Are we too many people or too few?

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/07/are-we-too-many-people-or-too-few.html

by nsoonhui • 4 years ago

27 73 4 years ago

backreaction.blogspot.com

Flozzin• 4 years ago

Something not discussed is the why. Why would we want more or less people. The less people, the less pollution. The more people, the more ???.

One way we have been able to have this many people, are modern farm practices. But those rely heavily on chemicals. Which is not ideal(dead ecosystems, poisoned water). Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.

zmgsabst3• 4 years ago

The more people, the more people.

I view human life as an inherently good thing to have more of — and certainly a higher priority than nebulous problems like “pollution”. You also didn’t give any reason why we should care about “pollution” more than human life.

Human life is beautiful and good.

Insanity• 4 years ago

Why do you think human life is beautiful and good? And is it more so than life of other species?

psyc• 4 years ago

Would you mind my asking what decade you were born in? I'm just curious.

Article is light on criteria. My criteria is misanthropy, personally.

paskozdilar2• 4 years ago

You also didn’t give any reason why we should care about “pollution” more than human life.

The only reason anyone cares about pollution is because it endangers human life.

Human life is beautiful and good.

I'm sure it is, if you only focus on the pleasantries.

alophawen• 4 years ago

The planet is literally littered by people.

They are starving and out of homes.

monkeywork2• 4 years ago

To what end? When a population gets to a size where continued growth actively hurts or lowers quality of life shouldn't that be considered.

If you had an arc ship sending ppl to hopefully a new planet. That ship has limited space and resources, at what point do you stop expanding the population of the crew and passengers?

thirdmunky• 4 years ago

This is a reductionist take on a complicated question. More environmental damage may mean fewer people in the future. Is more people now worth fewer people or a lower quality of life later?

Also, consider non-humans: how many additional people would make destroying the Great Barrier Reef worth it? If clearcutting the Amazon rainforest would increase the population cap by N, for what values of N would you do it?

H̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ life is beautiful and good.

BeFlatXIII• 4 years ago

Pollution reduces the quality of existing human life.

ako• 4 years ago

Pollution may destroy the ability for human life to exist, and you may end up with significant less human life if you keep adding more. Earth is like a boat, it’s great for a few passengers, but at some point you have too many and it sinks. And then you have zero passengers enjoying the boat.

kzrdude5• 4 years ago

Every species of organisms has potential for exponential growth - fill their niche. No organism has potential to grow without bound on just one planet, so there is a maximum number of individuals possible in the ecosystem. How many exactly depend on the environment and the other organisms in the ecosystem.

Human life is beautiful. Dolphin and butterfly life are beautiful. They are not in exactly in competition, but they have something in common which is that we can't grow their population size without bound.

OJFord3• 4 years ago

I think it depends on the country - substitute society, area, whatever as you prefer, an organisational unit - some would be advanced by more people; others would likely have an easier time advancing with fewer.

I think this is one root of colonialism: more people and land with which to expand our already developed ideas, processes, et al. - and also perhaps (though often/typically problematically, controversially, etc.) benefit them in doing so, bring our developed ideas, processes, et al. to them, saving them the development, a jump forward for them.

The most obvious example I can think of for this (the general idea, not colonialism) in the modern world is Canada: lots of land, well developed, few people; promoting net immigration.

(The UK has roughly double the population while Canada has about 40x the land area. I don't see many ads but something I've occasionally seen all my life is 'move to Canada' - like the colonial example they're helping us too, eh?)

monkeywork2• 4 years ago

In Canada however that positive net migration (I believe second highest in western world) and high immigrant percentage of population (forth highest I believe) comes at a massive cost when you realize Canada has not been matching population growth to housing and infrastructure.

Prior to pandemic we were building fewer than 0.4 new houses per person nationwide (down from 0.7 back in 2010), our healthcare system is very stressed with lowered population provinces (example Maritimes) having massive waits to get family doctors causing ppl to use ER for simple things adding major stress and delays there.

