[gwelson]

The thing that bothers me about this line of argument is...there already are a lot of people! We've had _massive_ population growth over the past few centuries, especially in the last 100 years or so. We have 8 _billion_ people now...and I personally don't see a lot of the benefits that the author talks about. I really don't think going from 8 billion to 10 billion or 16 billion or even 50 billion people would really make a meaningful difference in "the number of geniuses" or the number of people to populate a subreddit for a niche hobby, to draw on two of his examples. We have lots of geniuses now and we have lots of people on subreddits already.

We can already see that many (most?) societies are really quite bad at dividing finite resources/wealth/capital/land/etc. in an efficient (let alone equitable) manner among the billions of people in the world today. Are we really supposed to believe that resource management would magically become better/more efficient/more equitable somehow with even more people to divide them between? My hunch is that the vast majority of new people that got added to the global population would be relatively quite poor, whereas the global number of billionaires and millionaires would stay relatively flat.

Yes things like whale oil and bat guano are resources we've progressed past the need for...but we can't progress past the need for land. Or water. Both of which are in relatively short supply for many people, especially in places that are more desirable to live.

Large population centers have historically tended to form where they are for a reason (proximity to water, natural resources, natural recreation/beauty, desirable weather/climate, etc.), and most of the world's large cities are already pretty tapped out in terms of population. You can't magically fit a billion extra people in New York or Shanghai or Paris without it having disastrous repercussions for the people already there (and the new people). Sure we could build new massive cities in presently rural/unpopulated areas, but I think there's a reason that lots of people don't live in those places now, and if a billion-person city was shoved into South Dakota (to use an example of a very sparsely populated place) out of necessity, I'd imagine many people wouldn't be too happy about having to live there.

To be very clear (and preempt any bad-faith readings of this), I'm not endorsing the view of dramatic population reduction or anything like that. I'm just saying that the idea that massive population growth is always an inherent good strikes me as quite wrongheaded.

[kiba]

These resources are abundantly available on Earth and endlessly recyclable. It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.

At some point, your problem will be heat, not energy, because roughly speaking humans are 100 watts space heater, never mind all the heat generated from making food, transport infrastructure, industrial production and extraction.

If you take a look at cities and how they're constructed, it's really a 2.5D map. The road corridor are frequently ground level, maybe two or threes. Then we build towers and buildings. So what we created are artificial canyons in cities, but we don't build entire floor of cities.

So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.

So in that sense, space isn't probably an issue.

Humans are actually pretty space efficient. What's not space efficient is all the expensive infrastructures such as cars and roads.

What will be the most challenging for us is really political, not engineering or economics or space or energy.

[kelnos]

> It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.

And we're doing a pretty poor job at solving those problems today, for many people at the lower end of the wealth & income spectrum. What makes you think adding more people will magically fix those issues?

I don't think anyone is arguing that it's technically impossible to fix issues like this and have a much larger population, with everyone housed, clothed, fed, and even more than that, happy. But humans -- especially those with wealth and power -- are a selfish bunch, and we are pretty bad at sharing when the goal is to raise other people up.

I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.

The continued comfort and wealth of the haves will always be a priority, at the expense of the have-nots. Eventual post-scarcity increasingly feels like a pipe dream to me.

> So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.

That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.

[kiba]

I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.

It's really not a problem of economics. It's entirely a political problem.

That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.

Not everybody care for natural sunlight. I certainly don't. Moreover, I see sunlight hitting the roof of my non-solar paneled house as uselessly bouncing and heating things up unnecessarily. Just another resources to be used and transformed into something more our liking.

If you're talking about open space for a sufficient definition of open space floor plan, then it's a question of engineering.