> If there were few of us, building replacements for our engines would be more economical than bombing our neighbors to influence gas prices.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of human motivation. We could do the more economical thing right now but we don't. We could have done it decades ago when there were much fewer people on the planet but we didn't. No change in the population level will alter this.

I don't know what you mean. Of course we could have, but we didn't. We didn't because building 10,000 electric cars vs 10,000 bombs is a no brainer, but building 500,000,000 cars vs the same 10,000 bombs is a different kind of problem (i.e. a politically difficult one if your constituents aren't keen on factory work).

- World population in 1967 was around 3.5 billion people, less than half of our current population

- The U.S. nuclear arsenal peaked at 31,000 warheads in the same year 1967

Why did we need more bombs when there were less people? Why was there a greater perceived threat when there were less people in the world to fight over resources? Why would reducing our population level by half cause a change in our behaviour when these factors seem to be independent?

> Why did we need more bombs when there were less people

Bombs don't really scale with #people do they? I'm not a military expert of any kind but I would expect the number of bombs required to end humanity is really more a function of how much landmass people occupy?

Eg if you have a nuclear bomb that levels a city block it does not matter if 100 people live there or 10000, it pretty much just kills everyone there?

The number of nuclear weapons needed is more a function of reliability and accuracy than of population density. The older delivery platforms were much less accurate. That doesn't matter for targeting entire cities but it matters a lot when targeting hardened military sites that might survive a near miss. Now accuracy is much better so fewer weapons are needed to achieve the same deterrence effect.

I feel like we agree: The amount of force necessary to be an effective bully is independent of population.

And its pretty obvious that the amount of oil necessary to run an economy is population dependent.

So one is a constant and the other is a function with positive slope. The lines cross at some point. To the left of that point you get investment in renewables, to the right of it you get war. Therefore whether or not war occurs is population dependent, since its a choice between the two.

I mean, this is all given some totally awful blend of shortsightedness and cruelty. But that does seem to be the blend our leaders are using these days.