Stringing a few "U" ending words together does sound a bit wierd though... like your making a hooting sound or something.

...and always, life has gotten better and resource starvation has always gotten rarer...

and still, Malthus won't die.

Oh that and often weird racism about how many people live in poor countries.

It can't just be those two things, though, because it's really big in the U.S. right now on the political left, and especially that part of the far-left that relentlessly mock the right for both their religion and their supposed racism/"whiteness".

In some ways, it's an anti-economic-growth, anti-capitalist sentiment that portrays the great conflict of the world as between "the world" and "human economic activity"

But there's a lot to unpack in the question "Why won't Malthus die" that I won't claim to understand at all.

If others have things you want then they are stealing from you. If others are poor then they are a threat because they might want to take what you have.

Belief in the neccessity of one's actions is one hell of a drug that sticks a magnet onto their moral compass ensuring it always points to "correct".

It might be running out of capacity to do so without changing in ways we care about. Possibly.

But I do note that there is a distinct lack of interest in any attempts to solve that problem other than shrinking the population or dismantling our economies or ending any semblance of liberty.

Indeed, most of the proposals are so extreme and draconian that they would lead to much more misery and death than simply doing nothing.

Nobody is interested in even considering alternatives. Research to solve the problem is ongoing, but barely funded at all -- and yet tons of things are possible.

Sure, fusion is interesting.

But, other things are too. Safe and plentiful fission power would help, and is available today.

Work on the chemistry of photosynthesis is promising -- imagine a truly carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel (the carbon in the fuel having come out of the air through artificial "plants"), but is barely funded at all.

Direct carbon sequestration is an expensive, but possible, option (probably cheaper than just rolling society back to the middle ages!)

But 99.9% of the energy is instead spent on terrible fantasies like "fundamentally restructuring" the economy away from profit and liberty.

Because there is no desire to actually work the problem. Just like the original Malthus didn't care about the plight of the "surplus population," but instead had a political axe to grind.

Even if we can figure out how to keep a reaction going with a useful energy surplus no one has any idea

a) How much a reactor will cost,

b) how long/hard will it be to build or

c) If there are any issues with the process - yes no nuclear fuel but there's still some nasty crap coming out of the reaction which you will have to deal with if you scale the technology.

Meanwhile there are a number of perfectly viable planet saving power sources - solar, wind, solar-thermal etc - already out there providing power.

Fusion is a nice idea, but it isn't the only way to save the world...

Why spend huge sums in a fusion reactor, when we have a perfectly reliable funsion reactor right above us, the Sun, giving power at a convenient form (~500nm light -- far better than heat), at convenient power densities (not too high to overheat panels and not too low to be uneconomical), is available virtually everywhere, etc. It really is like we had already built a reactor and only need to add the last, least expensive, bit of energy harvesting.

The only thing Solar cannot compete well with are fossil fuels, which are essentially like discovering charged batteries buried in the ground (which is great, but they'll run out, and are ruining our environment), or wind/hydro in some places (where energy is begging to be harvested in the form of kinetic energy or potential).

Our salvation (for this crisis :) ) is indeed already within our reach, we only need to act...

So, that's sort of the point of fusion. It's clean energy with no need for storage.

If it weren't for its potential use as a weapon, I'd look forward to seeing it put in practice.

"soon" is relative. The older I get, the more something a century or even two away doesn't seem that far off, and something that could arrive in 20 years seems positively near.

The Long Now project strives to get people to think more long-term, and I've heard that in some parts of Asia governments and organizations plan on far longer time horizons than is common in the West.

The world would be far better off if more of us adopted such a perspective, rather than focusing on only on what can be done now or in the next few years.

One of the megatrends of the last 200 years has been a huge increase in the time horizon deemed acceptable for investment payoff.

Generally, humans aren't willing to forgo things today for a payoff more than about half a life-span away. Today, a true long-term investor considers the 30-year return on their investment.

An investment that won't make a return for 50 years or more mostly isn't worth making.

But, if you knew you would still be healthy enough to enjoy the profits in 90 or 100 years, you might be willing to invest for the even-longer term (historical trends suggest this to be true)

Government grants are fun and all, but the way you get thing going big is to get them funded by people who are hoping to profit, not just hoping to make the world better in some way

Imagine for a moment that cryogenization technology became available tomorrow. Would that help? Should we start forcing everyone to spend 3 years in cryo sleep every year, thus extending everyone's lifespan 400%?

