No Such Thing as Over Population

As prosperity expands birthrate declines. End of discussion.

TLDR: Worrying about populations anywhere in the low billions is silly. And that’s just one planet.

Malthus was wrong objectively and qualitatively.

The food supply will increase exponentially over time along with everything else subject to the leveraging of computing power, which food is thanks to genetic engineering, robots, and fission.

Consumption of food is the hilariously inefficient process of swapping molecules to export entropy. To get some idea just how efficient, imagine if you could eat uranium for fuel. The idea that the only way to accomplish powering a human permitted by the laws of physics is a 1900s concept of farming is hilariously wrong. The myth of overpopulation is nothing but cover for the pathological greed of the 0.1% ownership caste.

But even assuming no changes to people themselves, it’s still not even that big of a problem the moment we grow a spine, or find ourselves choiceless. Trigger one good sized volcano somewhere and the volcanic winter will counter the runaway methane reaction. (CO2 is a wimp.) It may not perfectly balance but we can make a pretty safe calculation about which we’d prefer. 

Or we could literally do the Matrix revolutions approach minus the permanent nano magic and create our own particulate winter on the installment plan. And that’s just one class of responses available the moment humanity decides to geoengineer willfully, as opposed to incidentally.

Humanity only needs to deploy three (or four depending on definitions) tools to turn this planet into a fully people serving ecosystem. Fission, Software, and Robotics/GE. Fission to power it, software to guide it, and Robotics/GE to actualize it.


Assuming vertical (up or down) deployment of support infrastructure and total planetary urban cover we can see already what the interpersonal density would be: The low birth rate low poverty areas of urban Japan. Since XKCD and others already did the napkin math on how much space there actually is, we could extrapolate to arrive at a maximum prosperous human population for earth. 5 Trillion. With a T.


Area of Earth divided by the area of Texas times Earth’s population at the time of the calculation. So, 200 million square miles for earth’s surface area divided by 268,600 square miles for Texas.

Now, the population density of NYC, (because NYC and Texas were the base of the XKCD math) 28491 people per square mile.

So, 28491 people per square mile covering 200 million square miles leads to a population of 5 trillion 698 billion 200 million. And these are numbers generated without the downward pressure on birth rate caused by property. The final homeostatic number will likely be substantially lower.

“Over population” is a fictional problem. At the very least it’s the very least of our most pressing issues.

Citations and alternate numbers.

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=51292

POP101: A primer on the future of planet Earth

Oh yeah and all this is assuming population rise isn’t already reversing. But it is. 

My Most Mind Numbing Ban

I just had to share this. I rarely get such blatant evidence. Ok so there is this subreddit called r/LateStageCapitalism right and it’s very much convinced of its own enlightenment. And not without reason since capitalism is at the center of a huge percentage of human policy problems on earth today. 

But of course being run by humans, it is quite irrational. And ironically I was banned for lamenting this easily provable fact.

I am no exception. My irrationality lies in my perpetual (apparently) belief in the power of facts and logic. Like some flabbergasted leftist confused by Trump’s success via the usage of completely transparent lies, I keep expecting proof to matter. But it simply does not in the human policy arena. It only matters in the technical fields where physics actually dominate.

Which is why I sent them another message 15 hours later.

The reply I received is such a glorious encapsulation. I am honestly still processing it. I have trouble even putting the event into words. But I think you’ll see the implications pretty much immediately.

As they say, I have lost my ability to even.

http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/

SJWs, Divide and Conquer

I hate that no one on the left wonders why MLK and bobby got shot, while SJWs are promoted on every campus in the country plus a major political party.

They don’t seem to grasp that unifying people is a threat to the 1% while dividing them is profitable for them. 🙁

I hate having to constantly argue with my own class because I’m a different color or gender or whatever. And I’m SUPER tired of people telling powerless me I’m their oppressor. As if I own slaves and a yacht. I mean I basically can’t participate in 90% of social media spheres because of that.

I am totally forced in a number of contexts to at the very least hide my position or be banned. Like even in that indie fiction places stories are full of gender pronoun self policing, which don’t get me wrong, genderless pronouns are needed, but that’s not why they are growing in popularity.

I’m pretty confident if I commented on the resulting conversation it would get me banned. It’s messed up that the right wingers on 4chan hate me as much as the leftists on Reddit XD especially considering my philosophy and policy is built on helping everyone and hurting no one. It’s like fighting pain and death itself has rendered me socially an asshole.

It’s almost like people in power have maneuvered such that they win either way. >.>

Lock thread reply: Coders and the job market.

I normally wouldn’t bother but my reply draft started to grow general and it became worthy of posting somewhere imo.

This is in response to this comment:

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/164#issuecomment-387787082

That thread is now locked.

I have no illusions about the impact my words are going to have. I get that. And he’ll probably never even see this, though I will email him a link to it and promise to publish any replies he has.

This is about my own ethical code and recycling of labor. It has nothing to do with him beyond my code of conduct towards all people

So, here is my reply proper.
…

> Again, you can demand all you like, and you can claim that it’s totalitarian that nobody wants to implement them. I don’t think it’s a very effective way of getting what you want though. Obviously the burden of proof lies with whoever want to invest labour in a feature (specifically other people’s labour).

This whole paragraph is nonsensical. Burden of proof doesn’t even apply here. If you’re tangentially talking about power and responsibility which is loosely similar to burden of proof then yes, those with power collectively have responsibility. But it is diffuse. I was always only ever speaking in general and about classes.

> So who are you directing your demands at

I don’t have any demands at all beyond ethics. My demand in this context was simply that the goal should be doing what’s right and sensible. As for who would implement then, if ever, that’s entirely up to those able to do so.

