• all-knight-party@kbin.run
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    5 months ago

    If we’re gonna go to sci Fi then you could solve overpopulation with FTL travel, terraforming, and farming, and we’d just spread out across the galaxy and then galaxies until the universe experiences heat death, I assume that solves it.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Also like. Overpopulation isn’t really an issue. Every country that has modernized and increased education, distribution of goods, and gained some sense of reasonable health care has seen a reduction in births

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      “This transporter will help us solve overpopulation”

      “How’s that work?”

      “Stand right here”

    • just_change_it@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Any hard science fiction clings to the fact that taking people off the earth is a luxury only afforded to the most influential and powerful, unless you have critical skills to do a job that they can’t find with space residents.

      Imagine what would be needed to ferry a million people off the earth in one year. Then imagine that there are 20-50 billion souls eager to have that luxury off-planet destination life. The math never adds up.

      • all-knight-party@kbin.run
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        5 months ago

        Oh, I just mean in the instance that the entire earth is completely full to comfortable capacity and the government is not totally evil, so when necessary people get shuttled to a different planet for comfortable spread. In my head this wouldnt be up to the individual, but the government would be looking out for and monitoring comfortable living space.

        Totally unrealistic, but y’know

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Imagine what it would have taken in 1800 to build an iphone. Now imagine there are hundreds of millions of people wanting that same luxury. The math doesn’t work out.

        • just_change_it@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Not the same scale. If we had the same technology back then it would probably be possible, but the population has exploded since. If we still had 1/8th the people we might get that, but there’s no way we can produce a billion iphones every time an upgrade comes along, let alone 8 billion.

          Standards have to drop for real even equity compared to what we are used to in the west. This would be true even if we took everything from the top 10% (which globally seems to include nearly all of the US, even us middle class working peons.)

    • just_change_it@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      We’ll all be long dead by the time interstellar travel is here for a handful of individuals, and we may even be dead before we find another planet that could be habitable in a million years time.

      You’re realistically targeting ultra-long-term solutions, all of which ignore the fact that we’re trashing this one pristine planet right now by filling it with billions and billions of souls more than it can sustainably support.