It's a hard problem. It's also what prevents meaningful criminal justice reform. Some people just have a very hard time accepting that bad things are going to happen. If you make the justice system less punitive, yes, you're going to get some number of extra crimes, as some people who should have stayed locked up will be freed. People have a very hard time grasping the concept that you need to do a cost benefit analysis for any policy. Sure, criminal justice reform will result in some small number of additional crime victims, but it will prevent orders of magnitude more people from being victimized by overly punitive laws and extreme jail sentences.
Yeah people fall for it. Hell, look at the mass downvoting of my comment here.
I'm a leftist myself, but folks on the left are just as vulnerable to knee jerk reactionary thinking as conservatives. They see someone saying that regulations can be bad, and their mind immediately jumps to the conclusion, "THIS PERSON MUST BE A REPUBLICAN!!!" and all thought ceases.
Regulations can just as easily be a tool of big business as they are a tool to protect the public. And the easiest way for governments to take away people's rights or for big business to stifle competition via regulation is "think of the children."
We need to make it far easier for people to operate businesses out of their homes. So many of these costs disappear if you can use the structure you already have to pay for.
I'm no libertarian, but a major problem is that a lot of our industries are severely over regulated. Regulations are usually a good thing, but often they are pushed by big business to prevent future competition. If the only way to comply with the law is to retain a staff of lawyers, then it becomes impossible for individuals to set up small operations.
For example, there's no reason we couldn't have micro nursing homes set up in individual private homes. Maybe a trio of licensed nurses can operate one out of a home. Maybe they can care for up to half a dozen patients.
Yes, this does induce additional risk of abuse and neglect, but I would argue that is probably less likely to occur at such a human facility than one run by a big corporation. And maybe accepting a bit more risk is worth it if it allows people to get card they otherwise would be shut out from.
Thanks! The photo is from a few months back shortly after we moved into our new place. The moving boxes are gone now, but it's still a lived in space.
I made the top of the desk. But a standing desk that raises and lowers. The base is by a company called Uplift. They make some great desk hardware. And crucially for this project here, they sell both complete desks with tops or just the legs and underframe so you can do make stuff like this. And it can certainly handle the weight. I don't remember the exact lifting capacity of it, but I did check to make sure by doing some rough calculations of the wood's density. It is well under the rated capacity of the legs.
DIY desks are awesome. Nothing like using a piece of furniture you made yourself. This is the one I made for my husband last year!
It was my first time making an epoxy river desk/table. Made from two live edge slabs joined together. I suggest zooming in or opening the third image in a new tab to see the full resolution. My favorite part are the swirls in the epoxy river itself. What's so neat about those is that those aren't something I created. Those formed naturally. I poured two different colors of epoxy at the same time, deliberately not fully mixing them. As the epoxy cures, the heat given off by the reaction generates convection currents that swirl and whirl. When the epoxy sets, those convection cells get locked into place. So cool!
Immigration is really irrelevant to this discussion. Every country is rapidly aging, including the poorer countries that currently have above-replacement birth rates. We're all going down the same path. Some nations are just further along the path than others. Unless there's a large population of Martians eager to immigrate that I'm not aware of, immigration is not a long term solution to this.
Please read the thread carefully. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the context of this discussion. We aren't talking about interstellar travel in general. We're talking specifically about the utility of using interstellar travel as a means of keeping exponential growth going forever.
The species can keep growing by extending out to the stars, but an individual star system can't. Eventually your star system reaches a maximum population. In the age of European imperialism, Europe shipped its excess population off to settler colonies Australia and the Americas. That will never be possible between star systems. In the 1800s, Britain could lower its resource demand by sending people off to the Americas. It took far more resources to keep a person alive for their lifetime than it did to send someone across the ocean. But you save no net resources by shipping someone off to Alpha Centauri. Sol will not be able to solve an overpopulation problem by shipping people off to distant Suns. And it's not a matter of how much cargo you bring with. The energy required to move just your body across interstellar distances dwarfs what is required to keep you alive for many lifetimes.
So, no, population cannot grow forever. Eventually Sol will have to stabilize its birth rates, or it will have a problem. Starting new seed colonies around distant stars can probably be done. But it won't allow the population or economy of a single star system to keep growing forever. With interstellar colonization, you're not expanding your civilization to multiple star systems, you're budding off new independent civilizations around those distant Suns.