In my view compensation would come in the form of an improved society paying up front with a basic income, the utility of the code itself, and respect paid to people doing good for its own sake.

> I’m not suggesting it’s easy to become a (good) developer, but once you are, it’s trivial to get a job. 

Goal post move. Adding that subjective qualifier changes the entire scope of your assertion. 99% of coders can’t find work already. Millions of coders bag groceries thanks to the exponentially increasing demands of profit.

https://newrepublic.com/article/145734/costs-millennial

Only the privileged pampered elite among coders have wildly insecure jobs in the industry. That they don’t feel pampered is merely testament to the 0.1%’s ability to get people to works for the bare minimum they’ll accept.

It’s worth noting also imo that those jobs are ALL about making it so corporations can hire machines instead of people. Coders are maggots in the corpse of the job market. And to be clear I say bravo because the job market is only different from a slave market in methodology. The result of both is still brutal physical punishment for refusal to work. We just moved from away from whips towards crushing poverty in the midst of technological plenty.

Objections to capitalism itself center on this fact but rarely make the comparison because traditionally communism and socialism by necessity of technological immaturity had to have workers as a necessary evil.

We are building a new mechanical ecology. Earth is going to become an indoor garden or lush space station eventually and the floor of the food chain is going to be fission reactions and robotically actualized open source code.

> This is not the first time the world has gone through technological shifts 

This statement is entirely wrong.

We’re today capable of dispensing with the food chain and work generally at the same time. And we’re on the cusp of both an AI singularity and a reproductive revolution that is going to force us to redefine what “human” even means.

In the context of code work alone the change coming is so substantive and qualitative that work itself is about to come to an end.

Retaining it much longer in the face of our physically real option to obviate it will amount to a religious decision completely unconnected to the objective world.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36246153-can-biotechnology-abolish-suffering

> Well, in your star-trek communism it still wouldn’t really be voluntary, would it? I would have to work on the majority-vote feature.

Firstly, Star trek isn’t communist. It’s fascist. Secondly, you won’t have to work at all if you don’t want to (Yay for actual real freedom) and what you do work on will be your choice.

See also: http://underlore.com/the-apex/

Why existence exists as opposed to not exists.

Bear with me here… I’ll get to the point at the end.

QM (quantum mechanics) is a religion.

Granted we are on to something with much of QM, or else the tools we build based on those assumptions wouldn’t work, but extending them to existential scales is essentially a leap of faith.

Faith needn’t be wrong. You can believe a random thing and by chance have it line up with reality. Especially if you’re constantly adapting your faith to observations, which is what QM has done. Think of it like the scientific method applied to a dogma.

Usage of the term “possibility” here is when you clearly see the religious nature of QM. There are no probabilities. There are simply events which occur, and our imagination. When our imagination and occurrence match, we call that prediction. There’s no such thing as random, there is only unpredictability, which is OUR limit, a cognitive limit, not reality’s. Not a physical limit.

The cat is either alive or dead in the box. There are no superposed states. There are just states. Some we know some we don’t.

And don’t tell me about the double slit and particle duality.

https://marty-green.blogspot.com/2016/02/there-are-no-pea-shooters-for-photons.html

In order for possibilities to be a “real” thing you have to create space for them of infinite size outside events that existed. But there’s a logical problem, a possibility is always by definition something that didn’t happen or hasn’t happened yet. A possibility is a non-happening. That is functionally identical to a position of faith.

The moment something you have faith in actually happens it stops being a matter of faith and becomes a matter of fact. Believing a fact before you can prove it is just imagination. Just like the moment a possibility happens it becomes an occurrence.

I can say it’s possible for one of the infinite possibilities to annihilate all others, but we exist, so clearly that didn’t happen, thus that is not among the set of possible outcomes anywhere since the definition impacts all others. Thus constraint is required: You MUST grant that a universe that destroys all others past and future universes cannot ever be an occurrence. And if something can never occur, can it be a possibility? No. Just like a false faith, an impossible possibility isn’t possible. In order for something to even be a possibility, it has to be possible. It has to have a non zero chance of occurring or having already occurred. It’s thus not possible for some all-other-universes-annihilating universe to exist, as proven by the existence of ours.

That means the space outside occurrence is finite. Just as science expanded, room for faith based answers contracted, the room for “possibilities” similarly contracts for the same reasons. All possibility is like that, and the more you dig in the more constrained it gets. Like entropy, it’s unidirectional. The advancement of understanding is the elaboration of constraint. The idea of infinite possibilities is a cognitive artifact, a belief system, an imagining. Not a state of reality. QM is a religion in the sense that it invents possibilities to suit its needs in the exact same way religion invents spiritual external contexts to suit its needs. Possibilities are dogmas and imagination, nothing more.

The universe is 100% deterministic. Randomness is as cognitive and illusory as the behavior of movie or book characters. Just because you don’t yet know what they’ll do next means they have more than 1 option.

The only broad version of QM that is completely secular in this sense is a the hidden variable one. The question of why there is something vs nothing implies it was ever possible for there to be nothing, and that’s wrong. Because as I’ve shown, there is only occurrence and imagination. Fact and concept. Nothing is a concept, not a fact.

However, subjectivity is important, it obviously exists. A sufficiently convincing illusion is no different from reality in terms of experience and the illusion of free will, chance, and probability is absolute.

Science co-opting chance and possibility here is an example of it encroaching on philosophies turf. And good policy must embrace both subjectivity and objectivity because sentience is both.

It is my view that a complimentary synthesis can be found and there is no need for compromise: https://underlore.com/deism-v-atheism-how-and-why/