Look around. We're living in a world in which smallpox has been completely eradicated. Amazing! And peak oil? With all the advancements in solar energy coming out of our ivy league universities that seams so silly now. And yet we frequently hear so-called "enlightened" individuals calling for policies that immediately lead to suffering and death out of fear that the future holds certain doom.

Erm, that works well and good, until it doesn't, and then you're fucked.

The point is that these advances don't come in a timespan of weeks or months, but years or decades (or centuries!), and when we finally see a problem concretely manifest we may well have no alternative but very nasty population reduction--the trauma of which may result in a near irreversible backslide to barbarism.

I recently came across this blog in an HN user's comment. I found the writing clear, detailed, and well supported with math. The author has a PhD in astrophysics, so I imagine he deserves greater credibility than a pseudointellectual.

So here's what this guy is arguing in the first post: as we extrapolate our current economic growth rate, we begin to run up against thermodynamic limits. Therefore, it's absurd to extrapolate that our economy will grow at the same pace forever. That is, technology can't fix everything.

I would agree that outright genocide is a bad idea. But I think population control has its merits.

On another note, can someone explain to me how the Irish Potato Famine was the result of population policy? As far as I know, the Irish screwed up because they put their eggs in a single basket. I don't see how this is relevant to eugenics.

[index] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/post-index/

[1] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

The math is fine, the assumptions that undergird that math are terrible. You can see that in a lot of his blog posts. There's another [0] that argues that economic exploitation of space doesn't make sense because it is impractical to ship large numbers of people offworld - which is true, and supported by mathematics and physics, but barely touches (if at all) on things like space-based solar power generation and asteroid mining, neither of which depends on shipping large numbers of people offworld, as colonization presumably does.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

I was using the blog as evidence to support my argument. My argument was that once we hit the economic plateau, our quality of living will decrease if the population continues to increase. Therefore, perhaps eugenics (a la China's one-child policy) won't sound like such a bad idea in the future.

> but barely touches (if at all) on things like space-based solar power generation and asteroid mining

Again, he covers this in his first post via reductio ad absurdum:

> Let’s think big: surround the sun with solar panels. And while we’re at it, let’s again make them 100% efficient. Never-mind the fact that a 4 mm-thick structure surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit would require one Earth’s worth of materials—and specialized materials at that. Doing so allows us to continue 2.3% annual energy growth for 1350 years from the present time.

This is totally irrelevant because (as I said) population growth is slowing down and the population is almost certainly not going to continue to increase forever. It's forecast that human population will max out late this century due to declining birthrates in countries that are growing wealthier; hitting the theoretical limits (e.g. max solar output) before then is so implausible it's barely worth discussing.

> Again, he covers this in his first post via reductio ad absurdum:

His assertion that SSP (and everything else) is impractical for sustaining 2% growth for a millennium is true, but practically irrelevant. Space-based exploitation can increase the plateau cap, allowing for higher standards of living for a future populace whose population is level or declining.

There is lots of writing and historical context for how Malthus and his theories influenced the day of the potato famine, google around for it and draw your own conclusions.

... to prove what exactly? That humanity will inevitably overcome the issues which overpopulation begets? That our population will plateau before we reach 250 billion if we close the gender gap? I feel like your comment was really vague, and you answered jrs99's question somewhat obliquely. So I don't know what you're arguing. But if your Amazon link is anything to go by, I assume you predict a decrease in the world's population.

Also, I don't think we can continue to extrapolate history as you imply. I used to think that our age was no different than any other age. I used to think "Humans have always had the same needs, right? Technology simply gives us more effective ways to satisfy them. Technology changes, but Humanity's needs have stayed relatively consistent."

