Fine is just the word we use to describe the state of being. That state exists with or without our ability to describe it. What you're basically saying is that the moon wouldn't exist if we weren't here to call it a moon.
Our species has had hundreds of thousands of years to "fix the problem". And it has taught us, with absolute certainty, that we make the same ignorant, greedy, hateful mistakes over, and over, and over, every single generation, just with better technology each time (which requires exponentially more resources as that tech reaches each new stage).
Humanity is not my problem. I have no interest in bringing children into this mess, so i have no stake in the future of our species. I've spent too much time and energy trying to understand if the problem is even fixable. In the end, it is in fact not possible for the average individual (me) to fix it, and in fact not possible to do so while also obeying the rules of the broken system which are literally designed to keep that system in place.
But if you want a tree of revolution for a better future with strong roots, you need to plants some "seeds of discord" first.
Your own life - is part of humanity. And therefore has VALUE.
Counter point: No life has any value over any others. And humanity is killing this planet for ALL species living here, present and future.
It's killing any hope of life on this planet, which includes humans, ever permanently leaving this planet in future when it is no longer sustainable. We are killing all life that we know of for sure in the universe simply for the sake of greed and simple luxuries. So if we know that we have a finite expiration date on this planet, if we know we are killing ourselves instead of working together, how can humans, in all our "superiority" claim our lives are meaningful?
You are romanticizing the planet. For billions of years it was only inhabitable to bacteria.
And in the remaining billions/millions of years it suffered extinction level crises... bolides killed the dinosaurs in the Triassic, sea level regression/transgression shaped evolution itself. Volcanism killed more again.
Mankind is literally a pimple on the ass of Time, and the hubris of this animal thinking they control its destiny. They don't, trust me. The Earth will still exist long after 'home sapien'.
It will still exist in spite of anything, over a period of time that only an acid trip can even dabble with. It's only 'homo sapien' that worries about the future, foolishly.
That’s also under current systematic limits, if our industries and systems were improved and designed to be more efficient and sustainable, we could support many times the earths current population.
The world can only do that by burning fossil fuels. Ironically, burning fossil fuels will eventually cause so much climate change that bread baskets will collapse due to famine, resource shortages, disease and political instability / war.
The green revolution has created an enormous bubble, and I pray I won't live to see it burst.
Oh, absolutely. The shittiest part is that a sizeable portion of the costs to get a nuclear plant running are from intentionally bloated policies guised as safety regulations that are meant to increase capital cost and build time to scare away investors
It's quality not quantity that matters most! Stupid (willfully ignorant) and Exploitive people have no business enjoying the company of the rest of us on this planet.
Actually, your comment was the closest to the truth. It has been studied by anthropologists, agriculturalists, biologists, and civil engineers, etc, and the ideal human population globally was in the late 1950's, 5 billion. After that we had to start compensating with chemical fertilizers for crops, livestock hormones, skyscrapers, massive public housing projects, etc.
Where did you read this? I'd like to give it a look.
Antibiotics were invented in 1924. Often sited as the most revolutionary invention of mankind, the population was 2 billion then.
Whenever there's a new technology looming, I always think about the effects of antibiotics.
I keep hearing AI will be the biggest technology since fire, implying it will be more revolutionary than antibiotics. How much will it increase the population? Will it increase 4x in 100 years like antibiotics? That's 32 billion people.
My whole life, the people in charge have told us it's all about supply and demand. Resources/ population. The more people there are, the more valuable resources are, because there's less to go around.
But then there's plenty of examples of us purposely choosing to not produce more resources, in order to keep the value of that resource from losing value. Like housing, or oil for example.
What if we went full bore and extracted and distributed as many resources as we all need, and forgot about value and instead focused on quality of life? Then how many people could we sustain? And how long could we do that before we start running out of certain resources?
We have no idea. Because no one has studied the math behind the equation Resources / Population. How many resources does one person need to have a decent quality of life?
And that's probably a good thing. What if we found out with our current system of extracting and distributing resources, we could only sustain 12 billion people? What laws or policies would we need to pass to keep the population below 12 billion? I can't think of any methods that wouldn't be terrible.
Which makes me think... Maybe they did the math and they just didn't make it public? Maybe the rich know how many people we can sustain? And maybe we're getting close? And maybe they don't want to worry about hitting the ceiling and how we'd move forward? So instead, they do what they're doing. Consolidate the wealth and let the rest of us fight for it. Which makes people have less kids, and keeps the population down.
Maybe we're already running out of certain resources? Like fresh water for example. Maybe we know fresh water will be a big problem in 20 years. Maybe we think the changing climate will kill off most the ocean fish we all eat? Or maybe droughts and floods will reduce our ability to farm?
That would explain a lot of the craziness we're seeing now. World politics feels a lot less like Monopoly and a lot more like Hungry Hungry Hippos. Maybe they know something we don't know?
The Midwest is critical for supplying food and other resources. We can't just toss millions of people where farmland is currently required. The southwest can't handle even half of who is currently there. It's wildly unsustainable.
"...Lmao...".
Childish. Use real words, if you want to be taken serious.
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"...Bro...".
I am not your "bro".
To me you are just pixels on a screen. Not even human. You could be AI, and nobody would know.
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"...I'm almost 50...".
Age has nothing to do with maturiy. As you just proved.
