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Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by superchroma on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:06AM (#32552507)
There are whales full of plastic and the rain isn't safe to drink. How can adding more humans help??
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by samwillis on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:12AM (#32552579)
We can have population growth and still solve the impending environmental disaster.

On top of that, a declining human population results is an increasing young:old ratio. Fewer younger working age people supporting an increasingly older population. Socially and economically that will be a disaster, which will make solving ecological issues significantly harder.

Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by tzs on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:59AM (#32553315)
We can have growth, but the growth rate must decline over time. For example the current growth rate of world population is around 1.1% per year. It is easy to see that it cannot remain above 1% for more than 12101 years (assuming FTL travel is not discovered).

Proof: Right now every living human is either on Earth or close to Earth. Without FTL it follows that 1 year from now every living human must be within 1 light year of Earth, 2 years from now every living human must be within 2 light years of Earth, and so on. 12101 years from now every living human must be within 12101 years of Earth.

If you calculate the volume of a sphere of radius 12101 light years centered on Earth and divide that volume by what the population would be after 12101 years of 1% annual growth you get 0.04 m^3 per person.

But the volume of an average human is ~0.06 m^3, which is greater than 0.04 m^3.

At 0.1% annual growth it would take a little over 127000 years to run out of room.

At 0.01% annual growth we've got 1.34 million years.

Of course the actual limits are much lower because the above is assuming that we can pack humans so that there is no space that is not occupied by humans which we cannot do because, among other things, (1) our shapes don't fit together perfectly to allow such tight packing, (2) there isn't enough mass in the 12101 light year sphere to make that many humans, and (3) we would need to use much of that space for the infrastructure needed to support humans.

Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by graywh on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:14AM (#32552611)
> We can have population growth and still solve the impending environmental disaster.

But will we?

Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by nibbleshifter on Monday August 22, 2022 @12:03PM (#32553374)
Clearly not. We aren't going to solve it.

We probably will continue to expand though.

Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by ErikVandeWater on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:27AM (#32552835)
We could always allow more legal immigration.

Some countries don't have unfunded liabilities that can share some of their population so we can keep the Ponzi scheme going.

Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by secondbreakfast on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:10AM (#32552565)
Reminds me of the George Carlin bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdSi9NW5u3E

Humor aside, it's a depressing worldview to me that each marginal human is a net negative. I take the opposite view, that each human is a net positive - and we need all the brainpower we can get to solve all of our problems.

Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by superchroma on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:20AM (#32552719)
We could solve a lot of our problems right now if people were prepared to change how they live and accept a decent amount more responsibility (e.g. sort waste by hand, etc.). Scaling up problems typically hasn't helped, and you get novel issues at large scale (e.g. parasites and diseases thrive due to monoculture in huge farms). As Bill Burr noted, we could all drive tanks to work if there weren't as many of us. It's cynical, but there's more room for largesse at small scale.
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by secondbreakfast on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:39AM (#32553000)
Love bill burr
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by ErikVandeWater on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:29AM (#32552851)
Some people are certainly not contributing much brainpower. If only the smartest people were having kids I could see this being true.
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by AyyWS on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:22AM (#32552737)
Pyramids were built with slave labor. Poor sanitation lead to the black plague. Imagine if they all stopped having kids, because they thought Egyptian slavery would never end and the black plague was insurmountable?
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by jacobolus on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:33AM (#32552924)
Pyramids were not built with slave labor. This is a myth.
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by mantas on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:12AM (#32552581)
If people who understand these issues don't procreate, then people who don't understand this will dominate and keep ruining earth into... ground?
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by soylentcola on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:45AM (#32553098)
I believe there was a (logically/ethically questionable, yet amusing) film that outlined this exact scenario.
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by schredder on Monday August 22, 2022 @01:43PM (#32554745)
Idiocracy?
Re:On Car Seats as Contraception by dylan604 on Monday August 22, 2022 @11:10AM (#32552560)
Because the humans that are currently existing aren't helping doesn't mean that one that might come along later doesn't have that "Eureka!" moment.