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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I know some people here are concerned with national demographic shifts, but there's a larger and more esoteric question. Epistemic status: Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.

If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.

At some point the lines of human population, possible food/power/water resources and our technological advancement will intersect. Could be ten billion, could be a hundred billion, could be much more, but without FTL travel, we get there someday. The obvious answer is to have less people, and there's any number of horrific ways to achieve that, and one painless one. Given our assumption, and further assuming that we want to do this the most moral way possible, zero population growth is the way to go. We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale. Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much. This brings us to the issue that the demographics of the world change over time, so when this event takes place will have a huge impact on what sort of humans are represented in this hypothetically fixed future population. There will be a lot more africans in ten years than there are now, and fewer europeans, but in a hundred years, or a thousand? Who knows? If the decision is outside the next few decades, it's very hard to say what the population trend lines will be. People tend to slow production as they develop economically, so the whole thing may be solved organically.

This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?

Bonus question: Do you feel strongly enough about the moral correctness of your current socio-political unit to want the decision? Every day the resources get less and the people more. Someone will make the call at some point. If we defer, someone else makes it. We have our own concerns, but the Chinese have different ones, and the Russians still different ones to that. Or some future superpower nation (or group of nations) not yet in existence. Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time? Or do we act as soon as is possible because we think we're the best possible people to do the moral calculus? And can we trust anyone who thinks that?

Whenever I feel existential dread or depression based on the inevitability of increasing entropy putting a cap on the ability of humans, or anyone else, to expand and thrive in the universe, I do find it helpful to read The Last Question by Asimov. Even with our current understanding of physics being accurate, there's the tantalizing possibility that there are further phenomena that we could eventually uncover that gives us a lot more to explore and discover and possibly escape that final fate.

Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

That's maybe a bit misleading, since we could likely establish some kind of upper bound which we believe we absolutely CANNOT cross, and then reason backwards from that towards a 'safe zone' of population.

I'm fairly convinced that the upper limit for earth alone, if we assume tech advances continue and we manage to learn to tolerate each other enough to not do a genocide or two (LOL) is around 1 Trillion People.

We are more limited by the rate at which we can grow than the absolute, final number we could maintain.

I also don't know what the hell the demographics would look like since the introduction of genetic engineering, affordable human cloning, artificial wombs, and cybernetics means you can't really reason about what the world looks like beyond these techs since they have fat-tailed impacts. And I'm leaving out AGI because... duh.

I do think that the trope of humanity trending towards becoming a 'single' race which is just a mixture of all the current races due to interbreeding is silly along several dimensions at once.

This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?

I'm going to punt on this by saying "it'd be nice if we could give people the freedom to make their own choices within the above-discussed framework." That is, once we know the constraints, to make up some arbitrary ones "don't exceed 1 trillion people total, no single person's genetic children should be more than 5% of the total population, don't go under X% rate of genetic diversity, and do not increase the population more than 5 billion in a given year," let people choose when to have kids based on whatever conditions they find themselves in, at whatever time they find appropriate." THE FREE MARKET WILL FIX IT!

Will this mean that the future will be dominated by the hyper-fertile? Almost certainly yes. That's been the case since, I dunno, the genesis of life itself?

But if we're working off of the assumption that we'll never actually get off-world colonization, may as well let people enjoy earth as best they can according to their own utility functions rather than trying to forcibly optimize everything towards some particular metric or metrics and use top-down authority to push us there. Coase theorem tends to imply that given sufficiently low transaction costs/respect for private property rights then we can avoid tragedy of the commons and bargain away externalities, whether those be excess people, too little or too much diversity, or misallocated resources per person.

If we instead assume that we WILL eventually make it out of the planet and out of the solar system, then we're going to have a LOOOOOT of time to think about this problem and maybe solve for it, so this is genuinely a problem for our descendants, and our main goal now should be to NOT DIE so we are able to actually have such descendants.

TL;DR:

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.