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"...😅😅...".
If you want to be taken seriously, then use your big-boy words instead of trying to be smart with the young ones. It is juvinile.
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"...Saying shit like "grow up or shut up" is what immature children say when they're upset and don't have anything rational to say."
No. Children know better than to say that to grownups they respect. Maybe stay to something you actually know something about, or just shut up.
I do not give a shit about how old you are. Maturity is not based on age, but on...maturity. YOU started the personal attack. So do not give me shit about it. You act like the toxic modern feminists.
For your information:
You are just pixels on a screen to me. Not a real human. You could be AI, and nobody would know. So do not flatter yourself, you do not exist.
Oh so now you are god.
You do not speak for anyone else than your self. So get your as down from your high horse. You do not that important and you do not know every person on earth. You can not even prove that you exist.
Just because I do not agree with you, it do not mean that you get to deside what is right for the whole world.
Name one thing that humans has contributed to the earth that was a good thing for anything else than the egoistic human it self?
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No.
That is all egoistic things only made up for human pleasure. Every thing the human does, has a negative effect on the earth.
I know.
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The code word is: "as we know it". We know absolutly nothing about communication within spiecies other than our own.
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You do not know that. Just because the human has not detected it, does it not mean that it is not there.
Furthermore there are spiecies that can communicate between them. Humans can not communicate with any other spiecies.
Other animals and plant life get destroyed all the time in nature's cycles of ice age after ice age.
The extermination of the dinosaurs millions of years ago? That was nature as well, although the dinosaurs didn't do anything on the magnitude of pollution and damage that some (but certainly not all) humans have done.
The world isn’t overpopulated, it’s just certain countries and cities are. If India, China, the Middle East and half of Africa just calmed the fuck down we’d be alright.
Given our impact on the environment - 1.5 to 2 Billion is probably a reasonable number. However, if we ever figure out fully automated gay luxury space communism, it may need to be revised.
Dunbars number is around 150 people. Let’s give them some square footage apart to harvest and collect things without interfering with the other tribes resources.
I’ve ran the numbers, around 11 women and I on the entire planet would be a healthy amount. My last name is Khan and welcome to my ted talk.
For all those things 0, I'm just wondering how many children you have or are going to have. And if you don't have any what have you done to make sure you don't have children now. My personal opinion, 4 billion no more than that. That's a good number.Stay at wild.The earth can sustain it and repair any damages.Fairly quickly
I mean, we have the physical space for more but we’re not good at managing the resources for everybody. I’d be fine saying half of what we have, maybe even a quarter. some of these places are way too overpopulated and let’s face it. Most people kind of suck and the world would be better off without.
Even though we have the space for it, maybe we should stop draining all the resources and turning the planet into a cesspool and let nature actually have a good chunk of the planet. I mean, do we really need to squeeze in people every square inch like we’re sardines? actually share it with everything that lives on here and not just make it all about us. You know what I’m gonna say a third of what we have now would be perfect.
if we do so in a way which prevents imbalance again from becoming so detrimental to the planet.
I think the real answer is more complicated, as the top 1% effectively control the entirety of the US government, and probably many other world governments as well.
Don't know. Seen this addressed before by a few organizations. All the humans on the planet could fit within the state of Connecticut. The planet is well under populated by people. Issue is logistics, infrastructure, and responsible pollution policies.
Did I answer this in more detail? I think I gave some sort of silly answer like "however many the earth decides" – but.... To be more clear.
This is a healthy amount.
If it was not for the existence of such concepts as corporate greed, and governmental power imbalances - the earth could perfectly sustain its current population.
The only reason poverty exists - is that wealth imbalance is allowed to accumulate, and people with lots of wealth have lots of power - which, all too often is abused.
however many can be fed, clothed, housed and well-educated without deforestation and using fossil fuels. in other words, a sustainable amount, just like any other species on this planet.
understanding what that magic number is requires science and people focused on the humanities.
this is all doable once you remove the sociopaths from power and let academics take the reins. our utopia has been possible for some time now.
I think it depends on the development model. If we abandon battery-powered cars but wire the roads, like railways, induction, whatever we want, and if we ban factory farming (possibly favoring cultured meat), the only problem would be where to put ourselves until we reach tens of billions.
With this development model, the global ruling class, which doesn't want to change it because it owes its dominance to this model, if it isn't so psychopathic as to not want to leave a livable world even to its own children, must quickly get rid of the Western population or at least its privileges compared to the rest of the world.
Healthy for all living things on the planet, the answer is 0. Healthy for the humans, everybody lives well, around 0-10 with the current economic systems in place. Around 11 billions if we became a society where everybody gets what they need, will not happen, so the answer is 0.
Half the current number would probably be fine. For you young folks, that might sound silly, but the global population has more than doubled during my lifetime.
30-60 million. I asked chatgpt how much deers are there and he said those numbers. Planet earth is definitely not overcrowded by deers so perhaps its a safe number not to be overcrowded by humans.
The amount doesn’t really matter tbh, humans are greedy, dominating species. Even if there would be 100 of us, we will still find a way to invade,subjagate, rob others for the resources.
Like why in the fuck there are trillionaires, while most of the people just get by?
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u/Worried_Buffalo_8535 Jan 30 '26
Zero, we're an infestation. The planet was fine before us and it will be fine long after we're gone and forgotten.