@Whisper Declaring me fractally wrong without having addressed the things I've actually brought up, then going on a Star Trek TNG dialogue level technobabble jag about something different, that's quite rich. I've discussed the concept of too many people with many types of people in many contexts using many approaches over the decades, and have come to expect people to refuse to face this topic directly for a variety of reasons and using a variety of defense mechanisms. I had hoped for something better from you.

Anyway...

My main premise here is that there are too many people already on Earth, and as a whole humans and the planet suffer for it. This has already reached a level where humanity can't innovate our way out of it, and the more humans we carelessly pile on, the less able we'll become able to.

Main problem: You're denying there already exist too many people because humanity will continue to innovate our way out of problems. Basically pitting your hopes upon unrealized improvements and innovations. This is as foolish as falling in love with a person for their potential.

You're not addressing a technophobe or naive person. I've been immersed in technology for decades. I've witnessed the arc of improvement, and stand intimately familiar with the costs and tradeoffs associated with them. This also gives me direct insight as to how much more efficiency gains can get wrung from further improvements.

I see these as promising a more across the board age of prosperity that will be sustainable for many generations to come... for a world population of say 800 million, but not 8 billion. Continuing to grow in numbers to 11 billion when we're barely managing with 8, without working systems in place already, is planet wide madness.

As Elon Musk famously pointed out, you don't get your hoverboard and your flying car by magic,

Answer then, how will humanity look when half a billion Indians and half a billion Chinese expect and obtain private automobiles, two generations hence? Have them all drive Teslas instead of ICE cars, when I believe you yourself has pointed out that our power grid can't possibly support a majority of the car owners now switching to electric cars?

Paul Erlich wasn't wrong with his basic premise, only his projected timeline. It doesn't matter how much quantity of resources exist on Earth, but how much economically harvestable (all aspects considered) quantities can get recovered.

@Whisper not really.

The thing is that most people (i.e. most men, I don't care about women) are alienated enough from society as it is. It's been traditional for religions to sell them a vision for the future, instead of a solution for today. Not that you haven't personally provided ample tips for individualism elsewhere. But, of course, individualism and a collective vision are quite at odds, especially when there are different status roles in the later.

Basically, what technology and more products etc can't solve is the general issue of status, which is a definite bottleneck to getting pussy. Even the utopian Martian colony of eugenic optimizations will have the hubbab, and most probably collapse, from the unchecked female sexual strategy, just like Owen's New Harmony did.

What really matters for the kind of society we have is not the technological level. It's how resources (read: pussy) are distributed. Sure, more technologically advanced societies can and have taken over less advanced ones. But you seem to provide a vision for humanity as a whole, and in that case the problems I've identified stand.

@MentORPHEUS

I'm not arguing with you, I'm talking to the audience. There is absolutely no point in arguing with the #fractallywrong.

You're just the example. You can stop reading now.

For the rest of you:

When you assume that the resource economy is a zero-sum game, many leftist plans begin to make a twisted kind of sense.

For example, expending most of your society's energy and effort deciding what distribution of goods and services is "fair" makes sense if goods and services come from the goods-and-services tree, which bears a fixed amount of fruit over any given period.

And believing that history is shaped by the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat seems viable if you believe that, for any given point in history, the sum of what the former and the latter receive is some fixed number.

This, of course, is nonsense, because the bottleneck on resources isn't the total amount of them in the universe. It's the work and innovation needed to go get more. It's utterly irrelevant that we do, technically, live in a finite universe with a finite amount of stuff. Because we're never going to even get close to using all the stuff.

What shapes history isn't class struggle. It's ENGINEERING, which gives us technology. Because it is technology which determines what we can and cannot do, what resources we can and cannot obtain, and so on.

As Elon Musk famously pointed out, you don't get your hoverboard and your flying car by magic, because it is {current year}, and these advances "should have" happened by now.... somebody actually has to DO the engineering and make the progress. Whether and how that gets done is what shapes the course of history.

Now, Elon Musk isn't the first person to say this, and he isn't the first person to say that we should be actively investing in science-fictional tech. He isn't even the first person to say we should have electric cars, an active program for colonizing Mars, true AI, direct neural interfaces, etc.

Science fiction writers have been talking about such things for about a century. All that's special about him is that he had millions upon millions of dollars, grew up reading those science fiction writers, and was willing to bet on the future, instead of just making additional money with your typical Soros-style stock market short and distort fuckery.

And when those kind of resources were poured into investing in the future, it was surprising just how nearby certain advances were.

Which brings us back to the point. If you're not growing, you're dying.

The leftist long game is to assume that technological advances will not happen, act in such a way as to ensure that is the case, and hang around waiting for the next asteroid impact to wipe out our species, or the sun to go nova. But hey, at least in the meantime we stole people's income and gave it to single moms with drug problems.

The sane long game is to maximize technological growth, which means big dreams, a market that rewards risk, available investment dollars, and minimal state restriction.

You can't economize your way into a science fiction future, any more than you can earn a living by saving money on coffee, and digging through the couch cushions for change.

You have to understand that Amdahl's Law doesn't just apply to computer systems.

@Whisper Not even the smartest guy in the room can formulate a meaningful rebuttal to the claim. Even with a deux ex machina like breeder reactors becoming common, the population is projected to swell from the current 8 billion to approach 11 billion by 2100. With that many people competing for and consuming Earth's resources, there exists no way or place that your grandchildrens' generation can enjoy the standard of living we do today. Not even so-called renewables can renew fast enough with the necessary burn rate of that many people.

Most rebuttals I've heard over the decades boil down to but then other races will outbreed and subsume our own!!1! which is also a dodge of the question.

If humanity collectively and universally recognized the danger, we could voluntarily reach a stable and sustainable-for-countless-generations population of say 800 million. The floor for potential individual standard of living would inevitably rise much higher. This song wouldn't be ironic if it were so.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueivjr3f8xg