this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
13 points (76.0% liked)

xkcd

17027 readers
273 users here now

A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I don't know that that really answers the question properly. If you don't have a sustainable population base, then the concept of killing and freezing the majority is moot. It won't be the lack of food that's the issue.

I think a proper answer would have to assume farming humans for food, over time. Would it be possible to breed in fast reproduction rates? Are we limited to only meat, or are we going to breed milk hucows? How big a population could be sustained with current reproductive speeds? Being limited to one or two babies every year from each hucow doesn't seem like it would work out without huge herds, so wouldn't that be the biggest limiting factor?

Then, even if we get reproduction up to speed, are we eating huveal, or letting them mature? Most livestock raised for meat tends to need to be ready for slaughter in a fairly short time, a year or two. A human that age wouldn't give much meat at all. So upper point would it take to breed a new subspecies of human that can reach a breeding age rapidly, produce more than one baby a year, and develop muscle fast enough to be ready for slaughter in roughly the same span of time as cattle to be realistic as a long term food source.

And, since we're all cannibals now, what portion of the hucows is going to be reserved as hucow food?

[–] Astronut@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I can’t help but think that the vegans are going to be extremely pissed in this new world! 

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Could be, but I've seen some state that cannibalism is vegan, as long as consent is present. Be interesting to see how they'd view this scenario

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I don't think the farmed humans would even be able to consent in this scenario, so it would not be vegan. However to me it also doesn't seem much worse than the world we're living in now 🤷

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

And, since we’re all cannibals now, what portion of the hucows is going to be reserved as hucow food?

I think this is where your farming idea falls apart (or becomes identical to the problem discussed in the video). You can't sustainably farm animals without an external energy source. The reason we farm herbivores and some omnivores is that it's possible to feed them with grass (or whatever processed awfulness passes as grass nowadays). When we do farm carnivores for some reason, we feed them with meat harvested from herbivores.

A fully cannibal-based farm is simply impossible because even if humans were perfect at turning food into muscles on their body, there wouldn't be anything to (sustainably) extract from the overall farm system, since there wouldn't be any extra energy/muscle mass/whatever going into it. Also, humans are very very not perfect at turning food into muscle mass, and waste most of the energy that came into their system on stuff like breathing and heartbeat and other metabolism. So, if the requirement is that all humans are cannibals, the only thing left to do is to farm non-sustainably, i.e. extract meat from the system as it runs out, feeding hucows with other hucows to keep at least some of them alive, but eventually you will run out of hucows (which is, once again, pretty much what's discussed in the video).

Alternatively you could claim that "hucows" are not "humans" per se and feed them with non-hucow-based food, in which case it could probably work in a fairly similar manner to modern-day pig farming but on an even larger and more horrifying scale - pigs are quite similar to humans in many ways. Sans all the pandemics that would eventually happen due to cannibalism, of course.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, but the question is how long would humans last, but whether there's a way to make it work at all.

My point was that it isn't sustainable, but that it makes more sense than just killing everyone but an unrealistically small population

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

Ah, I see. Yeah, that makes more sense and I don't have an answer for your question then. I suspect it wouldn't really work due to long reproductive cycles and extremely limited total food supply.