Most of the talk about Canada's RE market gets pushed to secondary causes or really reactions and symptoms of the core issues. Foriegn money, private investment, greedy landlords etc are all results of a basic supply and demand problem that the government could fix via zoning reform and immigration reform but seem to deflect away from instead giving ppl boogiemen to hate on instead.

Net migration into Canada is great and we benefit greatly by those who choose to come here however if it's not balanced by the government spending to support it Canada is heading for disaster in the next decade.

IdiocyInAction• 4 years ago

It's not just less pollution though. It's less people that might fulfill valuable societal roles that scale with the number of people and in many developed countries less people to look after/produce value for those in old age, which will lead to all sorts of unpleasantness.

Also, non-modern farm practices are also not ideal and I think if we were forced to switch to traditional agriculture we would still have a large adverse effect on ecosystems.

kken• 4 years ago

The more people, the more scaling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#Wrigh...

This is what brought us scientific and engineering progress.

The problem is, of course, that growing inequality stalls these mechanisms.

__alexs2• 4 years ago

This is what bought us the rate of progress we've become accustomed too. Why should we want it to be faster?

daniel-cussen• 4 years ago

The last 500 years's scientific progress is much less impressive when you adjust for the number of people it took to make all that progress.

somenameforme2• 4 years ago

Culture, art, technology, science, growth, exploration, communication, and so on. Basically advancement in nearly every measurable way of every aspect of society.

Food is not a limiting factor. China is a net exporter of food in a country of 1.4 billion on about 1.1 million km^2 of arable land. For context, the United States has about 1.6 million km^2. And the quantities of arable land can be expanded somewhat dramatically everywhere.

croes2• 4 years ago

Culture, art, technology, science, growth, exploration, communication, and so on. Basically advancement in nearly every measurable way of every aspect of society

I doubt that these depend on quantity and not quality.

formerkrogemp• 4 years ago

Food is not a limiting factor.

Food and more importantly, as you would know if you googled depleted aquifer, water are limiting factors. Always. You will always need those two. Most of our agricultural practices are unsustainable across multiple measures, especially water.

China is a net exporter of food in a country of 1.4 billion on about 1.1 million km^2 of arable land.

Saudi Arabia used to be a net exporter of wheat until about 5 years ago. Our arable land, the topsoil so vital to it, and the fresh water we overuse so much faster than it can be replenished worldwide are all hitting bottlenecks in the coming years. Egypt and Jourdan are fighting over the Nile. The Sahar and deserts in China are expanding despite great efforts otherwise. China is imposing its will in Thailand and Vietnam over their control of the headwaters of the Mekong. The Europeans are worried about the Po and Rhine being lower than usual with glacier meltwater being depleted faster and faster with rising temps and milder winters. Aquifers built over thousands or millions of years are being pumped at rates unrecorded for agriculture and residential use. Ogalalla and western US aquifers are sinking the land and running out. Encroachment of freshwater systems by erosion and saltwater from rising sea levels and fierce storm surges are threatening ecosystems and coastal farming. A pernicious side effect of a hotter atmosphere is increased vaporization of water from lake reservoirs causing water loss exceeding water use of cities and populations. The outlook and ongoing crises in places like California are grim, but there's a lot we can do. Price water more closely to its real cost. Build desalination plants. Implement water saving tech into manufacturing and households. Water loss from reservoirs and recording depletion rates of aquifers can give us better data of the scale and rate of the depletion to inform the urgency. More data can be collected. Swale water runoff and improve land management techniques to retain water. Implement drip irrigation and water efficient and drought resistant crops. Build cisterns and modify reservoirs to improve water storage and retention. Chinampas can be built. Many other efforts and policies can be implemented, but they are all costly and take time. Perhaps that's why this issued has been ignored for so long, because we turn on the tap and the water always comes out. Until it doesn't anymore. We've certainly been warned. Hydrologists have been warning about this for almost a century.

concordDance• 4 years ago

Note that this assumes the new people are statistically just as likely to contribute in those ways as the average person today/40 years ago but we don't know this is true (and indeed there's some weak evidence it's false)

dilap• 4 years ago

But it's not like you get that automatically just by having a giant mass of people. There needs to be a certain life-style and culture to create those things. What density of humans is ideal for that?