A seed is actually a perfect metaphor for interstellar colonization. A tree can throw a seed to the wind to make new trees far away, but those seeds don't help that original tree grow any bigger.
Sure. But again, if you're planning for climate collapse, it's a complete uncertainty. Really the only thing that we can do now that would reliably increase our chances of survival is to shrink our current population peacefully as rapidly as possible. If you're worried about climate collapse, you should be dancing with joy at a declining population. Fewer people means fewer emissions and less land taken up by human activities.
We already know from millennia of history that the human population can be maintained just fine at pre-industrial technology and population levels. Sure crop failures happened, but they don't happen everywhere at the same time. Famines were historically very localized things.
And if we're talking complete climate collapse? In that scenario, everything goes out the window. If that's the scenario you want to plan for, then we should be doing everything we can to shrink our numbers as fast as humanly possible.
Humans are by far the most resilient species on this planet. We've learned to live everywhere from burning arid deserts to frozen arctic wastes. We will be the last species on this planet aside from some bacteria that go extinct.
Yes, I get it, beating on the US is a fun thing to do, especially right now. But if you think there's anything particularly wicked or decadent about Americans by nature, then you're no different than the countless racist despots that have caused untold human misery through the ages. Every time someone makes an assumption that another group of people is somehow more evil by nature, that assumption has been proven wrong again and again. People are just people.
What you're missing is that while the US does currently use an outsized amount of resources, we only do so because we are wealthy. If tomorrow everyone in the US dropped dead, the cost of various resources would decline, but all those resources would still be used. Sure a more globally equitable distribution of resources would be a good thing, but it won't do anything to help humanity's total environmental impact.
Earth has 8 billion people on it. The poorest 7 billion are scraping and scratching as hard as they can to live the same lifestyle as the richest 1 billion.
No. The physics does not allow this. Physics does allow interstellar travel and colonization. However, the resources required are immense. To transport a single human being between star systems would require more energy than it would take to keep them alive in decadent luxury for centuries. We're talking hard limits of physics here. Sure, you can imagine this will be solved by some magical technology outside the known laws of physics, like a perpetual motion machine, but you could then just as easily imagine using that magical technology to keep people alive back at home.
Interstellar colonization would be a wonderful idea, but simply as a means of backing up life. And spreading life through the universe has value in and of itself. It's a wonderful thing to yearn for.
But interstellar travel has absolutely zero utility as a means of addressing population growth.
Oh, and you can only have so many humans living in any given volume of space before the raw output of their body heat cooks them all alive. Regardless of your tech, there are only so many humans you can cram into a volume the size of the solar system.
Reality check. We are in ZERO danger of extinction. Our population could decline by 95%, and there would still be more humans alive than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth. Extinction would take millennia. But even then, there are built in safe guards that make declining below a certain population level impossible.
For a start, consider natural selection. societies are not homogeneous. Some groups reproduce at above replacement, some below. In the US for example, if we just assume birth rates remain the same for all groups indefinitely, never returning to an average replacement rate? In that unlikely scenario, extinction still will not happen. The Amish and the Mormons shall inherit the Earth.
And this can happen for cultural practices, not just religious groups. Maybe multi-generational households will become more common through natural selection. Maybe it will become the norm for people to have children right after high school, while still living with their parents. You only go to college and start your career after having some kids. Each generation pays to raise their own grandchildren, rather than their own children.
And even without cultural selection, eventually technological decline will prevent extinction. What technology your society can wield is a function of its population. As your population shrinks, your society's technological complexity decreases. Eventually you can no longer manufacture mechanized farming equipment, so more people have to work the land again. And on traditional family farms, children are an economic resource that pay for themselves. So the birth rate recovers. And of course, reliable birth control is the product of industrial production. Eventually your population shrinks enough that you are no longer capable of running a birth control factory.
I don't want to see the country become entirely Amish or to see us collapse back to 18th century levels of technology. But these are just the worst case scenarios. The absolute worse case scenario is that population declines by 90-95% and we regress technologically to some 18th century equivalent. Not a future I want to see, but it would hardly be the end of the world. Our present industrial civilization would be remembered as an unsustainable historical aberration, a temporary population boom brought on by the era of cheap hydrocarbons.
