[somenameforme]

Culture, art, technology, science, growth, exploration, communication, and so on. Basically advancement in nearly every measurable way of every aspect of society.

Food is not a limiting factor. China is a net exporter of food in a country of 1.4 billion on about 1.1 million km^2 of arable land. For context, the United States has about 1.6 million km^2. And the quantities of arable land can be expanded somewhat dramatically everywhere.

[formerkrogemp]

> Food is not a limiting factor.

Food and more importantly, as you would know if you googled depleted aquifer, water are limiting factors. Always. You will always need those two. Most of our agricultural practices are unsustainable across multiple measures, especially water.

> China is a net exporter of food in a country of 1.4 billion on about 1.1 million km^2 of arable land.

Saudi Arabia used to be a net exporter of wheat until about 5 years ago. Our arable land, the topsoil so vital to it, and the fresh water we overuse so much faster than it can be replenished worldwide are all hitting bottlenecks in the coming years. Egypt and Jourdan are fighting over the Nile. The Sahar and deserts in China are expanding despite great efforts otherwise. China is imposing its will in Thailand and Vietnam over their control of the headwaters of the Mekong. The Europeans are worried about the Po and Rhine being lower than usual with glacier meltwater being depleted faster and faster with rising temps and milder winters. Aquifers built over thousands or millions of years are being pumped at rates unrecorded for agriculture and residential use. Ogalalla and western US aquifers are sinking the land and running out. Encroachment of freshwater systems by erosion and saltwater from rising sea levels and fierce storm surges are threatening ecosystems and coastal farming. A pernicious side effect of a hotter atmosphere is increased vaporization of water from lake reservoirs causing water loss exceeding water use of cities and populations. The outlook and ongoing crises in places like California are grim, but there's a lot we can do. Price water more closely to its real cost. Build desalination plants. Implement water saving tech into manufacturing and households. Water loss from reservoirs and recording depletion rates of aquifers can give us better data of the scale and rate of the depletion to inform the urgency. More data can be collected. Swale water runoff and improve land management techniques to retain water. Implement drip irrigation and water efficient and drought resistant crops. Build cisterns and modify reservoirs to improve water storage and retention. Chinampas can be built. Many other efforts and policies can be implemented, but they are all costly and take time. Perhaps that's why this issued has been ignored for so long, because we turn on the tap and the water always comes out. Until it doesn't anymore. We've certainly been warned. Hydrologists have been warning about this for almost a century.

[croes]

>Culture, art, technology, science, growth, exploration, communication, and so on. Basically advancement in nearly every measurable way of every aspect of society

I doubt that these depend on quantity and not quality.

[chitowneats]

I much prefer to date a single woman of high quality than to have a bunch of flings and one night stands. Finding that woman is still a numbers game though. Same is true for the Einsteins and Jordans of the world being born.

[theplumber]

So you have a plan to reduce the quantity and increase the quality? Right now it seems that education leads to lower birth rates and slows population growth so it goes the opposite direction someone would want.

[croes]

Is it education or the time and money that is needed to get this education? Not to mention that a costly education runs the risk of becoming useless after parental leave, especially for women. Nowadays many people have to decide between family and career

[dilap]

But it's not like you get that automatically just by having a giant mass of people. There needs to be a certain life-style and culture to create those things. What density of humans is ideal for that?

The calculation shouldn't just be, "what's the maximum # of people we can physically support on earth?" It should be, what's a nice number that makes life pleasant and fulfilling and leaves time for leisure?

And while the earth is very large, the number of places that are truly special is much smaller.

For example, if you look over the whole earth, what fraction of it is at the level of, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, for sheer natural beauty and enjoyability of surroundings?

A small fraction indeed, I would say!

(Of course there is some room for personal preference in here; maybe you're a desert person or whatever. But though squishly defined, the point still stands.)

Today, it's expensive and stressful to live in the Bay Area, because of overcrowding.

But look back at say the middle of the 20th century -- it was still an amazing, beautiful place, but it was much less crowded and much less expensive! This provided fertile ground for interesting artistic and cultural movements, like the beats & their poetry & the hippies & their music.

Now it's much harder to have those kind of cultural and artistic movements in SF, because just basic physical survival is much more of a struggle.

[concordDance]

Note that this assumes the new people are statistically just as likely to contribute in those ways as the average person today/40 years ago but we don't know this is true (and indeed there's some weak evidence it's false)

[somenameforme]

I don't disagree with this in the least, but I would say that people are contributing less per person today not because there are more people but because of other reasons. There's no doubt that in at least some instances the next [insert really cool person here] instead just got sucked in a vapid world of social media, or endless self indulgence with entertaining videos, or other "niceties" of today.

The point of this though is that it's all still on a distribution. We've lowered the mean but a higher quantity still means more outliers, which are those that ultimately do neat stuff for all of us.