The calculation shouldn't just be, "what's the maximum # of people we can physically support on earth?" It should be, what's a nice number that makes life pleasant and fulfilling and leaves time for leisure?

And while the earth is very large, the number of places that are truly special is much smaller.

For example, if you look over the whole earth, what fraction of it is at the level of, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, for sheer natural beauty and enjoyability of surroundings?

A small fraction indeed, I would say!

(Of course there is some room for personal preference in here; maybe you're a desert person or whatever. But though squishly defined, the point still stands.)

Today, it's expensive and stressful to live in the Bay Area, because of overcrowding.

But look back at say the middle of the 20th century -- it was still an amazing, beautiful place, but it was much less crowded and much less expensive! This provided fertile ground for interesting artistic and cultural movements, like the beats & their poetry & the hippies & their music.

Now it's much harder to have those kind of cultural and artistic movements in SF, because just basic physical survival is much more of a struggle.

haunter• 4 years ago

The more people, the more ???

Wealth for the 1%. The rulers need a group of wage slaves who will serve the foundation of capitalism. The whole system is designed so average workers can never get ahead but can be exploited.

oneoff7864• 4 years ago

There’s no particular reason to think pollution is a function of population size. It’s far more dependent on societal factors like industry and energy usage and freight and what not.

throw_nbvc1234• 4 years ago

Because it's easier to make GDP go up when you have an increasing population.

wooque2• 4 years ago

The more people, the more people. Human experience is beautiful. If you don't think so, don't have children and end your life prematurely. If you are still here, means you are hypocrite that enjoys human experience but don't want others to do so.

carapace4• 4 years ago

Overcrowded conditions are not conducive to the good life. E.g. Life in Kowloon Walled City wasn't beautiful

ramblerman• 4 years ago

The more water the more water. If you don’t think so just drown yourself.

I enjoy going for a swim, it doesn’t mean I want there to be no more land.

Why would you simplify such a tricky topic to a binary decision

mg• 4 years ago

I think we are like mold on a tomato that is floating in space.

At the moment, we are barely visible. But over time, the whole tomato (planet earth) will turn into mold.

Earth is 10^24 kg.

So far, humans are something like 10^11 kg.

Maybe 10^13 or 10^14 kg if we count all our stuff, like roads and buildings etc?

So we still have about 99.9999999% of "colonizing earth" in front of us.

diegoperini• 4 years ago

Earth is 10^24 kg

I'd use diggable surface mass. :)

kzrdude5• 4 years ago

The biosphere - the part of earth that supports life - is like the skin of an apple, a very thin layer. I would compare against its mass, not all the rock in the mass of the planet.

Yaa101• 4 years ago

There is a sweet spot between the number of people and the number of people having a quality life. Too little then not enough progress and comfort. To many then not enough resources per person, too little space per person. Not all our problems are solvable with science (usage) and some of are problems are caused by science (usage).

Bancakes• 4 years ago

As with any operations research, you start with the goal. What do you stand to gain?

The way I see it:

maximizing the economy means maximizing the population and the money they put back into it
maximizing quality of life means reducing the population and allowing cities to spread out horizontally, more personal space and self-reliance
maximizing survival of the species means reducing lifetimes and increasing birthrates

And I see these as mutually exclusive goals. Ask yourself if you would be happier in any other point in history. The men who engineered Sputnik likely couldn't afford common imported goods, and that didn't stop them from living a successful, rewarding life.

oneoff7864• 4 years ago

Is that a random assumption?

