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Too many people?

Elixir said:
I think we can see how that’s gonna work out. A certain definition of insanity comes to mind.
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Seeing that the people here are oh so charitable--except when they are joking about killing me--I'll take my chances. ;)
 
Merle said:
Seeing that the people here are oh so charitable--
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I detect a note of sarcasm. People here are ruthless, and many are unrelenting in their demand for logical consistency. But the forum is more diverse than that. There’s a poetry section, some art threads, literary fora … perhaps you’d be more comfortable in those venues. They tend to provide more latitude for artistic license, which seems to be what you require.
 
Elixir said:
Merle said:
Seeing that the people here are oh so charitable--
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I detect a note of sarcasm. People here are ruthless, and many are unrelenting in their demand for logical consistency. But the forum is more diverse than that. There’s a poetry section, some art threads, literary fora … perhaps you’d be more comfortable in those venues. They tend to provide more latitude for artistic license, which seems to be what you require.
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Demands for logical consistency are good.

Jokes about killing me are wrong, in my opinion. (see https://iidb.org/threads/too-many-people.27312/page-20#post-1101793)
 
FWIW,
For all of our sakes, I sincerely hope that neither you nor I “detonates”.
That you are offended by an impossibility is not something I know how to address beyond that…
 
Elixir said:
FWIW,
For all of our sakes, I sincerely hope that neither you nor I “detonates”.
That you are offended by an impossibility is not something I know how to address beyond that…
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Ah, so a joke about killing somebody is not a joke about killing that person if it would be impossible to do the threatened act?

I came here lookin for serious debate, not talk about killing each other. Should I be in the poetry section?
 
Merle, this was not a ”death threat”. Read back to the beginning of the exchange

Elixir said:
bilby said:
I'm concerned that the Sun might go nova in the next ten years.
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I’m more concerned that Merle might go nova in the next ten minutes! Wish he would clarify his intent /meaning rather than keep vexing about being misunderstood.
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You have here “I hope he doesn’t explode!”
Followed in later posts, up the one one you linked, by, essentially, “yeah but if he did, it would kill us all and we’d stop arguing.”


That is not a death threat.
 
Had I surmised that if 100% of MY mass were to be instantly converted to energy it would wipe out human civilization, would that also have been taken as a personal threat to Merle?
Because if not, I happily retract my former surmise, and eagerly volunteer to be the one hypothetically converted to energy.
In fact I consider it an honor, and a possibly salvitic sacrifice to the welfare of the planet!
Yay me! If anyone survives maybe they’ll build me a monument!

PS @Merle, please don’t call a suicide hotline! I’m not going to detonate! :hysterical:
 
Elixir said:
Had I surmised that if 100% of MY mass were to be instantly converted to energy it would wipe out human civilization, would that also have been taken as a personal threat to Merle?
Because if not, I happily retract my former surmise, and eagerly volunteer to be the one hypothetically converted to energy.
In fact I consider it an honor, and a possibly salvitic sacrifice to the welfare of the planet!
Yay me! If anyone survives maybe they’ll build me a monument!

PS @Merle, please don’t call a suicide hotline! I’m not going to detonate! :hysterical:
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The post I linked to above specifically addressed my post requesting to let me live (with a smile face). The responding post would not accept letting me live as an option. Instead it requested to fly me to Moscow and let me blow up.

That's not the way issues of science should get resolved.
 
Merle said:
I have told you before that I am an engineer and I love technical solutions. You simply ignore what I say.
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You say that you love technical solutions, but don't actually propose any.

What technical solution do you propose, that addresses population, and not some other ecological problem that we could seek technical solutions for without reference to population levels?

I already showed that your "top three" concerns are nothing to do with population - they could (and did) exist with much lower population than today's, and they can (and likely will) be solved without any reference to population at all.

Nobody's prevented from building or operating a nuclear reactor by the sheer number of people who are alive. The population is irrelevant; If we look at global warming, we find that fossil fuel consumption is barely correlated to population, and that even if it were precisely correlated with population, population reductions would just kick the can down the road

If it takes fifty years for eight billion humans to totally fuck the atmosphere, then two billion humans each burning the exact same amount of fossil fuels per capita will totally fuck the atmosphere in two centuries - having a lower population doesn't help much at all. To avoid fucking the atmosphere, we need humans to not burn fossil fuels; This can easily be achieved by fissioning uranium instead (and despite your woeful ignorance of how reserves are calculated, it remains true that the cheaply accessible uranium on Earth is enough to last for at least many millions of years).
 
