At what population density, exactly, have we ‘filled the earth’? How powerful and how many of Earth’s species must we be driving to extinction at any given moment before we have fulfilled God’s command to ‘subdue it’ and ‘rule over’ all animals?

If you interpret this as a obligation on humans or a divine mandate, then how do you reconcile this interpretation with the very clear description of it as a ‘blessing’? And how do you reconcile it with St. Paul’s 7 Corinthians, where he urges everyone to be celibate if possible?

Given that the writer was ignorant of multiplication and as looking at translations shows, only meant a vague ‘increase’, why does the population need to grow numerically? Why couldn’t the growth be intellectual or political?

As for China: the problem of the unmarried men is trivial and easily solved by importing from surrounding countries, and quite likely positive because of its effects on womens’ rights and the diversion of effort into attaining socioeconomic status to attract women. It is particularly trivial in comparison to what would have happened if China had blown past 3 or 4 billion as could have happened in some scenarios (already China has difficulty absorbing its educated elites into the workforce and is suppressing upwards of 5000 ‘incidents’ a year).

> The internet is amazing because, in a way which is more visible than ever before, it makes population a multiplier. That is, the value of material put into the internet is multiplied by a factor proportional to the total number of world citizens.

No. It is, at most, proportional to the number of highly educated materialist intellectually inclined citizens actually on the Internet.

(And even that is likely less than proportional – more like logarithmic. More people imposes increased communication overhead and there are only so many new ideas or things possible with the data & techniques available at a time. If you don’t want to thoughtfully read your Malthus, please at least read your Fred Brooks.)

If you take Africa and make its population 10 times larger, you don’t get 10 times the value. You merely have 10 billion dirt-poor people where you had 1 billion people before. There will be no more specialization or industrialization than there was before, and each person will be poorer.

You can talk about how the question of water hinges on whether desalinzation or war is cheaper, but the fact is that either way water will cost more! More of peoples’ wealth will be spent on water! That means less wealth for all the more important things like investment or escaping the Malthusian trap.

The second one to me is obvious. Do not hunger for that which you can not have. Don’t try to be what isn’t, just _be_.

I enjoyed reading these though, thank you. The hot and cold one sounds like Wu Wei from Taoism to me.

- different Dave