posted
They say that money is the root of all evil. But really, that aside, the stretching of limited resources by too much population seems to be the most important issue in the world.
Everything stems from it. Overcrowding causing different cultures to collide, the growing dispairity between the haves and have-nots, and even pollution: overpopulation of Earth is killing us all.
Limited births, mandetory sterilization, even licensing to procreate, all are horrible ideas to contemplate.
But the thing is, what do we do about it?
Posts: 1843 | Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
Well first you have to convince me there's a serious problem. And I don't mean convince me that many (third-world) contries have a population larger than they can support, I would have to be convinced that many countries have a larger population than they can support if they were updated and technologically advanced (which is how I would describe most first-world nations).
In other words, my solution is to raise the standered of living everywhere and increase the technological standings of these poorer countries and then see if their mechanizied farmers and sophisticated agriculture ideas can't produce enough for the population.
The two things that worry me are water and oil, which, while related to the overpopulation problem, I think have to be looked at seperatly.
posted
First, it's " Love of money is the root of all evil". In Star Trek there is still commerce, just no one lives solely for their wages.
Birth rates are already too low in Europe. What makes them the way they are and how can you spread that to what you consider "problem zones". The Chinese population experiment has myriad problems.
What we are seeing is that it is not necessarily the children that will be this generation's resource problem, but aging adults. They consume much more if they are healthy and exponentially more if they are sick.
I think the old population bomb panic is a uniquely baby boomer problem. Sure, if baby boomers had had as great an increase as their parents, and those children had consumed as much. But they didn't. I'll give baby boomers credit, though, for thinking of it. It could have happened. As they age, we now have a healthcare bomb that has swelled medical spending from 1/20th the GNP to 1/6th. And when it's over... ugh. Now there is where we need some planning. (1/20th in 1957 to 1/6th in 2000. As a proportion of the GNP this growth is already adjusted for inflation. Source was the keynote speaker at my sister's med school graduation)
One fact that is not often enough discussed is the fact that we can only produce food for five billion by using oil to fuel the machinery and turn into chemical fertilizer. Without the oil, we would be starving right now.
Posts: 1843 | Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
We start by raising the educational standards of women worldwide. Statistically, the higher educated a woman is, the fewer children she chooses to have. Also, it would be great if the conservatives and the abortion advocates could just reach a compromise and agree to provide contraception to third world countries without abortion funding. Especially condoms, since that would also help stem the AIDS crisis.
Oh, and as to resources...let's push for more alternate fuels and try to stem the disposable nature of our society.
And lastly, we need to colonise Luna.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
I think we turn a lot of our resources into pet food and alcoholic beverages currently. Just as thoughts before we jump to Soylent Green here.
P.S. Off the top of my head, if 60 percent of 300 million Americans are obese, there is already plenty of extra calories. In fact, I believe most of us have difficulty finding food choices that aren't empty calories. Food stuffs that have been stripped of nutritive value so that we will consume more of them.
P.P.S. I second the need to educate and liberate the third world, especially the women. If folks could read their own scriptures, there would be a lot less zealotry in the world.
posted
By the way, one thing I never understood was how colonizing other planets (or moons) would solve or population problem. To be honest, I agree it's a good idea, and I'd be behind the project, but I just don't see it as a solution to population.
In order for it to be a population control method you have to be able to send up a significantly significant number of people, and right now I don't think we've ever sent up more than single digits at a time. To really make a dent we'd have to send up many millions.
Of course those we send up could form a colony that would in time, expand and grow into a significant population, but it would still have only removed a small number of people from the Earth.
posted
It takes a lot of fuel to get people into space. I'll start saving now for a prize to the first human powered space flight. Liposuction + solid fuel technology. It's the AWESOME.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
i think the obvious answer to this over-population thing is genetic engineering!!! we just make a really nasty virus with a 10+ year incubation time (without symptoms of course) so that everyone gets infected but doesn't know it. And while we're at it, we could make it sexually transmitted so that only the promiscuous sinners of the world (and those darn homos of course) get it. Then, when people start realizing what's going on, we can refuse to do anything about it and call it a "homosexual disease", or equivocate about how drug companies' intellectual property rights is FAAAAR more important than the lives of a few million fornicators.
wow, that post sort of took on a life of its own. didn't really mean to imply the whole thing was a conspiracy to reduce world population...
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Saying we should practice population control in countries with too-low birthrates like the USA, Canada, Australia, Russia, European Union, Japan and the like is like telling a girl suffering from annorexia that she should reduce her caloric intake because some of her neighbors are overwieght.
