Reply To: The recent "discovery" of Dark Matter

[Brian H]

Warwick wrote:

Ah, overpopulation. The trump card.

If all the world was organized into 4-person families, living in 2 story houses on 4600 sq.’ lots — they’d all fit inside Texas. And then you could have all the rest for yourself!

Well that’s very kind of you. Actually the distribution of land ownership is pretty much like that in many countries (but it’s not me that happens to own it).

When we all live in Texas (most of us in the middle of a desert then), where are we getting water, food, wood? At the moment we like to get water and wood by depleting natural sources so that ecosystems die off or are gradually attrited. We like to get more food by progressive deforestation / desertification, and intensification. The pollution created by agrochemicals now befouls rivers across most of the Western world, and there are plenty of ecosystems that have been wiped out completely.

And yes if we all live in Texas there will be no lack of room for wildlife, but since that hasn’t happened yet, we’re kind of spread out and like to build lots of roads and cars. Rezwan’s flying cars will be here one day maybe, then we can just kill birds, but I think that for the average subsistence farmer in the majority world, that day is a long way off. It’s been shown many times that the effect of dividing up wildwood with roads is that the ecosystem fails – all the larger species need to cross the roads and if they can’t they’re screwed. We could imagine a different world where is some weird and wonderful rural public transport, but let’s not bet on it.

It’s not easy to persuade someone affluent to do something such that they’d barely notice the difference, like driving a 1 litre car instead of a 3 litre car, so is it realistic that we are going to see a big change in human behaviour away from things like poaching endangered species (which makes a huge difference to someone poor)? The Chinese demand them for medicine, African herders see them as a threat to livestock, and so on.

In the US, populations have about depleted the Great Plains aquifer that is the water source for quite a large patch of states. Never mind what’s happening to the good ol everglades. California too will be running out of water within 30 years.

Many of us also use things like varnish, paint, plastic, jewellery, birth control pills, and so on and so on, which release environmentally hazardous chemicals (hazardous to humans too if they stick around long enough) in their manufacture and/or use. With few enough people doing it, things will come back to a balance; we passed that point long ago.

And sure, world food shortages (as opposed to famines caused by a shortage of funds, a la Amartya Sen) would not be happening without factory-farming. If we devoted arable land mostly to feeding humans, food would be relatively plentiful.

But without civilisation we will one day converge to a Malthusian equilibrium where we are running out of something, or everything, or overtaken by a massive disease – it’s in our nature. We’re rabbits, not foxes.

Both analogies are false. We’re neither. Food is not a problem, except insofar as people attempt to generalize and super-size regional diets like sushi, which will almost certainly shortly delete bluefins from the wild. As for farming, there are many ways to skin that carrot; check out urban hi-rise farms, e.g. And FF power makes all sorts of other models viable.