Interesting in this context is completely divorced from morally good/bad. Could be any group from any area at any time in history. I’ll start with a few, followers of the cult of pythagoras, contemporary black Hebrew Israelites, antiracist skinheads and the Amish (neo-luddites in general). Don’t be racist or a prick to other people discussing.
Idk humans existed for a long time before society and our near ancestors have been around for millions upon millions of years. It’s maybe like the last 200ish years where we’ve been a serious ecological menace. It’s a bit odd to take like 0.07% of the time we’ve been around to be judged by. I guess you can argue it back to like the beginning of known civilization but that’s still like 3.3%. the other 96.7% to 99.93% of the time we were ecologically insignificant in contrast to greater forces like ice ages. I still find the view needlessly extreme.
Now of course we have indeed fucked shit up pretty badly the last 200ish years and we need to fix it quick, fast, and in a hurry and the absolute laziest and fastest way of doing that is just killing everyone. It’s like the answer of a five year old. Let’s use technology and policy? Nah just kill everyone.
last 200 has been particularly bad but we have been not living in harmony before that. For most of civilization although some were not to bad. I mean yeah millions of years but why not just add apes at that point. But yeah 200 years ago our population was such that we did not do that much damage. heck 50 years ago was about when we started using more than one earth. If we had worked hard at sustainablility and kept our numbers in line we would be fine now. As I said though after all the damage we have done we need to drop to about a billion at least until we are optimally living sustainably. Which given humans will be a long assed time if at all.
It’s difficult to argue that homo sapiens all together are more destructive than other organisms and much more difficult to argue it’s all hominids. Like in contrast to what? For reference one of the first mass extinctions that killed like 99% of life was caused by photosynthesizing microorganisms. All said and done humans have yet to pull that off so far. All well and good photosynthesizing life forms are still around, now should we go kill them all because they caused that very nasty extinction event a while ago?
What you are arguing for would indeed work but it’s still not necessary. It’s like a trivial solution to a function. We’re more than capable now to maintain our current population and otherwise live in symbiosis in comparison to other natural forces at play. Although the more people there are the more difficult it is to manage short of us constructing O’Neal cylinders and just not living on earth. Then we could manage quite an astronomical population while mitigating our impact on the earth.
Instead of looking towards the trivial solution I would rather get creative and push our technology forward. Lab grown meat and plants (also very useful for space stations) and all around minimizing our footprint while encouraging natural biomass and natural processes. Humanities footprint could more than be compensated for even without space stations.
In short just decreasing the population seems like a child’s answer to the problem.
Um its not difficult at all. No other species can poison the planet the way we do. I would say argueing that homo sapiens all together have been more destructive than other organisms is trivial. Its cart before the horse for me. We live within our means which means dealing with how we do with things today rather than assumming we will achieve some pie in the sky future technology will allow us to consume and continue to grow the population and keep the same quality of life. Decreasing the population is exactly the type of balanced approach that we lack doing which keeps us from living more sustainably. There is no level of sustainability that allows for our population to live on this planet above a certain level and that is where and how we live now. Im not saying stop advancing im saying we should live within our current means so that we have time to advance rather than burning outselves and our planet out now. Which is what we are currently doing.
We’ve yet to poison the earth to the same level as those photosynthesizing microorganisms that caused the first known mass extinction. I mean the O’Neal cylinders would be a tough one but the rest is well within our grasp today, particularly if we were motivated enough. Honestly it’s just that the economy is built for older very inefficient systems so deploying something new at such a large scale just doesn’t have the demand currently or the trust. Factories take decades to replace and so on. With a hot fire under our ass we could retool the system in the matter of a few short years.
I mean yeah everyone switching to a plant based diet that’s grown locally and in season, switching as many jobs to work at home, and so on would be great and we could nearly flip a switch for a lot of optimizations. I guess we could impose a two child policy globally and that would about handle it. I say just let things take the course that it’s already going, just optimize what we can.
For an updated infrastructure and strong urbanization aka decrease suburbs and rural areas and place urban centers in advantageous locations we are no where near the carrying capacity if we were efficient about it. Our current predicament is caused by fractured and poor planning, placing opulent cities in the hottest of desserts is a good example of a dumb thing we’ve done multiple times globally.
Real life though, if we just charged for everything what it actually costs including environmental impact the problem would solve itself. $5 ground beef would be $50, the cost of dumping unrecyclable waste would skyrocket for individuals and companies alike. Sure as shit people would have fewer kids as well.
I mean maybe in a million years I poisons will bear fruit with new lifeforms but I kinda want the earth to be compatible with us. We have a massive divide though is space habitation. I don’t think we even know if it is possible in any sustainable way. In addition the economic solution you have ignores the massive wealth disparity at the core of almost all our modern problems. I don’t see further discourse as worth it as we are too different in our core truths here. I me we can do things better sure but we don’t and our history indicates we likely won’t.
You want to decrease the population by 7.3 billion. That’s not happening quickly and if it is then a lot of awful and unfortunate things will need to happen, namely death, starvation, disease, poverty, war, and the like.
The only real way we are managing this is through technology. Kinda paradoxical that technology gave us the capacity to get into this mess and is our way out but will likely cause other issues we will need to fix with yet again better tech.
yeah it will take time but it is a guaranteed an necessary thing to do while technology is a maybe and will happen regardless to. technology does not advance faster because we have more humans.
I mean more people literally means more technological advancement, more universities, more experimentation, more engineers, more ideas tested and developed.
I’m not sure how you think we would exactly motivate a global depopulation short of something extremely unpleasant aka the example I gave of just charging the actual cost for products and services. Maybe a one child policy and you kill the extra children and one of the parents for breaching the rule. Good luck roping the rich and powerful or developing nations into this. At least developing nations with a high fertility rate will (and do) argue that they should not be punished for the misdeeds of others.