It's a hard problem. It's also what prevents meaningful criminal justice reform. Some people just have a very hard time accepting that bad things are going to happen. If you make the justice system less punitive, yes, you're going to get some number of extra crimes, as some people who should have stayed locked up will be freed. People have a very hard time grasping the concept that you need to do a cost benefit analysis for any policy. Sure, criminal justice reform will result in some small number of additional crime victims, but it will prevent orders of magnitude more people from being victimized by overly punitive laws and extreme jail sentences.
Yeah people fall for it. Hell, look at the mass downvoting of my comment here.
I'm a leftist myself, but folks on the left are just as vulnerable to knee jerk reactionary thinking as conservatives. They see someone saying that regulations can be bad, and their mind immediately jumps to the conclusion, "THIS PERSON MUST BE A REPUBLICAN!!!" and all thought ceases.
Regulations can just as easily be a tool of big business as they are a tool to protect the public. And the easiest way for governments to take away people's rights or for big business to stifle competition via regulation is "think of the children."
If you're feeling generous, sign up for the cheapest plan and then pirate everything.
Yes, but more for nursing home care.
We need to make it far easier for people to operate businesses out of their homes. So many of these costs disappear if you can use the structure you already have to pay for.
I'm no libertarian, but a major problem is that a lot of our industries are severely over regulated. Regulations are usually a good thing, but often they are pushed by big business to prevent future competition. If the only way to comply with the law is to retain a staff of lawyers, then it becomes impossible for individuals to set up small operations.
For example, there's no reason we couldn't have micro nursing homes set up in individual private homes. Maybe a trio of licensed nurses can operate one out of a home. Maybe they can care for up to half a dozen patients.
Yes, this does induce additional risk of abuse and neglect, but I would argue that is probably less likely to occur at such a human facility than one run by a big corporation. And maybe accepting a bit more risk is worth it if it allows people to get card they otherwise would be shut out from.
Thanks! The photo is from a few months back shortly after we moved into our new place. The moving boxes are gone now, but it's still a lived in space.
I made the top of the desk. But a standing desk that raises and lowers. The base is by a company called Uplift. They make some great desk hardware. And crucially for this project here, they sell both complete desks with tops or just the legs and underframe so you can do make stuff like this. And it can certainly handle the weight. I don't remember the exact lifting capacity of it, but I did check to make sure by doing some rough calculations of the wood's density. It is well under the rated capacity of the legs.
Thank you for sharing this!
Thanks! I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure it's some niche 3D printed thing. Would have to ask my other half!
Yeah, but in my defense...meh.
Better than aging backwards. Benjamin Button disease takes far too many lives.
DIY desks are awesome. Nothing like using a piece of furniture you made yourself. This is the one I made for my husband last year!
It was my first time making an epoxy river desk/table. Made from two live edge slabs joined together. I suggest zooming in or opening the third image in a new tab to see the full resolution. My favorite part are the swirls in the epoxy river itself. What's so neat about those is that those aren't something I created. Those formed naturally. I poured two different colors of epoxy at the same time, deliberately not fully mixing them. As the epoxy cures, the heat given off by the reaction generates convection currents that swirl and whirl. When the epoxy sets, those convection cells get locked into place. So cool!
I'm just going to assume they're the character from Heinlein's All You Zombies.
Immigration is really irrelevant to this discussion. Every country is rapidly aging, including the poorer countries that currently have above-replacement birth rates. We're all going down the same path. Some nations are just further along the path than others. Unless there's a large population of Martians eager to immigrate that I'm not aware of, immigration is not a long term solution to this.
Please read the thread carefully. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the context of this discussion. We aren't talking about interstellar travel in general. We're talking specifically about the utility of using interstellar travel as a means of keeping exponential growth going forever.
The species can keep growing by extending out to the stars, but an individual star system can't. Eventually your star system reaches a maximum population. In the age of European imperialism, Europe shipped its excess population off to settler colonies Australia and the Americas. That will never be possible between star systems. In the 1800s, Britain could lower its resource demand by sending people off to the Americas. It took far more resources to keep a person alive for their lifetime than it did to send someone across the ocean. But you save no net resources by shipping someone off to Alpha Centauri. Sol will not be able to solve an overpopulation problem by shipping people off to distant Suns. And it's not a matter of how much cargo you bring with. The energy required to move just your body across interstellar distances dwarfs what is required to keep you alive for many lifetimes.