Posts: 232 | Registered: Jun 2004
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well here's a question for those of you arguing that there is no population problem in the developed countries, that in fact we have an underpopulation problem: why is it bad to have a decline in population? michael, i've already seen your ridiculous web page about 10 reasons to have a kid, so don't bother. It seems like population decline indicates that a population is adjusting itself to its environment, starting to reach equilibrium. Sure, we could sustain a lot more people here in the US of A, but do we really need to?
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Another thing which has yet to be properly addressed is the impact of these unnatural populations on the areas they live in. If we keep it up, we will just desertify the whole world.
Then where will we grow food?
Posts: 1843 | Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
Edit: To Micheal8, denotes sarcasm. Sorry for simultaneous post confusion/Edit.
I'm all for folks living smarter before we begin to look at mandatory population controls. I think once we start down that road, licensing and culling for quality, we might as well be living under natural selection. Saying that abortion and welfare are some kind of inter-related system is already a step in that direction. Refusing a woman food stamps unless she gets a Norplant.
I don't see anyone moving to put condoms on ants. It's because ants are part of the earth, and their being alive doesn't deplete it. What can we do to return ourselves to that relationship with nature?
posted
Pook- you have soem good points there. Sfter all, how many people could be fed with the grains used in cheap beer production? (Just don't touch my microbrews).
Obesity too...I think it's very true that the real issue is distribution. But people have been saying that foe decaeds and we still haven't figured out how to fix that.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
It's not necessarily the grains used for beer production... the fields that are now growing hops could certainly be used to grow wheat, corn or another food crop.
Hey, we all have to make sacrifices, right? Posts: 2069 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
I like P.J. O'Rourke's take on the population control issue in his essay "Just Enough of Me, Way Too Much of You." He skewers, among other things, the racist attitudes of some population control advocates toward Third World peoples.
Posts: 1512 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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posted
Actually, there really aren't that many resources on Luna. It's extremely metal-poor. I'm not saying there's nothing there, but it's not going to solve our problems, I don't think.
By the way, how do those of you proposing to raise the standard of living in Third World countries without massively increasing their energy use? Decreasing their population won't do a lot of good if they're consuming the same amount of resources with fewer people.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
star trek can't seem to make it's mind up about that. while picard is lecturing people from the past about the enlightened economy of the future quark is drooling over gold-pressed latinum. i think the basic jist is that the federation is enlightened, the other groups are intended to exhibit various foibles.
Posts: 380 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Colonizing the moon is a massive waste of resources right now. Until we have spaceflight as a commodity its flat out impossible.
Why hasn't anyone meantions infant death rates here? What about all of those helpful americans that go to third world countries and make sure as many of the infants live as possible? This too contributes to the population problem. The birth rates in these places are correct for whatever the regular infant death rate there is. We go in and change this, but don't do anything to make sure there are jobs and food for the increased population, let alone places for them to live.
It took hundreds of years of slow change to get where we are. There is no reason to expect that any other country could become like us in anything less than several generations.
We also like to look at our food production and then compare it to the third world. We don't even begin to farm in the same way they do. Its hardly even the same concept.
I was relying on Steven Baxter, who ordinarily documents his ideas quite extensively. But that particular concept--that there is little iron on the moon, at least in the crust where it's get-at-able, lists no documents. He does have a paper out on deep-core mining, which I would not expect to be worthwhile if the crust had plenty.
I thought I would look up something online, but so far what I've found has said the opposite--though so far it has mentioned no materials heavier than iron.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
One of the reasons I ask is that I've seen information on gravametric studies (one of the lunar orbiter programs from NASA) that suggest that the near side is very "heavy", probably due to metals.
Posts: 1843 | Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
Then I would not be surprised if you were right and I was wrong. That'll teach me to trust otherwise trustworthy authors... Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
No one is suggesting that lunar metals are useful for anything other than a lunar base/colony, are they?
The energy cost of bringing them from the moon to the earth will probably never be justified by rarity on earth. Unless I'm missing something about the availability of iron, etc. on earth.
posted
If you wanted to get something from the moon to the earth, could you just throw it really hard? Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Boon
unregistered
posted
Hey, if you took some of the metal (weight) from Luna and sent it to Terra, wouldn't that make the moon lighter? And isn't it held in orbit by gravity? So wouldn't it fly off into space after a while?
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posted
Rail gun on the moon - How would these materials not cause havoc falling to earth? I'm genuinely curious - a big block of Uranium coming in at thousands of miles an hour sounds pretty scary.
posted
Since having less children in America won't impact the demand for resources, how about if everyone in America sells their car instead?
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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