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

Short of stature, heavily built, with head sitting awkwardly on his body, with brown eyes glistening with intelligence, he was a skeptic, a cynic and a pessimist who took the gloomiest view of the future. 'We are all going to be shot and there will be no obituary' (Khlopnut bez nekrologa, Хлопнут без некролога – i.e. "we will all vanish without a trace") was his favorite expression.
On 3 December 1960, Korolev suffered his first heart attack. During his convalescence, it was also discovered that he was suffering from a kidney disorder, a condition brought on by his detention in the Soviet prison camps. He was warned by the doctors that if he continued to work as intensely as he had, he would not live long. Korolev became convinced that Khrushchev was only interested in the space program for its propaganda value and feared that he would cancel it entirely if the Soviets started losing their leadership to the United States, so he continued to push himself.

jodrellblank3• 4 years ago

All your ways you see it don't seem to be the only options:

maximizing the economy means maximizing the population and the money they put back into it

Maximizing the economy means keeping the population the same and increasing the velocity of money. Maximizing the economy means having more automated transactions, regardless of the human population. Maximizing the economy means increasing the value added to human society with each transaction, and increasing the number of transactions...

maximizing quality of life means reducing the population and allowing cities to spread out horizontally, more personal space and self-reliance

Clearly no, otherwise maximum quality of life would have been agricultural life thousands of years ago, pre-dentists, pre-anaesthetic, pre-central heating, pre-drinking-water, pre-freezers, etc. etc. Quality of life can be improved in cities compared to countryside - e.g. nearby conveniences, more people to socialise with, more interesting things to do - as well as reduced.

maximizing survival of the species means reducing lifetimes and increasing birthrates

Why reducing lifetimes? Fighting Polio increases the lifetime of potential Polio patients as well as the survival of the species by taking away another cause of death. Improving cold weather clothing improves individual lifetime in freezing climates as well as expanding the areas the species can live in.

Ask yourself if you would be happier in any other point in history.

The 1990s was pretty good; yes anaesthesia and computers, but also yes lower population, affordable housing, better state of the NHS, fewer vehicles on the roads, and I was younger which was nice. But still, it's an illusion of an idea - people make happiness where and when they are. Happy people existed in history before {arbitray recent cutoff year}, and if you were one of them and your life wasn't particularly awful, you would be normally happy with it and see that around you. The Hedonic Treadmill (as you gain something which makes you short-term happy, the effect fades and you return to your normal happiness level) is a thing; you say you'd be happier with a new widget, but that only lasts a short while. Same in reverse, you think you'd be unhappier without a widget, but that would only last a short while too, as long as you have the basics. People predict that getting fired will ruin their lives, a year later they say it improved their lives a lot. (See Dan Gilbert's TED Talk on the science of happiness).

xnx• 4 years ago

I still haven't seen an explanation of why more people at the same time is better than having them spread out over multiple generations. Same number of "Einsteins" (though I don't subscribe to that reasoning), just not at the same time.

id• 4 years ago

If I know I'll get a rare type of cancer in 10 years, I'd rather have 10 experts working on a treatment right now than 1. I won't have the time to wait for 10 generations of cancer research. Timing is important, too.

pcthrowaway2• 4 years ago

Oh good, we should have as many kids as possible so we can get 100 billion people working on climate change at the same time

edit: parent commenter removed a claim that it was beneficial to have more people working on issues like climate change simultaneously

oneoff7864• 4 years ago

Front loading is useful.

kzrdude5• 4 years ago

Front loading of human population started in 1800s and is now almost complete.

I think it worked? Scientific and technological progress has been great.

jodrellblank3• 4 years ago

How are you going to have a single Chess Grandmaster alive on the planet? Who will they play against to learn? Whom will they compete against to get really good? Where will the enthusiasm and education come from to get them interested at all? Who will their peers be to certify them as any good? If you need two people to lift a heavy weight, it's not possible unless their lifetimes overlap enough that they are both strong and healthy at the same time.

Insects with individual neurons alive for a billion years didn't produce a single technological invention.

If you need a civilisation where some group digs iron ore, some group processes it into steel, some group processes that into sheets and pipes and tools and valves, some group processes those into chairs and desks, some group uses those to build computers, some group uses those to build wind tunnels, some group uses those to build rocket engines, some group uses those to build rockets, some group uses those to build satellites ... it wouldn't work if your only source of plate steel was 1,000 years old and your only source of valves was some weird pile of leftovers from 500 years ago when they didn't understand your use case at all, and if you're plans for your rocket are that someone will fly it 200 years after you die...

throw0101a• 4 years ago

Meta: anyone know why *.blogspot.com seems to default to plain-HTTP and not HTTPS?

