to increase insolation, so we'd better come up with a way to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. (Not to say that there aren't plenty of ways around this. Maybe we'll use solar cells to power chemical sugar making plants.)

> For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over.

You quoted me, but I'm having a hard time interpreting your response in the context of you understanding me. I was stating that we might be better off with less population, not simply that the standard of living can increase with an increasing population. To state it again, we could have X% increase with double the population, but with our current population we might have Y%. Is Y > X?

> I'm not sure that the past situations and solutions will be the same as the future situation and non-/solutions.

The future will be completely different than the past, but in the same way -- consistent with the Logistic function and its description of the relation between species and environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

There are any number of unpredictable aspects to how events unfold, but physical laws remain the same.

We've already demonstrated that we can bend physical laws to our needs, or have you missed that point in your rush to cast away any faith in the human species' ability to manage its resources? Because: managing our resources is what makes the difference, entirely, between extinction and survival, and we've been doing precisely that for 200,000 years so far.

To be fair, we'd both agree that we're bending "natural laws" not physical laws. Right? I mean: we're not getting energy for free, we're just capturing more of it.

> We've already demonstrated that we can bend physical laws to our needs ...

Bend doesn't equal break. Obviously a species will adopt more and more ingenious measures to stave off the inevitable, but that doesn't change the inevitable, only its arrival date.

The basic equation collides a finite planet with an infinite capacity for growth. Ultimately the finite planet determines the outcome, not the infinite capacity for growth.

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