this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] benni@lemmy.world 20 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The design choices of people who make memes out of their political opinions are so random and funny to me sometimes. Like why is one of them a Russian gopnik? Why is the other one a blushing gamer femboy who paints his nails??

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[–] amikulo@slrpnk.net 15 points 4 days ago

I agree that we can support everyone on earth if we change our social, economic, and political systems.

I also think it is good that voluntary population decline is already happening and seems likely to continue in many industrialized nations.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 21 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Define 'decent living standards'.

[–] astutemural@midwest.social 3 points 3 days ago

The study does, in fact. Or actually, bare minimum living standards:

Quoting from the article:

"It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension."

[–] Taalnazi@lemmy.world 17 points 4 days ago

I think Maslow's pyramid of needs would be a good starter. But let's be more concrete.

  • House (60 m2, +20 m2 per extra person in household), with electrification, and which can withstand severe weather events (heatwaves, blizzards, heavy rain and wind, etc.).

  • Clean air and environment without fine dust, microplastics, PFAS, asbestos, etc.

  • Clean, potable and heatable water available anytime

  • Healthy and clean food free from animal suffering made available for all

  • Everyday and affordable clothes available for all

  • Bodily integrity: only the person themselves can decide over their own body, with the exception of vaccination (because everyone ought to be vaccinated!)

  • Labour rights, such as automatic unionisation, workplace democracy and self-governance, no vertical hierarchy (so no CEO, overreaching holdings, trusts, etc). And ideally, a wageless gift economy system based on needs. If not that, then this: any company lacking one of the above/being too big, may never get bailed out.

  • Protection of personal property, with private property becoming communal property instead.

  • Encouragement of meeting people at sport, hobbies, reading (helps finding friendship)

  • Bicycle and public transit infrastructure being widely available.

  • Free and high-quality public education available for all

  • Same with healthcare. No artificial limit mandating that there be max x amount of doctors or teachers.

[–] Banana@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I'm sure they define that in the study if you read it

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[–] brianary@lemmy.zip 27 points 4 days ago (18 children)

Does this assume instant, frictionless transportation of goods?

[–] Shareni@programming.dev 18 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Transportation of goods is mostly a capitalist issue. You don't need to cover a cucumber with plastic and ship it half way across the world, while selling the local ones to richer countries. The same goes for the vast majority of "goods". Remove all of that greedy, superfluous shit, and you're left with minimal shipping needs.

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[–] carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 27 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Why can’t we just have fewer people too? Instead of finding ways to support 50 billion people, how about we have good birth control facilities, education, and economies not based on constant never ending growth? The reality is unending growth WILL end whether people like it or not- wouldn’t it be better to do it on our own terms rather than in a global catastrophe?

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[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 28 points 5 days ago

Most of the 8 billon people are living in the third world and which less resources waste, most recources a wasted by less than 10% of the world population.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Technically, earth's land area is big enough to sustain around 24 billion people. Consider this diagram:

It shows that we're using around 50% of all habitable land for agriculture. Most of the land that we aren't using is either high up in the mountains (where terrain isn't flat and you can't use heavy machinery) or in the tropical regions on Earth close to the equator (south america, central africa, indonesia), or in areas where it's too cold for agriculture (sibiria, canada). so you can't really use more agricultural land than we're already using without cutting down the rainforest.

In the diagram it also says that we're using only 23% of agricultural land for crops which produce 83% of all calories. If we used close to 100% of agricultural land for crops, it would produce approximately 320% of calories currently being produced, so yes, we could feed 3x the population this way.

However, it must be noted that there's significant fluctuation in food production per km², for example due to volcanic eruptions. So it's better to leave a certain buffer to the maximum amount of people you could feed in one year, because food shortages in another year would otherwise lead to bad famines.

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[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 26 points 5 days ago
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