What's the point of saving the Earth if no one is alive to experience it?

Far all we know we're the only place in the universe where complex life exists, if we die other species may still stay around to experience it.

Until they get smoked by an asteroid again. Even if nonhuman life somehow doesn’t get wiped out by other factors it’ll all die with the sun. If we are the only place where life exists then that means humanity is the only chance life has of continuing after this planet is gone.

Pretty sure humans would wipe themselves before wiping rest of the biosphere

I feel like you zoomed right past the point of having an equilibrium between population and what the planet can support

Replacement fertility is around 2.10 kids per woman. Most rich countries are way below that line.

Although that leads to the mother of all natural selection - after a few generations, you'll have selected almost exclusively for families that have lots of kids. My bet is that fertility will flatten out and recover a good bit over the next few decades.

Global replacement rate is about 2.3 so ...

I wonder when many in those 'rich' countries will learn that they need to embrace that instead of 'build the wall'.

Anyway, I don't think replacement fertility is the right measure here. Replacement fertility could be crashing, but if the ratio of 'modern'* humanity is increasing as it is, then the problem remains ... there's probably a term for this if anyone knows.

* (by 'modern' [super air-quoted] I mean, those who have the wants and desires and ability to get the goods and services of the 'rich' countries).

The planet by itself can only support a few million humans. It’s human technology and intelligence that support the rest.

That is an interesting distinction, the order we bring to things--nature refined and directed. Makes me recall this analogy I remember reading years ago about a Japanese Zen garden not being something you'd experience in nature but rather only from a human tended and curated garden. That image changed the way I think about nature and humans in nature.

This type of human-centric view is exactly why we're in this mess to begin with.

There are other species on this planet too, you know. What about them?

gotta keep it pristine for those lower organisms who will have a better shot at utopia than we ever could.

But seriously, I always see the planet as on a finite timescale anyways with the lifetime of our sun being the limiting factor (which is interesting because it's the sun that gives us all our energy for the most part ignoring nuclear). Once the sun goes kaput that's it, we better be intergalactic by then. So I wonder can we think of perhaps maximizing the number of civilizational hours spent under the sun on Earth. Is that a good framework to go by. Put another way say the sun goes out in the year 10,000, and we are to judge two scenarios

A) humans go extinct in the year 7,500 B) humans go extinct in the year 9,000

All else being equal what scenario would people prefer and why.

Our civilization doesn't have thousands of years ahead of it, unless something changes radically.

7500 - 9000 is just a wishful thinking ... we won't make it there without functioning ecosystems

Most of the carbon footprint on the planet comes from the relatively low number of people in the US and Europe.

Not having kids and consuming like crazy won't save anything.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?

(Don't forget we've outsourced our manufacturing to China)

https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-worst-places-...

Countries contributing the least to the climate crisis are feeling the worst of its effects

> Most of the carbon footprint on the planet comes from the relatively low number of people in... Europe

That's not so true now, China emits as much CO2 per capita as Europe does, and quite a bit more than the greener European countries (e.g. France, Sweden, the UK). This remains even after adjusting for consumption rather than production.

> That's not so true now

Maybe not now, I was talking about cummulative footprint. Even now China is a third of EU + UK + US together.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions (see 1950-1980)

It seems obvious that it's US & EU who made the China the polluting giant it is now.

> Most of the carbon footprint on the planet comes from the relatively low number of people in the US and Europe.

> Not having kids and consuming like crazy won't save anything.

Most of the people on this site are American or European. You are the problem you name.

I'm aware.

If you think that population trends are still exponential then you’ve been living under a rock

Yup, if all countries got to the "1st world countries" birth rates the population would slowly start to drop, maybe even equalize at some point.

Population collapse is like a banking collapse, it happens slowly at first and then all at once.

Well if you don't fix the problem of "it's too dystopian to even think about having children", sure

That’s not the main reason why so many more people are childless now. We have a long road ahead to fix this.

At a global scale yes. Now look at specific countries/continents, some are absolutely exploding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media...

https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/

They currently use a tiny fraction of the energy the west does (and pollute a tiny fraction), they'll eventually catch up in "quality of life", with all the comes with it (exploding energy consumption)

And they’ll follow the same curve that India did and China before them and so on but I’ll bet the time scale will be greatly compressed because they benefit from all of our experience and technology and having so many more countries ahead of them on the curve who will invest in them.

Yeah but my kids' kids are going to figure out how to make cows that can photosynthesize.

A modest proposal -- your kids could just figure out how to photosynthesize directly.

Demographic collapse is also a very bad thing.

And it's even more of a tragedy of the commons than simply not eating meat/dairy.

is this a longtermism?