This is far-fetched and just sci-fi for now, but interesting to think about nevertheless: should you go into cryo sleep while you are waiting for the right job offer? Should we cryogenize refugees while we are waiting to find them some shelter after a disaster or a war happens? People surely take a lot less resources if you can stack them, and they are not moving, feeding, etc.

Something like this would require us rethinking our ethics and society, yet it would be a very welcome way to start thinking more about the future.

It's one of his earliest works, so it isn't as well-produced as some of his later stuff, but it explores some very interesting ideas.

(This story began life as a different novel called Hot Sleep. Having read both, I honestly can't remember which parts are in which version, but Card himself says he considers The Worthing Saga to be the official version)

(hint: in Card's story, cryotech created a dystopian, not utopian society)

Longer term vision is still required.

Hell, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of trained physicists, chemists, material scientists, etc, who aren't even engaged in relevant work at all - they fall into neither camp.

We are currently at we know we have an electrical problem in the walls that we know will cause a house fire in the future if we don't fix it.

I disagree. Permanent damage has already been dealt. To continue with the house analogy, we can probably still save a smaller or bigger part of it depending on how quick we are to put the fire down.

But irreversible damage has already been done: even if we were to stop our carbon emissions right away, sea levels would still rise quite a bit (more than 1m by 2100-2300 IIRC). Every species that goes extinct will stay extinct, forever. And many are headed down this path. Biodiversity has suffered a lot in many places.

Think about this: we can complain about having to deal with radioactive garbage in 100ky, but any species that disappears today will not come back, even after billions of years. And millions of would-be species from its possible ofspring won't ever be either.

Those thoughts put things in perspective. I find them daunting, and this has led a lot of people to take the "climate emergency" very seriously. Our house is already on fire. Even if we start putting it out, we know it will still continue growing at least for a bit after we start pumping water, but we'd better start ASAP.

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/conflicts-affected-...

Even if global warning has a death toll of 10% of the world population I don't consider that a real problem. As long as humanity can progress afterwards it's fine.

Absolutely incredible. Are you picturing your friends and family in this hypothetical 10% death toll? Or the social conditions that would result in this number (comparable to Germany in WW2)?

What is so horrifying to you about stopping global warming, that literally decimating the world's population is the less bad option?

I think it would be great if we could stop global warming. But I don't think it socially possible. The only glimmer of hope I have left is that it is only a significant reduction of the human population while the rest can move on.

Do you think it's worthwhile to discourage humanity from attempting new things because there are existing sub optimal alternatives?

Or are you just trying to sound contrarian for internet points?

(Despite what you're saying being the safest, most boring, done to death, remarks on fusion)

https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR2LwDYcozvpGCOa3bIi2ieMbj...

Fusion reactions produce lots of neutrons, and neutrons weaken metal, in many cases within a few hours.

It may be that a "successful" fusion reactor is still a failure because it can run for only a few hours, days, or weeks before it has to be scrapped and completely rebuilt.

MIT spun off the company Commonwealth to commercialize the idea.

And nuclear fission first, if you want to be realistic.

That's why research is needed otherwise researching will take the research duration plus the delay imposed by people saying it won't be here anytime soon anyway.

> perfectly viable power sources like solar, wind, solar-thermal etc.

Until humanity has figured viable massively scalable long term power storage solutions we will always be at the mercy of natural phenomena (time of day, wind speed and direction etc). Additionally AFAIK "renewable power sources" don't have the necessary power density to make them viable as humanity's exclusive power source.

I would argue we just need to make sure ongoing power needs are met - ie we can always turn the lights on. This doesn't need "scalable long term" storage - although pumped hydro, batteries, thermal salt all work well - it just needs sensible grid design so the needs at any one time are met by available power sources.

This above is obviously a "harder" problem than to just have a few big power plants you can throttle on or off but not that much harder and we already have the technology and knowledge - if not the political will - to do it.

> Additionally AFAIK "renewable power sources" don't have the necessary power density to make them viable as humanity's exclusive power source.

This is flat out wrong. many communities already exist exclusively on renewables.

"Communities" maybe but what about (heavy) industry like the the one required to e.g. manufacture more wind/water turbines and parts, (continue) to research more efficient technologies in the future, to sustain the growing population etc. ?

Wind/solar and hydro/geothermal really should be described by different words. Using "renewables" for both causes a lot of confusion.

The stupidy here crosses the isle.

But then I am from Australia.

There is an arm-wrestle over a nasty piece of refugee legislation that might see both acts not get voted on today. That means it won't be back in parliament until next year and the government is looking so shaky it might not be in power then so... who knows!