@woodsmoke "Overpopulation is only a problem in cities where people cram themselves into mausoleum-sized apartments..."

Overpopulation is not where you live. It's what the environment can provide. You lay siege to a modern city and most residents will be dead within months. Because they have no food, no electricity, no heat, no cooling, perhaps no water. That's the problem with seeing where human settlements end as the limit to overpopulation.

The world was already overpopulated 10,000 years ago, where hunter-gatherers didn't breach 10 million. They hunted numerous species to death and plants didn't grow in neat rows in nature. In other words, the way that nature ordered the world limited us to that amount of people.

Then people began to farm and grow. About the limit of this world was reached around 1700-1800. Growth of very slow. About 1 billion. Malthus calculated 2 billion (iirc) was the absolute limit and he was not wrong. For the tech of the time and the limiting factor which was nitrogen that soil bacteria could take and affix from the atmosphere. There was a limit to how fast they worked.

This limit got subverted a bit by industrial farm but what really bought us into the modern paradigm around 1910 by the Haber-Bosch processed invented by Fritz Haber. Synthetic fertilizer, nitrogen, amino acids, protein. A bit more was expanded upon by Norman Borlaug with his green revolution, grains that could grow better in more conditions, etc.

Anyway, that bought world population from 1900's 1.6B to 8B now. Simply the fastest it's ever grown.

So if we're talking about overpopulation, then we need to talk about threats to the paradigm and not just land. There is water shortages, drawing down the water table, climate change heating up bread baskets of the world too much (even if just a few days, just enough to ruin crops which is all that matters), running out of fossil fuels (will happen but more distant), phosphate, and so on.

You see, the more we build up on this world, the more threats we will have on the jenga tower. Everytime we add more people, we need to take more from the environment, a lot of it not replenishable on human timescales. This is not debateable. And one day that Jenga tower will fall, unless you believe in Star Trek future (it's a happy deus ex machina type story but fiction).

Idk if that's tomorrow or 300 years from now. I just know it's coming. All that "empty land"? That's human thinking. We share the world with millions of species, they need land too. And if we kill them off (which we have done), well a narrowly bio-diverse world is less able to adapt or survive. But that's what we're headed towards. More for us and less for everything else. Cause there can never be enough humans, or whatever. Amazon? Clear cut for meat. Oceans? Overfished and replaced by jellyfish.

But all you see is the human settlement which couldn't survive a week on its own. And suburbia is not sustainable either. Too much government build road infrastructure for too few people. One of the reasons cities are poor. Building out sewer and all other things was a nail in the coffin cause it was paid by debt which meant credit card for next generation. And the more that this is built out, the more to fix. It's a well-known problem that suburbia isn't paying for itself, it was well-known already by the 1980s if not earlier. That's why bridges and shit galore around me are falling apart. This will only translate until the dollar is no longer accepted as reserve currency and the American credit card no longer accepted worldwide. Another one of those, now or in 50 years problems, but it'll come.

Anyway, people oughta know how the exponential function should work.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kza9hnp3av4

@Typo-MAGAshiv I don't see that happening and think it's optimism at its basest. At best, a caste system of lighter skin ala India should hard times come back (it likely will).

The reason it will happen like this is people get programmed who they are attracted to as kids. This is called the Westermarck effect. Up to age 6 or 8, the features in the adults around a child is later what they see as attractive as a mate. Therefore, it's pushed in the pop culture and schools. My area looks nothing like I did growing up and less and less that do. The west is being overrun quite systematically.

Liberals know this instinctively and is why they push diversity at every institution and every area. It's why Obama tried to diversify the suburbs with the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulations (later revoked under Trump). It's why Israel has a segregationist country. And so on.

There might be a few holdouts, like that Alexander-the-Great era white tribe in Pakistan (3,000 people?) but the masses will be mixed.

@woodsmoke "People have been predicting the "browning" of white populations, particularly in the U.S., for quite some time now."

It's already happened in Brazil and other places. You don't tend to see it when the supermajority is white because the mixed kids often go blend in with the other races and don't self-identify as white.

"I've known a number of people who are 1/4 black, Columbian, Indian or whatever else; had they never told me, I'd never have thought of them as anything other than white."

Then you really can't really recognize white faces too well. Not my problem. 80 years ago, people could often tell what country in Europe a white was from. Generations before that, they could tell they weren't from the same valley. But technology and movement.

Anyway, if you have problems telling 1/4 black from white, you need to get glasses. Next thing you telling me Kim Kardashian is white.