[rindalir]

I'm one of those people who often says "the problem is that there are just too many people." But I hadn't ever really thought about the hypothesis that the "good idea" yield was low enough that you needed a large number of brains to make technological (or other) progress. Certainly there are lots of problems in the near, medium-term, and distant future that will require creative solutions.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

It's more than that. Yes, if you only have one genius per million people, you want more millions so you can get more geniuses.

But it's also true that there is a networking effect going on. Having two geniuses is more than twice as good as having only one. They work together, they're smarter together.

If we could travel the universe Star Trek style, what we would almost certainly discover is that for any given level of technology, it's correlated to a particular population level. The science fiction stuff we all love to watch and read about and dream of, that stuff's available if you hit 20 billion, 30 billion. We should want that many humans to exist.

The trick is figuring out where to put them (populate the solar system).

The inverse of this problem is that as population levels off and starts to fall, technological advance will stagnate and stall out completely. But there will probably be even worse catastrophes such that it will go unnoticed.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> if you only have one genius per million people, you want more millions so you can get more geniuses.

It takes more than the genius to exist, they have to be in an environment where they can thrive for there to doing anything beneficial. Also, there can also be evil genius people too, who seek only personal gratification at the expense of everyone else.

> as population levels off and starts to fall, technological advance will stagnate and stall out completely.

Citation needed. There is no reason to think this would be the case.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Citation needed. There is no reason to think this would be the case.

You may need it, but some truths exist in a place where they aren't studyable by academia, so you're just shit out of luck.

If population needs to go up for tech advancement, and it stops going up so too will tech advancement. By the time someone can submit a paper to Nature, it will be too far gone. Guess you're screwed. Guess you need to be able to think even before some sociologist bothers to apply for grant money.

[rindalir]

Right, network effects -- benefits accrue as power of population size. That's a good point.

And the stagnation is a depressing thought. I naively hope that if we can survive this phase of our existence we will find a way to exist in large numbers but also allow all the other beings along for the ride with us to exist and thrive as well. But to survive that long and figure all this out, we actually need to increase our numbers and demographic trends look pretty pessimistic for that.