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daenerys comments on On "Friendly" Immortality - Less Wrong
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Over-Population Discussion Thread
Space colonization isn't really all that necessary, if we're talking about human habitation. On the other hand, if we're talking about space industrialization -- constructing industrial/economic materials/objects in space -- then that definitely opens the floor to sustaining significantly larger populations here on earth, with just a touch of additional materials-science "shenanigans".
Orbital solar-thermal power plants (if constructed offworld with bootstrapped lunar industry) could push humanity to post-Kardashev-Type-I energy consumption. This reduces energy costs as a primary economic concern.
The adoption of skyscraper farming techniques would reduce vast swathes of human ecological impact (in addition to the offset of energy production offered by point #1.) It would also significantly reduce current human land-use by area. These two things in turn would allow for greater human population without apparent depreciation in available square-footage per person.
The adoption of higher-strength materials for construction (CNTs for example) could permit the development of 'megastructures' terrestrially. This, in turn, would allow for multi-level urban environments. Imagine a single building the size of the NYC metropolitan area that was half a mile high. Even if it was primarily open-air, and dedicated 25% of its area to "parkland", that would still represent as much as a ten-fold increase in "habitatation area" using generous amounts of square-footage per person. (I'm heavily 'ballparking' numbers here.)
-- In case it isn't entirely obvious; the scenario I just described would allow for the increase of human populations by approximately 20x our current numbers, all while reducing the total landmass utilized and our ecological footprint. (Industry, energy consumption, and agriculture would all cease having observable ecological footprints.)
While clinical immortality might decrease the TFR necessary for population replacement, it certainly wouldn't reduce it to zero. (Accidents, plain and simply speaking, happen. As do intentional deaths.) The question then follows -- what rate of TFR would such a culture described operate at?
John McCarthy argued that overpopulation won't be much of a problem as part of his larger analysis on the sustainability of progress.
Human material progress is sustainable?!? Has anyone told Robin Hanson?
Human material progress is sustainable for very large values of material progress.
The page says: "there are no apparent obstacles even to billion year sustainability". It seems rather strange to have a whole page devoted to the hypothesis that human material progress is sustainable - apparently without acknowledging that progress might result in the end of the human race - or that overall progress is very likely to eventually slow down to minimal levels. Instead we have a page on menaces - which offers an inadequate treatment of the topic.
I've never understood how severe food yield issues from overpopulation are supposed to come about. If the population is increasing far faster than we can increase the food yields, wouldn't the price of food massively increase and stop people from being able to afford to have children? Is the idea that the worldwide agricultural system would be gradually overtaxed and then collapse within a short period? If not, what were all the people eating the day before catastrophic overpopulation is declared?
Things like that are not unprecedented. I think that is the theory for what became of the Easter Island civilization. One could also draw parallels to the collapse of sardine fishing in US in the 1950s -- in a couple of years the sardine population completely crashed, but up until that point the fishing had been going great, there was no gradual cost increase that made it less profitable.
One thing that should probably be noted is that doubling life span wouldn't necessarily double the number of years a woman is fertile.
That is true, but life-extending tech/transhumanism doesn't tend to focus on making people be old for a longer period of time, but on lengthening our "peak" years.
This is actually one of the arguments that proponents of life-extending technologies use. Nay-sayers will say: "Well, who wants to be 150 years old? You'd be sick and wrinkly and falling apart, etc?" The general come-back is that the whole point of the tech is to not make you be old until you were, say 130 years old.
I sure as Hell wouldn't expect life-extension through rejuvenation to actually restore eggs in females. They do run out eventually.
Whether or not Logos01 below is correct, the finite number of eggs women have is still vastly greater than the number of children most women have.
Hm, you are right. If I had remembered my basic biology, I would've remembered that women are already born with a finite amount of eggs.
Weak rebuttal: Another reason people don't have children in their 50s-70s is that chasing kids around is tiring. If women knew that they would at least still be young physically at those ages, they might think ahead and have some eggs frozen.
Isn't that currently in doubt? I recall that in other mammals marrow stem cells have been shown to differentiate into follicles, but no studies have shown this to occur in humans yet.
Or have eggs generated through biomedicine practices of the age. We're pretty close to differentiating sperm cells already, eggs can't be that far off.