In response to Armchair Critic, Sunday, 10 June 2018 3:24:10 AM

AC deserves credit for lateral thinking. Also for injecting hope into this hard problem.

There's a few engineering solutions to massive populations.

I'm a big fan of 3D printing (expecially 3D Printed Buildings - and this looks like a good implementation) but let us test it a bit more before we use it for massive social engineering. ;)

Remember the British Public Housing Disaster of the 1960's - Billion's of pounds of tax payers money wasted, broken buildings, and billion's more to fix.

Then there's the healthy cultures angle. Best to put it out there and see if people use it. The highest form of management is to give people good options.

But when we get down to it what is the purpose in having an enormous monolithic human population of 50 billion or 500 billion people.
Bigger is not always better - what could you do with 50 billion people that you can't do with 1 Billion people or less. I think most people would prefer more space but they can't restrain the urge to procreate. Human beings have a layered brain structure due to brain evolution and are often torn between reptilian and human parts (instinctive and rational).

Reducing our population is a better use for human creativity. But hard decisions (HD) will have to be made - everyone takes the easy decision (ED).

HD x pop < ED x pop => Malthusian Disaster => Population Leadership

At my age you only have to revisit those places you last saw as a child to see what population growth has bought about, say Grandvile is Sydney, or Paramatta,we do, humans that is, change things forever,a comment spoke about a possible future, laws saying who can have children,do not discount it China had a one child policy, the sub continent kills still its female baby's at birth,hence a shortage of women/wives a war may even come to settle that issue,is it some thing we can control,? constant growth? is it our best/only option?

Child support for two good, child support for three or more heavily reduced as an incentive to ask for termination. very early termination under such circumstances are completely moral, anyone saying otherwise, provide your TFN so child support can be deducted from you pay.
People will be shocked at themselves when they realise how shallow their concerns for human life really are when the receive the next pay.

Individual - The article from "Hass" is interesting. It's great to see "respected greats" participating in hard problems of humanity.

There are many interesting comments on this forum and it would take significant time to mention everyone - but know that - I see greatness here - and it's marvelous.

Possible reason for massive problems is due in part to SocSci's dominating population policy rather than Engineers. SocSci somewhat an oxymoron - see Enron. Engineers have also known to be motivated by greed - at least they understand the maths. Malthus said that most processes in society such as acquisition of resources R is a process that scales arithmetically (linearly R ~ T) in time T. Increases in population scale geometrically (exponentially P ~ e^T) with time. He said that if population is not controlled to match the resources (P ~ R) then it is just a matter of time before a disaster occurs to correct the population (back to P ~ R).
It's not a perfect theorem but a broad rule of thumb. Most social theories are - due to their complexity.
Critics of Malthusian theory say that GNP is a more relevant equivalency, but most accept its validity and can be used to explain events in history.
The critics of Malthusianism are probably opportunists that want to take advantage of the profit curve till population controls are implemented - at that point they will have maximum resources. We have seen this by the smoking, anti-Environmental, and other lobby groups.

I love lobbyists - they're funny. ;)

Resources include varying methods of obtaining more space (including space travel, better utilization of land, etc), more water, more food, etc - they tend to scale arithmetically.

It's all fairly anthropocentric. Maybe we should breed with animals so we can break down the barriers between us and create a common culture - or maybe we can have separate communities and visit each other once in a while.

* Toni Lavis said "The rate of population growth has been declining for the last 50 years or so, and is likely to keep declining as those countries with high growth rates develop economically. The smart money is on world population levelling off somewhere around 12 billion, then probably starting to decline a bit after that."

* In reply to Toni Lavis - This common view is stated often in the media - A warm pot to boil frogs - but it indicates that "everyone believes that population does need a limit" - whether "the money is smart" or "not" - whether the population should max at 1B (Billion) or 12B or 50B - is up for discussion.

In Population Biology there is a concept of "Carrying Capacity" the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely. Often the exact amount is unknown but we know it must exist. It's not just a matter of packing each individual into a 1x1x2metre box and stacking them - as Aristotle would say an empirical method needs to be employed.
Maybe a 100 x 100 x 2 metre box would work better - this is similar to the Biodome project of the early 90's. Poynting said that the Biodome worked as far as biological needs were concerned - however psychology was somewhat broken.

Many believe that many countries are already beyond the Carrying Capacity of their country. Malthus has views on what happens next.

Countries that are beyond their Carrying Capacity can borrow the capacity of another country at a cost - who pays the price?

As we approach the Carrying Capacity there are expected undesirable psychological and social effects perhaps this implies that a stable population should be significantly under the biological and psychological limit.

We need to break the Soc / Cap dichotomy - mislead "them" down the garden path.

Its been said that companies should only care about profit to shareholders and it's the responsibility of government to regulate - but at the same time they undermine the governments ability to do this. But at least companies understand the maths.

Socialists are interesting and seem to be one dimensional idealists that don't understand budgeting - maths. If you want to be amused and are particularly masochistic try teaching them maths.

A common mistake is to find a problem solution without conducting a baseline analysis and test solution closed loop feedback test.

Human's are very funny they think they're smarter than nature, if we are wise perhaps in the future we will be.

I hope some here will look up the ALT left and right movements and find out their views as there are many like minded people. It would be such a loss to squander the greatness evident here.