Dear person of Earth, I must confess that I was perhaps not going to bother with explaining to you the details of this issue if it were not for a small subtlety of dubious comedic value, just enough to allow motivation to tunnel through that quantum barrier of action vs. inaction. To explain, and blessings upon you for bearing with me because this probably won’t be easy, this piece must begin with a parable. A user generated parable.
No not that one! More on that later… Instead, I want you to think of some idea which was favored by a large number of people, possibly gained momentum in numbers, obtained a position of authority in which people were compelled to give the idea lip service sometimes even if they disagreed with it, and yet was simply undeniably wrong. A great lie, believed, at least on paper, by many. Insane you say? Impossible? Well if you cannot give a current example, a past example, or even imagine that such a thing is possible, it won’t be worth continuing here because at this point we need to call out such an idea.
The idea crudely put, which you undoubtedly have heard, is that the Earth is overpopulated and we simply must have fewer people so we can destroy less of the arable land, biosphere, and have less garbage thrown in the sea and the air, fewer endangered species being shot, less shitting in the streets, less burning forests and so forth.
Have you heard it? Good. At this point in the story we need to stop and point out that this idea logically is utter nonsense and is in that sense alone undeniably wrong!
It is perhaps worth noting exactly where the logic breaks down. The claim is made mathematically, and we simplify here, that the destruction D must be exactly equal to the amount of people N multiplied by the damage caused per person P:
So far so good! This absolutely must be mathematically true because P is defined as 
Now then, we are supposed to infer that because N and P are on the right hand side of an equation, now the only way to influence D must be to influence N and P. Therefore we must reduce N. Gotta reduce the population, haha!
This is of course utter nonsense. Lets do a few examples of the same logic for fun.
Take W to be the number of attractive women in the house with you at the moment.
Now let’s define C to be the amount of cigarette butts on your floor. Lets define D to be the number of attractive woman in the house per cigarette butt.
Of course we have 
Now taking the same idea as before, we can see that the logical way to increase the number of attractive women is for you to increase C, and throw more cigarette butts on the floor. I think you’ll agree that throwing trash on the floor isn’t usually a good way to meet women, and so there must be something wrong with the logic here. But, the same logic told us something that “everyone knows” is true, what’s going on here?
How about another one. Let’s say you have a nice house for your family but with a problem. You have a problem in that someone is shitting in the kitchen and it’s really gross in there. Barely livable. That’s the problem. Clearly we have a situation where the amount of human excrement E you must step over to reach the fridge is equal to the number of people in your family N multiplied by the amount of shits taken there per person S. So we have 
Here we can clearly see the best way to solve your problem is to kill off a few of your family members, maybe half or so?, and then you will have reduced the amount of excrement E by about one half.
Does that sound like a reasonable solution to your problem? Fuck no. Is it a reasonable syllogism to the question at hand of some humans fucking some shit up on the Earth? Well yeah it is.
The simple logical point here is that equation one implies exactly nothing about how N and P might relate to each other or even the sign of P. It’s not even stated as to why we’d even be considering N here, isn’t the idea to talk about the damage being done? Why does the number of people on the planet even get introduced? It certainly could be introduced to the discussion of the anthropocene era and maintenance of our planets life support mechanisms in a variety of ways, but in the way that this idea is presented that doesn’t happen. Instead we have equation 1 out of the blue and everything that could ever go wrong on the planet is now distributed as a fault of every other individual for being born. Or even worse, we could consider the modification of equation one in the “COPSEC” photo. Services per person? Really? What kind of number is that, 8? 800? Wtf even constitutes a service in this context? It’s shameful really. You’ve got commercial fishers rapidly pulling out the last 10% of ocean biomass, bombs falling, slash and burn supporting bullshit business plans supported by fiat issuance, and we are making up nonsensical dependent variables and performing some arithmetic hocus pocus as if that would help in the slightest. The total CO2 produced has nothing at all to do with how many services a person consumes, and a lot more to do with how many army aircraft are at this moment moving supplies from one base to another. “Maybe if there were fewer of us at least we wouldn’t be killing as many fish and shitting them out in dead zones above dams” or whatever. It’s not the number of people on the earth that was the primary acting figure determining whether that BP captain was drinking or not when he hit the sandbar. A million less people in Tokyo wasn’t going to save bambi despite what equation 1 might lead us to believe.
Another example. Suppose I am robbing you blind. As I rob you, I tell you that the amount of money I take from you M is equal to the number of ants in the world N multiplied by the amount of money that I take per ant A. [math] M = N * A It’s true right? You can’t argue with basic arithmetic!
Now as you may have guessed, I’m going to tell you that in order to stop me robbing you, you’d better go on a hunt for them ants. Gotta reduce N if you wanna reduce M, right? Are you buying this, or are you gonna simply punch me out, walk away, and M is zero?
Note that we don’t even have to bring up actual arguments about population, such as the incredible specializations which can occur in a larger population. Do you think we’d have a thousand people working on the specifics of just one chemical engineering step required to make galvanized rubber if we had only half a billion people? Industrial society requires an industrial populous society. The technology and knowledge we have is in the minds of the living people. One could equally well (not saying much) argue that we need more people because the amount of trash cleaned up would be greater. No you don’t need to mention the incredible amount of solar energy we could collect, or all the vast undeveloped areas and inefficiently used resources. The idea is already clearly debunked.
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I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that some Chinese products were used in the raising, transporting, and carving of those Georgia guide stones, and that’s decent comedy.
I’m kinda torn here in interpreting the psychology of this particular delusion. Do you think there is anyone who really believes that there is some kind of “damage done per person” that makes sense as a constant? Humans will always be moronic self destructive vandals to the degree of X because I said so? Is that it? I mean seriously, did we really think that made sense, this idea of needing less people? Someone dumps a shitton of nuclear waste in our water supply and we respond by killing off half the population of our town to address the issue? Because “nuclear waste per person” ? Utter pesh, I’m sure you’ll agree.
So here’s the subtlety of dubious comedic value. Why would people believe some reeking bullshit idea like that we need to reduce the population, that pollution and ecocide are here because there are too many people, even though such a conclusion is ridiculous on its face and stands naked in front of you claiming to be the pope? You know why? It’s because there’s an echo chamber and we like to bounce things around, and there’s power in numbers, and if you heard it then we all heard it and it’s a thing that everybody knows. It’s the damn power of “everbody knows” to influence us, the power of numbers. Life is easy, with our industrial populous society, and so we can be intellectually lazy and just believe some total nonsense because a lot of people said it. It’s because there are too many people.
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OK, so I warned you it wasn’t going to be all that funny really in the end, but there it is. Hey, don’t blame me! The amount of annoying pedantic blog posts by physicists is equal to the number of people on the planet times the number of annoying pedantic blog posts by physicists per person. The reason my writing has annoyed you is that there ARE too many people on the Earth.
So let’s recap. The number of people momentarily stupid enough to believe we need to depopulate the world, a remarkable level of momentary stupidity, is equal to the number of people in the world times the amount of stupid created per person in technological services and “everybody knows” social media chitchat. Therefore we need to depopulate the world in order to stop people from believing we need to depopulate the world. Spread the word!
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