Merle said:
The responding post would not accept letting me live as an option. Instead it requested to fly me to Moscow and let me blow up.

That's not the way issues of science should get resolved.
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But it is the way geopolitical problems get resolved. The post in question took the absurd idea that a person might spontaneously explode, and built upon the joke by suggesting that IF this was expected to happen, then it would be more geopolitically useful for that person's death to take Vlad Putin out, than for the collateral damage to be inflicted on the USA.

If you feel that this is a personal attack on a specific individual, then you are right - but only if you also realise that the specific individual in question is the current leader of Russia, and not anyone who posts on this discussion board.
 
Ever since Malthus first wrote about it, people have repeated his major error.

It starts with the understanding that exponential growth in any physical system inevitably and unavoidably exhausts all resources, surprisingly quickly, and with very little warning.

That terrifying and unavoidable fact then causes people to lose their minds, and to make the next two logical steps:

If exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, then it won't.

The end of exponential growth will be a huge disaster.

The first is, of course, unavoidably true; But the second is just pure conjecture.

Exponential growth might terminate in disaster; Or it might end by non-disastrous means.

This latter possibility - the non-disastrous end of exponential growth - just gets completely ignored, despite the clear observational evidence that it is actually happening, at least in the case of population, which isn't growing exponentially anymore.

The mathematics is undeniable, and that seems to completely blind people to the fact that they stopped making a mathematical argument. In pure mathematics, exponential growth can go on forever, because you will never run out of numbers. In applied mathematics, there's inevitably a catastrophe; But a mathematical catastrophe need not be a disaster (despite the two words being synonymous in casual English).

The only thing that population alarmists can prove mathematically is that population won't grow indefinitely. But that's perfectly OK; Nobody needs, wants or (if they're paying attention) expects it to.
 
Merle said:
How do we fuel it all? We have uranium reserves to provide all our power requirements for six years. That's not much.
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In 1924, worldwide copper reserves were estimated to be sufficient to last about twenty years. Today, they are sufficient to last about thirty years.

When would you suggest we should start to panic?

Do you recall the world running out of copper in the mid 1940s?
 
Merle said:
bilby said:
What technical solution do you propose, that addresses population
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Condoms.

Birth control pills.

Abortions.
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All already done.

And they have actually resolved the alleged problem.

So you're proposing, as a technical solution, that we should just keep on doing what we are already doing. Do you imagine that without your input, we might not have?

Did you have an actual point to make?

Or is the thread title just intended as an example of Betteridge's Law?
 
Merle said:
Elixir said:
Just a reminder; “population overshoot” is not something with objective existence, it’s a descriptive phrase, and does not refer to a condition that has rigorously defined parameters.
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The overshoot limit may not be precisely defined, but as Justice Stewart said about pornography, "I know it when I see it."
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It's not even remotely defined because they never show how the lower limit is sustainable in the long run.

And the pornography definition causes problems--making things that would be useful educational materials for teens be 18+. (The most obvious example being illustrations of a large number of genitals to show normal variety.)
 
bilby said:
Ever since Malthus first wrote about it, people have repeated his major error.

It starts with the understanding that exponential growth in any physical system inevitably and unavoidably exhausts all resources, surprisingly quickly, and with very little warning.

That terrifying and unavoidable fact then causes people to lose their minds, and to make the next two logical steps:

If exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, then it won't.

The end of exponential growth will be a huge disaster.

The first is, of course, unavoidably true; But the second is just pure conjecture.

Exponential growth might terminate in disaster; Or it might end by non-disastrous means.

This latter possibility - the non-disastrous end of exponential growth - just gets completely ignored, despite the clear observational evidence that it is actually happening, at least in the case of population, which isn't growing exponentially anymore.

The mathematics is undeniable, and that seems to completely blind people to the fact that they stopped making a mathematical argument. In pure mathematics, exponential growth can go on forever, because you will never run out of numbers. In applied mathematics, there's inevitably a catastrophe; But a mathematical catastrophe need not be a disaster (despite the two words being synonymous in casual English).

The only thing that population alarmists can prove mathematically is that population won't grow indefinitely. But that's perfectly OK; Nobody needs, wants or (if they're paying attention) expects it to.
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I don't think it was a mistake--in the situation prevailing in his time the only foreseeable end was catastrophic.

The situation has changed since--reliable birth control and society caring for it's elders.
 
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