Part of the problem is people thinking, "myself and everyone I could ever have the notion of caring about, and everyone they could ever have a notion of caring about" is the same thing as infinity.

The universe is so goddamned big that it's hard to fathom how long it would take us to actually ruin the entire thing, or at least the parts that aren't flying away from us at faster than the speed of light. But 5% annual growth for a billion years eats up a ridiculous amount of real estate.

If people what to have more than two children that it is absolutely impossible.

If 'people' have more than 2 then yes. If my N siblings collectively have 2N kids then we are at break-even.

As effort for return goes, defending people for not having children may be one of the most effective acts of environmentalism someone can engage in.

5 percent growth for just the length of human history overflows the double precision floating point type.

Also if we really value life, we should probably optimize for total lives lived. The universe will not last forever and entire galaxies are being lost to both the cosmic horizon and blackholes at an alarming rate.

For some reason Earth seems to be the only planet with life, so every second we spend without making life interplanetary we are snuffing out an unfathomable number of future human and animal lives.

I think you can value Life without maximizing number of total deaths (or total lives lived, same thing). At some point quality matters as well as quantity.

If maximizing the total number of lives is really all that's important, we should cease all human activity that isn't necessary to sending ants to other planets.

Nothing guarantees we're on a path that leads to that. We might very well be the proverbial frog being boiled alive

People think that all new tech = progress = we'll have star trek at some point.

Don't forget all these things are sci-fi, 101% sci-fi, for now all we did is put a few dozen dudes a few hundred thousand miles from earth inside tiny ass metal cans.

Some people apparently think it's easier to terraform Mars than keep our home planet clean. One being a dead rock, the other being a planet we evolved to thrive on for the last few billions years that we half way fucked up after 200 years of industrial "progress"

You don't have to believe that all new tech = progress. Just that on average new tech makes things better over the long term.

That second part has been true for pretty much all of human history.

You can't "snuff out" something that doesn't exist yet.

That aside, if that were indeed our goal, then we should be forcing people to breed as much as possible, even if it causes short-term quality of life decrease - since population growth is exponential, every human not born today that could be born means billions less in that hypothetical future.

Something about this reminds me of the authority anti-abortion activists bestow upon themselves.

It's easy to speak for the unborn because they cannot speak for themselves and will not contradict you.

Surprising though, how neatly the interests of the far future unborn align with those of the wealthy and powerful today. Ah well, just a coincidence I'm sure.

Wait, you think it's the anti-abortion people who are bestowing upon themselves the right to decide what the unborn want?

If you want to be suspicious of a "coincidence", then maybe consider that mothers tend to be more wealthy and powerful than their unborn children, and see how that wealth and power plays out.

How does anti-abortion benefit the wealthy?

This is sort of a selfish viewpoint to take, is it not? I mean I don't necessarily disagree with you, just... the reasoning seems strange to me.

It’s ultimately a humanist set of values that lead to that conclusion. If we value human happiness we should try to make as much of that as possible.

Honestly I only care about the happiness of humans that actually exist. The theoretical happiness of humans that were never born concerns me not even a little.

Sure, but more lives doesn't mean a net increase in happiness. A trillion people who live in the edge of starvation are probably less happy overall than a few billion who are well fed.

I mean, what's the point if being a humanist of you don't care about the human?

There's a whole philosophical discourse about this very topic[1] and I'm not well read enough on the topic to adequately hash out the "repugnant conclusion".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

Except starvation has gone down and quality of life has gone up for the large majority of the human population. Where are you coming from with "a trillion people who live in the edge of starvation"? Some assumed doomsday situation?

Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

> Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

Past performance does not guarantee future results. In fact, what this article is saying is that mathematically, our future results are practically guaranteed to be worse than they have been in the past. I don't find your comment at all persuasive because you have not even attempted to grapple with this issue presented in the article.

No, but past performance does provide evidence, and in the outside view, "no really, this really is the time where we're growing too much and are gonna collapse" has not been true yet. Will it happen eventually? It has to. Will this be the one? Probably not. Are we close to the limits where it'll actually occur? Probably not.

Did... did you read the article you're commenting on?

Is that a reasonable conclusion? Is it better to have a population of 8 billion or a population of 8 trillion where on average everyone is 1/1000 as happy? Is happiness even something where it makes more sense to measure a total rather than an average? If we value high speed in the 100m sprint, should we add more runners to ensure a higher total speed?

Sure, but that's like a bacterium saying "exponential growth is unsustainable" after having colonized the extent of a petri dish. Technically it's correct; practically it's irrelevant.

constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita.

> constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita.

In theory. In practice GDP growth is strongly correlated with things like energy use and waste/pollution generation. There will come a point when either that correlation has to be broken or growth has to halt.

The USA is the exact opposite example of this. US carbon emissions have fallen 15% since 2005 but the massive US economy continues to grow. There’s no requirement that more growth always == more pollution.

While GDP growth has historically been strongly correlated with energy use and pollution (including CO2/greenhouse gas emissions), due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000. The correlation is already broken, and it seems quite plausible to continue GDP growth even with a decrease in energy use and waste/pollution generation.

> due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already.

They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing manufacturing.

That strengthens the effect, but no, the growth is decoupled even if you take into account the energy and pollution cost of the outsourced manufacturing.

The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000, and a lot of physical goods have been effectively replaced with features in digital devices; and the main part of GDP growth for developed countries does not involve any growth in consumption of goods but rather the consumption of services - the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy has quite fundamental impact on the nature of growth.

> The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000

But thanks to the rebound effect we make/sell/trash more of them

Like with airplanes, it doesn't matter that Rolls-Royce make their engines 5% more efficient every 10 years if in the meantime you have 4 times as many plane flying.

Do you have a current source on the decoupling claim accounting for outsourcing?

That's a good trend if true.

It was true in the UK ten years ago (although this Guardian article[0] tried to downplay the success):

> The amount of greenhouse gases linked to goods and services consumed by UK households, including emissions from the foreign manufacture of imported products, rose by 3% between 2012 and 2013, the most recent data shows. But the figures are almost a fifth (19%) below the peak seen in 2007, when UK consumers were responsible for nearly 1.3bn tonnes of greenhouse gases.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/02/uks-carb...

> GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000

Only because we delocalised all the industries to Asia, globally co2 = gdp, before and after 2010

https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GDP-CO2-wor...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabe-Scelta-2/publicati...

A different analysis here:

https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...

Zeno has entered the chat.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_an...

population cannot shrink forever