So, no, population cannot grow forever. Eventually Sol will have to stabilize its birth rates, or it will have a problem. Starting new seed colonies around distant stars can probably be done. But it won't allow the population or economy of a single star system to keep growing forever. With interstellar colonization, you're not expanding your civilization to multiple star systems, you're budding off new independent civilizations around those distant Suns.
A seed is actually a perfect metaphor for interstellar colonization. A tree can throw a seed to the wind to make new trees far away, but those seeds don't help that original tree grow any bigger.
Sure. But again, if you're planning for climate collapse, it's a complete uncertainty. Really the only thing that we can do now that would reliably increase our chances of survival is to shrink our current population peacefully as rapidly as possible. If you're worried about climate collapse, you should be dancing with joy at a declining population. Fewer people means fewer emissions and less land taken up by human activities.
We already know from millennia of history that the human population can be maintained just fine at pre-industrial technology and population levels. Sure crop failures happened, but they don't happen everywhere at the same time. Famines were historically very localized things.
And if we're talking complete climate collapse? In that scenario, everything goes out the window. If that's the scenario you want to plan for, then we should be doing everything we can to shrink our numbers as fast as humanly possible.
Humans are by far the most resilient species on this planet. We've learned to live everywhere from burning arid deserts to frozen arctic wastes. We will be the last species on this planet aside from some bacteria that go extinct.
Yes, I get it, beating on the US is a fun thing to do, especially right now. But if you think there's anything particularly wicked or decadent about Americans by nature, then you're no different than the countless racist despots that have caused untold human misery through the ages. Every time someone makes an assumption that another group of people is somehow more evil by nature, that assumption has been proven wrong again and again. People are just people.
What you're missing is that while the US does currently use an outsized amount of resources, we only do so because we are wealthy. If tomorrow everyone in the US dropped dead, the cost of various resources would decline, but all those resources would still be used. Sure a more globally equitable distribution of resources would be a good thing, but it won't do anything to help humanity's total environmental impact.
Earth has 8 billion people on it. The poorest 7 billion are scraping and scratching as hard as they can to live the same lifestyle as the richest 1 billion.
No. The physics does not allow this. Physics does allow interstellar travel and colonization. However, the resources required are immense. To transport a single human being between star systems would require more energy than it would take to keep them alive in decadent luxury for centuries. We're talking hard limits of physics here. Sure, you can imagine this will be solved by some magical technology outside the known laws of physics, like a perpetual motion machine, but you could then just as easily imagine using that magical technology to keep people alive back at home.
Interstellar colonization would be a wonderful idea, but simply as a means of backing up life. And spreading life through the universe has value in and of itself. It's a wonderful thing to yearn for.
But interstellar travel has absolutely zero utility as a means of addressing population growth.
Oh, and you can only have so many humans living in any given volume of space before the raw output of their body heat cooks them all alive. Regardless of your tech, there are only so many humans you can cram into a volume the size of the solar system.
Reality check. We are in ZERO danger of extinction. Our population could decline by 95%, and there would still be more humans alive than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth. Extinction would take millennia. But even then, there are built in safe guards that make declining below a certain population level impossible.
For a start, consider natural selection. societies are not homogeneous. Some groups reproduce at above replacement, some below. In the US for example, if we just assume birth rates remain the same for all groups indefinitely, never returning to an average replacement rate? In that unlikely scenario, extinction still will not happen. The Amish and the Mormons shall inherit the Earth.
And this can happen for cultural practices, not just religious groups. Maybe multi-generational households will become more common through natural selection. Maybe it will become the norm for people to have children right after high school, while still living with their parents. You only go to college and start your career after having some kids. Each generation pays to raise their own grandchildren, rather than their own children.
And even without cultural selection, eventually technological decline will prevent extinction. What technology your society can wield is a function of its population. As your population shrinks, your society's technological complexity decreases. Eventually you can no longer manufacture mechanized farming equipment, so more people have to work the land again. And on traditional family farms, children are an economic resource that pay for themselves. So the birth rate recovers. And of course, reliable birth control is the product of industrial production. Eventually your population shrinks enough that you are no longer capable of running a birth control factory.
I don't want to see the country become entirely Amish or to see us collapse back to 18th century levels of technology. But these are just the worst case scenarios. The absolute worse case scenario is that population declines by 90-95% and we regress technologically to some 18th century equivalent. Not a future I want to see, but it would hardly be the end of the world. Our present industrial civilization would be remembered as an unsustainable historical aberration, a temporary population boom brought on by the era of cheap hydrocarbons.