Randell Munroe's project "Time" changed my opinion. To roughly paraphrase, "Whatever civilization comes next won't have fossil fuels to jump-start another industrial revolution." And I began thinking "Huh... I guess that makes sense. Fossil Fuels make us pretty unique, doesn't it? There's a pretty low probability that we'll find an energy source more dense and convenient than Fossil Fuel. Things like solar and fission are certainly nice. But if they packed the punch that Fossil Fuels did, they'd have dominated our economy already! So does Fossil Fuel represent a limiting reagent (chemistry term) on what Humanity can achieve?"

I think you and the astrophysicist can agree that something has to give. And perhaps closing the gender gap will plateau the population before we reach 250 bil. But given this fails and the population reaches 250 bil and we live in dystopia anyways (like jrs99 originally asked), do you still believe that eugenics are inherently immoral?

[I'll take up that offer and start reading up on the famine.]

But imagine how limited people felt in the 1700s when their entire energy and food supply was simply the sun and arable land. I bet that felt rather absolute to them too. I mean, it's the sun. It's pretty fundamental and unchanging. What else could there be? Surely we can do the math on how much farmland there is to work and calculate possible yields and determine the maximum number of humans the planet can sustain. And what should be done with that number?

Yet centuries later we have shattered those limitations many times over, doubling and doubling and doubling the population again.

I don't mean to belabour the point, maybe we will transcend our current limitations (I think we will), or maybe we won't. But even if we don't, let resource scarcity cull and control population instead of policy.

I too recently thought that humanity probably overcome whatever problems the universe throws. But I don't see how humanity plans to "transcend" the laws of thermodynamics. The least far fetched idea I can think of is antimatter. But handling a substance that volatile somehow seems to me like a very bad idea.

You seem to be appealing to this notion that "There's so much about the universe we still don't know. What the future looks like is beyond our wildest imaginations."

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Above is Isaac Asimov's essay The Relativity of Wrong. In a nutshell, an English teacher had expressed disapproval at Asimov's arrogance when he "had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight." To which Asimov responded "[that the teacher] may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after."

Humanity doesn't know everything. And maybe we never will. But at this point, we're pretty confident that we've gotten down the basics . I.e. Relativity may have replaced Newtonian Physics, but Newtonian Physics wasn't outright invalidated for everyday velocities. By and large, our scientific body of knowledge is logically monotonic. We'll augment our models, we'll refine our models, but it's unlikely we'll ever say, "Newtonian physics is, and always has been dead wrong. We have to start physics from scratch."

And this is a different issue altogether, concerning ethics. As I said before, I think birth control policy is the better of 2 evils. The other evil being warfare resulting from abject poverty. Such policies would prevent a lot of needless pain and suffering. I'd rather live in happier world with less people than in a sadder world with lots of people. It's not like those unborn will mind, because they won't exist.

But maybe you think the parents will mind, or believe in the efficacy of natural selection. Our stances remind me of The Giver/Gathering Blue.

Terrible title for a great book that isn't nearly as alarmist as it sounds. If anything it covers how we're not breeding to replacement numbers and are facing labour shortages as our current population ages in the developed world.

Does it one day make sense to say you can't have more than 1 kid? Is it amoral?

Yes for two reasons. A) You're telling other people what they can do with their own bodies, and that is fundamentally wrong (see the ridiculous abortion debate in the USA). B) It's impossible to apply the rules evenly and fairly, creating (at best) destructive social imbalance and (at worst) an opportunity for slippery-slope eugenics.

My own view is that none of us actually knows whether it is moral or amoral to abort at any given month.

You have to really think of a world with hundreds of billions on it and how that possibly would change the morality of something.

China's "misguided" one chid policy came at a point where the extremely rapid population growth started in part thanks to Mao coupled with the massive other upheavals the party triggered had caused massive starvation and death.

While there are many issues with it, it also put the breaks on a population growth that was totally unmanageable, and frankly helped mitigate some of the effects of past atrocities.

It's easy to criticise, but it'd have been even easier to criticise the results of allowing the insane growth rate to continue unchecked.

While I admire your resistance to knee-jerk doomsaying, suggesting we're just going to technology our way out of this mess without having to make tough choices about population is blinkered and myopic.