(Not judging, just curious.)

logicalmonster• 4 years ago

The question of whether we're too few people or too many people is dancing around the wrong question.

Whether you attribute this difference to nature or nurture, different groups of people have wildly different levels of consumption, productivity, crime rates, scientific achievements, and other attributes.

The real problem we're faced with is that it's the most productive societies that are not reproducing.

Would anybody fear the overall quality of life on planet Earth if productive, low-crime, and scientifically motivated Japanese people (as one example) were the ones suddenly reproducing like crazy and there were an extra billion Japanese people on Earth in 25 years and an extra 5-10 random Japanese families moved into your neighborhood?

carapace4• 4 years ago

I think it's clear that the Amish inherit the Earth.

js8• 4 years ago

I think liberal-leaning people tend not to see resource conflicts as an issue. Liberalism was founded on the idea (utopian even at the time) that everybody can get a piece of land, and it's entirely up to them what they do with it, if they succeed or not. And that economy, through trade on the free market, is a positive sum game. So inherently, this assumes there is enough resources for everybody to be free in that sense.

There are two opposition camps to the liberal view, which acknowledge the possible conflict. Conservative camp which believes that might makes right, that is, resource conflict should be resolved through force and it is normal to do so. Then there is socialist/progressive camp which believes in equal distribution of resources during scarcity, and the conflict should be resolved by treating everyone as equal.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

I've always thought that the way to look at human population is to pretend you're looking at a population of some other species, say beavers. Beavers are a good analogy because beavers live in social communities and their dam construction activities have significant effects on local ecosystems, generally positive from the standpoint of species that like lakes.

With that thought in mind, let's look at global human distributions:

https://neo.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=SEDAC_POP

The thing that pops out is that humans don't appear to like living in deserts and polar regions, and dense forest/jungle doesn't seem that popular either. Given that humans evolved on the African savannah, perhaps this is related to some deep-seated genetic preference for living in valleys and grasslands with nice views? Note also there's a tendency to congregate in many coastal areas, likely related to the ability to harvest food from the ocean.

From time to time in history, there have been attempts to 'green the deserts', all of which have come to not much - the book 'Cadillac Desert' is a nice discussion of these efforts in the American West, which have created a few tenuous pockets of humanity in places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City:

https://xkcd.com/2399/

All communities that rely on mining water from aquifers are tenuous in nature and will quite likely dry up and blow away once the aquifer is exhausted. I'm still waiting for the first Dune stillsuit to be manufactured ('feces are processed in the thigh pads' being a drawback). Consumption of water distilled from human urine is still not that popular, either.

As far as the fossil-fueled global warming issue, let's take California which is emmitting on the order of 400 million tons of fossil-sourced CO2 equivalents per year with a population of about 40 million people. If we go to the other end of the scale, sub-Saharan Africa has about 1.1 billion people, and according to World Bank data that region is emitting on the order of 900 million tons of fossil-sourced CO2 equivalents per year... assuming this data is roughly correct, the avg Californian is emitting about 15X per year as the avg sub-Saharan African (a lower spread than I expected actually).

California could reduce its fossil fuel consumption to 1/15th of present usage while maintaining a steady, well-shaped population distribution by deploying renewable energy, storage and electric vehicles at scale. This, needless to say, is more likely than a 15-fold population reduction. And, similarly, sub-Saharan Africa could also meet its entire entire needs without fossil fuels, sitting right on the equator as it does. From this climate-centric perspective, population is not really the problem, as long as it stabilizes soon.

There is of course another issue, i.e. leaving space for other species to live in, aka preservation of wilderness, which is generally preferable to wall-to-wall humans packed front-to-rear across the entire planet, in my opinion.

jodrellblank3• 4 years ago

"Note also there's a tendency to congregate in many coastal areas, likely related to the ability to harvest food from the ocean."

