The needs of a child are mediated by productivity, which has been wildly different throughout history. E.g. maybe we'll have practical fusion in 100 years and can support 100 billion people no problem.
But the surface area of the earth is fixed. If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it with a giant seastead.
And even then, the surface area of the Earth is still fixed. So is the volume (unless you're willing to destroy Earth as we know it in the process).
So a seastead just kicks the can down the road. If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it in space.
2. But I don’t agree that property rights ought to be snatched from owners.
3. I also don’t think we could keep on increasing the world population when we have clearly crossed carrying capacity.
They are all different issues and points. Not necessarily related.
You don’t need separate a person’s property from him just because a few million people are homeless.
You don’t need to keep on breeding homo sapiens to out breed all other species and destroying habits and environment to support the extra billions of human beings. Because the apex predator can wipe out every eco system to support itself. And at a faster rate if it outbreeds the rest of the species.
Half the planet needs to be uninhabitated and rewilded for species and habitat preservation, conservation and restoration.
As apex predators, if we don’t protect habitat and other species below us, it is like sawing off the main trunk of a tree below us while perching on the top most branch. We will become extinct as a species.
One day, I am going to be able to buy thousands and thousands of acres and let nature take it back. There is a better chance that we will survive as a species if we reduce our population rather than keep on increasing it exponentially. Because we are guaranteed to outbreed every other species upon whom we rely on for our survival.
The planet survives because of a delicate balance between the ocean’s temperature and carbon levels in our atmosphere. We really don’t understand it fully yet. It’s premature to assume that we can keep on breeding to perpetuate our species. It’s the most unscientific, irrational and illogical way to solve a problem. It certainly is a sure way to erase ourselves from the universe as we know it.
A serial breeder..say..someone who has a couple of children with different women more selfish than someone who has 1-2 children.
The commons will be saturated by the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels. Is that selfish? Since we are talking about selfishness and commons as a collective inheritance, define commons.
I believe you mean the needs of actual human beings born of such people, to whom the God-given rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and yes, the collective inheritance of the commons, are owed.
These serial breeders do not show up in the aggregate in any country I've every been too. If you are worried about population rates in dirt poor countries, the per-capita consumption is so much lower you shouldn't bother.
> The commons will be saturated by the needs of genes of prolific breeders who use women’s bodies as vessels.
Do you have evidence to think this numerically insignificant behavior is so genetically hereditary we should worry about it?
It just doesn’t mesh well with the declining birth rates in developed nations. Some countries are paying people to have kids, and it’s not working very well.
My hope is that if we can manage population numbers before we run out of resources, we can stave off the severe resource crunch that will come when we don’t have a sufficiently large gene pool when the decline begins.
The problem also is that our efficient supply chain has ensured that one or two rich deposits of xyz resource takes care of the whole world. Many rare metals and precious metals mined for electronics and phones come to mine. Phosphorous comes to mind. We use it as fertilizer but it’s not renewable. The river sand we use for construction. Top soil that is depleted and water sources that are poisoned due to Ag runoffs and Ag soils that are tilled away.
And I am not even talking about global raising temperatures or carbon. Take insects for example. The bees we need for pollination. The frogs..especially insects and reptiles and amphibians need habitat to survive. Their disappearance shows that there is a tear in the web. It indicates that we have destroyed their environment or poisoned it or made it impossible for them to reproduce it sufficient numbers to keep their future generations up. They are on the other side of mammals like us or elephants etc..because we live so long, it would take a while and a lag before we see a decline. They have such short life spans and can have a couple of hundred generations within a matter of days, they are like early warning systems.
Given this, we know that habitat is disappearing and ecosystems are in peril. Poverty is disappearing and we are expending huge amounts of energy to keep our soon to be 10 billion people by 2050.
Even if population becomes stable before plummeting as the old people become more more numerous and are non reproductive and die off..even if we have sufficient young people to keep our species alive and even if we find it ways to live smaller and differently...the non renewable resources once gone are gone. Top soil once gone is gone. Soil phosphorus once depleted isnt coming back. Mining has to end some day. Oil will become scarce someday. Homes build on Ag land and forests cannot be razed down to become habitat and forests and environment and habitat again.
This might not happen in your lifetime or mine, but our species extend beyond one or two generations. We owe it to generations down the line to preserve the planet. We can’t synthesize our own food. We rely on our environment and natural resources as an apex predator sitting on top of the food chain.
The most urgent thing to do is multi part: 1. Find a way to preserve genetic material effectively and create a gene data base. We do that with seeds in Ag. There is a seed vault in Svalbard(don’t know if it still exists) 2. Invest in anti ageing therapies. And by this I don’t mean youthfulness of looks but ageing is the slow decline of cognitive faculties and organ failure and cell aging. 3. Have a half-earth philosophy as promulgated by E.O.Wilson to keep intact our environment and habitat that relies on that environment.
I am not attempting to suggest that we have to become Luddites or start controlling population numbers. If we just back off and stop incentivizing high birth rate, within 120-150 years, we might get this under control. No need for coercion or mandatory depopulation methods. Stop encouraging people who can’t afford children to keep having children. That will do.
China supplies most of the developed world with what we need at cheap prices. These are mass produced products. In return, through belt and road initiative, China has the entire Southern Hemisphere trading food and Ag products to support its 1.4 billion. It’s easy to make 10 billion iPhone chips. It’s not as easy to feed 1.4 billion people pork with available resources.
So with declining populations, the world still needs to deploy and deplete its resources to trade due to our higher consumption habits. But exponential population increases are a funny thing. Exponentially 1.4 increases faster than 350 million. Some resources don’t increase at all and in fact non renewable. What do we do now?
