I find it astonishing that people have an easier time believing we can colonise Mars than that we can colonise the centre of Australia.
The average person would rather live in a crammed Sydney apartment complex then live in the middle of the Simpson desert.
Mars is new. We really don't know what will happen. There are a group of people throughout history that have "chanced it" and gone to the new world out of the hope they can build something better. You will have the same rush on Mars.
Also, you drive through a lot of less arid farm land before you get anywhere near desert. Including past dying country towns (many below the Goyder Line). We could increase the density of rural properties (from large farms down to farmlets, etc) or do more to boost living in fading townships well before there was any reason to make the desert more habitable.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/14/just-a-m...
What makes Mars interesting is that it’s hard. Nobody is arguing that we should go to Mars because it is easy!
Help me understand your view because I simply cannot fathom how you must think to want 500M people in Australia.
Have you traveled? Do you want to live the way people live in overcrowded countries? Do you think there will be some trickle down economic effect for you? Do you place any value on the environment?
My point is that people assume we can turn Mars, an entire arid planet with no water, into a habitable place but that we can't turn deserts on earth into habitable, arable land.
The earth is finite. And it becomes undesirable and polluted long before we hit a hard population ceiling. I just do not understand people who would happily see the entire earth destroyed just so we can have a few more billion humans. we have too many already.
almost all high density places in the world are shitholes. Japan is an exception, but I don't have faith that Australia could be. Sydney is already seeing net loss of residents (excluding new migrants) because it is becoming overcrowded.
Australia is already "big Australia", Australia's record on habitat and species destruction is horrific. It just astounds me that people would think doubling the population of western countries (or any country) would be a good idea.
I don't buy the "eugenics" equivalence, any more than you can connect any sort of policy or technology to genocide if you tried hard enough. By advocating for massive populations you are implicitly advocating for tiered class system of haves and have-nots in my opinion.
On the contrary, though, advocating for population reduction is inherently classist, since this requires government management, and ruling classes will inevitably protect their own ranks first.
The result of such modes of thinking is not academic. The UK's prime minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, is not the hapless buffoon he plays on camera, and his COVID management policy disproportionately kills the poor by a factor of 3.7[1].
Inequity of survival is the actual consequence of any managed population reduction.
[1] https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/charts-and-infogr...
Many people are. Our current global population is massive. Humans and their livestock account for 96% of all mammal biomass on earth and we're rapidly exterminating the remaining 4%. And people want it to grow significantly, e.g., the person I just replied to.
> On the contrary, advocating for population reduction is inherently classist, since this requires government management, and ruling classes will inevitably protect their own ranks first.
No it doesn't, that's just false. The most highly consuming countries on earth have naturally stable or declining populations.
And making arguments about the ruling class protecting their own ranks or deploying authoritarian government control over others doesn't really make sense because they do that now, they'll do that when populations are growing, they'll do that when populations are shrinking. You can't have that as your argument.
However, since they're quite clearly a load of intentional misrepresentation and false equivalences, they don't wash with a critical outside observer.
> You can't have that as your argument
Excuse me, no, as with the previous misrepresentation of countervailing positions, once again you don't get to decide what someone else's argument is. This coercive attitude is consistent, but it doesn't hold any water.
There's no proposal to eliminate governments and ruling classes, so ignoring the realities is facile. The outcome of a downward trajectory is literally killing people, and this is not OK.
If I can make the choice to recycle, eat less cows, cycle instead of walking; why can't I make the choice to have 2 children instead of 5. Or even have 1.
I believe I understand how strongly some environmentalists believe lower population is "the answer" especially in an Australian context of concern about water and carrying capacity of an overwhelmingly arid landscape. This isn't a random belief, it's grounded in some simple economics about the environment. I just think it's usually over simplified, and lacks rigour.
The problem is that the historical associations to racism have to be confronted. And they rarely are. Oddly, the same people who push this small carrying capacity line often also oppose Gates and others working to improve access to contraception and abortion. Perhaps the Indian emergency under Indira Gandhi and the Chinese mass sterilisation campaigns left "scars" of concern.
Dick Smith didn't do enough to distance himself from Pauline Hanson.
(I am not a small Australia believer btw. Even noting the above we could have environmentally acceptable 50m population here)