Maybe, but if you have boats to go fishing then the easiest way to get 100 miles away to make a new settlement will be by boat and that coincidentally leaves your new settlement on the coast as well. 100 miles slog through undeveloped land and around valleys and hills and carrying all your supplies on your back is much harder. Same with your comment about valleys, the easiest way through land is to float down a river and that will include going through a valley and your new settlement being on the river in a valley, and the last settlements being at the river mouth and on the coast. And water makes for the easiest trade routes - a camel train can only compete in temperate open plains, not in polar regions or the harshest deserts or thick jungle.

"humans don't appear to like living in deserts and polar regions [..] deep-seated genetic preference for living in valleys and grasslands with nice views?"

Perhaps a deep-seated genetic preference for drinking water and not freezing to death?

carapace4• 4 years ago

Wendell Berry has a great essay called "What are people for?" (in the book of the same name) As several people have already pointed out, the article leaves the question open. Too many or few for what?

A recent comment here on HN seems to me to provide the missing piece of the puzzle:

There is this nonsense idea that the earth would be fine if humans didn’t come along. It wouldn’t. This planet is in its death throes. Life has delicately established itself in a habitable zone that is coming to an end. The carbon cycle has a good 800M years left before photosynthesis starts grinding to a halt. That might seem like a long time, but life’s been here for a good 4B years - we are 75% through life on earth. It’s taken evolution 4B years to print its first ticket off this rock: humans.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31411743

- - - -

Carrying capacity is a very broad measure. People can generates more life than we consume, it's fun and easy. (E.g. the "Grow Biointensive" system is a turn-key method that produces a nutritionally-complete diet and increases soil mass and fertility over time in aprox 500 square meters per person. http://growbiointensive.org/ )

So the "carrying capacity" is something that can actually increase with the population. If we live in ecological harmony then the limit to population growth will be something else.

- - - -

There's no free lunch. Exponential population growth will lead to a crash (or sea change) eventually. Even if we postulate Faster-than-Light spaceships, the end comes eventually. The internal volume of the "known universe" will eventually produce people faster than they can escape to unpopulated regions even if they have FTL spaceships.

- - - -

"The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall T. Savage has a wonderfully inspiring image of a green galaxy on the cover: humanity has brought life to the stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project

drivingmenuts• 4 years ago

Well, of course Elon thinks there’s too few people - the population isn’t high enough to raise pressure to get people to Mars or work for Tesla or whatever he wants done this week. Not for a second do I believe he cares about humans as humans instead of us being resources for him and others like him to somehow monetize.

While we are not approaching the carrying capacity of the planet, the population has exceeded our logistical capabilities or at least our logistical willpower. There’s too many people who live in abject misery while a few successful ones have entirely too many resources to hand. If we work on reducing population through attrition, then we might force the haves to spread out some wealth in order to get their wants.

As someone without descendants, and who will never have descendants, of course, I’m biased. But I also don’t think I’m wrong.

beefman• 4 years ago

Santa Clara county has a population density of about 600/km^2, or 0.4 acres per person. If we populate half the Earth's land at this density and make the rest wilderness, world population would be about 50 billion. The Earth has unlimited energy at this scale for desalination, indoor heating and cooling, etc. In Santa Clara county, dramatic measures aren't even needed. My family of 4 lives on 0.3 acres and it's technically possible to raise all our food here, including some meat.

In this drought year we've received ~ 70,000 gallons of rainwater to date. We've used about twice that but it would be easy to cut our use in half by changing the landscaping. Likewise we could make all our energy with a fission reactor in our basement. The actinides in a cubic meter of earth from our yard could power our 5-bedroom home and an EV for over 4 years.

Of course it'd be easier to use higher grade ore and share a reactor with neighbors. The whole neighborhood could run on a reactor the size of one of the transformers in the substation down the street.

The planet can easily support 50 billion people until the sun destroys it, without even feeling particularly crowded.

Are we too many people or too few?

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