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Population control.
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
The state this old world is in at the moment shows serious mismanagement.
Shortages of everything looming large. Degraded environment and growing health problems.
If we slashed the population of the planet the pressure would be off the environment and our diminishing resources.
With the thechnology we have' a lot less people could live a much better life but ...what would be the optimum figure to keep things running ...someone has to sweep up ...someone has to farm ...to repair and maintain ...
Shortages of everything looming large. Degraded environment and growing health problems.
If we slashed the population of the planet the pressure would be off the environment and our diminishing resources.
With the thechnology we have' a lot less people could live a much better life but ...what would be the optimum figure to keep things running ...someone has to sweep up ...someone has to farm ...to repair and maintain ...
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Eat the rich.
It is said where and by whom and when? When did they say it possibly being of significance cos i'm sure i can point you to people who were predicting that the UK would have collapsed totaly by the year 2000 cos of overpopulation ...they were very wrong of course.
I think it will start to fall rapidly this year or next.
I think thats a bit out of date considering most other projections were totaly out as well. The situation and awareness of our predicament has changed hugely since 2005. The shift in economic power ...the price of energy ...the food crisis ...all changes things.
I was actually entertaining the idea of cooking john prescott not too long ago.
I think a bit of rosemary along with lots of basting would be lovely. Have to let him cook slow to absorb all the juices.
:thumb: He is a God.
Lemmy should lead the world really, he has the right views.
Humans are very hard to kill off, I've heard it said that even an extinction-level event wouldn't end the human race, maybe only civilisation as we know it.
At the risk of being pedantic it wouldn't be an extinction level event unless it made humans extinct..
Anyway when i posted this thread i was thinking more about man ...culling huge sections of the population to bring it to a more workable level ...and wondering if there was an optimum level.
It seems the reform to the CAP are actually working, except now we do actually want them to massively over produce.
Oh for the days of butter and beef mountains.
Oh for the days when the Asian countries were poor ...
Expand.
To other planets, pool our resources and scientists, make a fucking spaceship, and colonise. We can terraform shit now. We can make self enclosed buildings.
And Mars has loads of resources.
We'd use far more resources just getting there than we'd get. And anyway there arent any Goldilocks planets anywhere near for us to colonise.
maybe or maybe we just need to ensure that its produced in a way which is sustainable and that there are better marketing measures in place for equal distribution - which means markets that function fairly at local, national and international levels, which includes things like building better roads and infrastructure and supply chains.
Also if you dramatically increase the education of women then you get fewer births - i cant' remember the exact statistic but something like for every year of education a girl recieves she delays havin children by 2 years. And once producing she will have fewer children (and nearly always provide them with better care).
Instead of encouraging birth rate by tax relief and other ways, we should reward child-free relationships and families with no more than one child.
Instead of mulling over pointless "ethical" issues we should distribute free contraception to everyone, including minors. Specially in the developing world. And the Pope can go fuck himself if he doesn't like it.
We are strangling the Earth and its resources. There are twice as many people around as there ought to be, and if forecasts are correct by 2050 this is going to feel like a Tube carriage at rush hour.
Eventually things will right themselves out one way or another. So it would be far better to try to reduce the world population gradually by civilised means than to let Nature take of it in 100 years time by the means of mass food shortages, environmental catastrophes and disease.
Is that what your saying here?
Urgh, pessimist. Do you support China's one child policy?
Humans can and will always rise to the challenge of producing more food for larger populations through more efficient means of farming. Developed nations can help by transferring the knowledge and technology to developing countries.
I agree over population is a serious issue, but you and buddha have both said we're vastly exceeding capacity of the earth and I wonder how we measure that. I agree we waste resources needlessly but surely the capacity of the earth = the amount of food / space available. As more places because habitable / population density is able to increase (think urban centres), and as improvements in food production come about the capacity should increase shouldn't it?
I agree with your points about contraception but am not sure when we are officially overpopulated or not. I haven't seen any definitive studies saying we definitely are, just journalistic articles arguing that that's why people are starving in Africa or why we have chavs or something like that. We are now globally in a stage where people have more than they ever really have before if you split years up into 30 year segments and take the median (I think if you measure it day to day maybe food production goes down one year and up the next, but the general trend is what I'm getting at).
From everything analytical I've seen, it seems more that our capacity for humans is increasing greater than than the population of humans is. However that doesn't account for the rape of natural resources, but I don't think it's impossible for 6bn humans to live sustainably with the earth either.
That's just my thoughts on the matter
We have a food and energy crisis ...due mostly to our technological and financial demands and doings.
Do we have a crisis though? Or is it just scaremongering? I mean I'm not doubting you, I just haven't seen it. Oil is supposed to have already run out but we are turning to other energy production techniques - I don't think it's a crisis from what I've personally seen it's just a time of change.
Food riots ... cos food is now oil ...not scaremongering.
Record oil prices ...not due to shortages but financial specualation.
In other words ...mismanagement and greed on the grandest of scales.
What other energy sources are we talking about here?
The way i understand it we are now about to rape the arctic and antarctic and anywhere else possible ...to squeeze out every last drop of oil and gas.
More people also means more land used for farming and housing, resulting in the destruction of many natural habitats which in turn result in a reduction of flora and fauna that is going to affect our food supply. It's a vicious circle, and a particularly vicious one at that.
I think it's more an issue of equity / distribution because of political issues. We are better off as a species now (including in countries like China where quality of life / real income purchasing power doubles every 10 years) than we were 50 years ago, and this trend goes back very far if you took a marker every 50 years. With the exception of Italy which apparently got worse