Conflicting views on population growth

[DarthVolod]

Andrespetmonkey said:

DarthVolod said:

I can't remember who said it, but it was something to the effect that we could fit nearly 100% of the world's population in the state of Texas with roughly the same population density as New York City if we really wanted to. Population growth is not the problem ... quite the opposite when one considers a vast majority of people in some countries are aging and will be dying off in droves with not nearly as many people in the generations that follow them to make up the loss. It has been awhile since I have looked at statistics for this sort of thing, but that is the general impression I have.

 

Forget about colonizing the sky (I can only imagine how challenging that would be) we need to go the Bioshock 1/From Russia with Love way with seasteading either through underwater cities or above water cities (seasteading). This seems far more practical than cities in the sky or colonies on the moon or something as you have a food source (fish seaweed plants ect.) and a source of energy (solar, wind, geothermic ect.) and easy transportation we already have mastery over (boats, submarines, underwater trains ect.)

Yeah, colonizing the sea will be next, or building artificial islands. In the distant future (100+ years) Space will be the next option, either moving people on to huge ships, terraformimg mars (far-fetched but possible) or colonizing an earth like planet, but we'll need to make some incredible progress in space travel technology before that's possible. WIth current technology, I heard it would take 19,000 years to get to the nearest star outside our solar system xD 

In the long long term space will be our only option when the sun goes supernova in 5 billion years (less than that considering it will become so large that Earth will no longer support life ... which is a fun fact to throw at environmentalists since no amount of conservation will save this planet). Hopefully, we will be long gone by then in another solar system or maybe spread out over several.

Another way of looking at the space travel thing is that we are thinking about it from a short life span (70 -80 years) life span. Even with no progress in space travel technology we might still have a chance so long as we can invent technologies to stop aging or at least some sort of stasis pods like you see in a lot of sci-fi that let us stay asleep for the very long journey to a new solar system.

From what I know about terraforming we should really start going for that soon since the process can take centuries to complete. Should try it on Mars ... is not like we are going to make the planet less livable or anything.