lucky_sharm said:
Today, mortality rates have gone down, medicine is becoming more advanced and effective than it used to be, and less people are dying overall. But now we have the issue of housing and sustaining more and more people everyday, and our Earth might not last forever. Do we have any solutions to these very troubling problems?
There is only one solution, and that is to get rid of people, and that is one of the reasons why I'm a major militant who sees war as the most viable solution to most of today's big issues, especially since we're heading there anyway.
I'm ironically both a realist and a romantic. I'm a romantic because I believe in the long term we can get into space, and obtain more resources and living space. We already have the tech to begin terraforming mars by all accounts, an we know there are minerals in the astroid belt, so we can at least obtain those pretty easily. I'm a realist because I believe that in order to do that, we need to get earth into a position where it's viable. That means we need a world unity, that is a single global goverment and culture everyone belongs to, no exceptions. The reason being that as long as there are factions paranoia is going to prevent much space development due to the constant fear of what the other guy is doing up there, we have tons of that right now, and mistrust is one of the reasons why the US hasn't invested more in space, because it's quite frankly considered antagonistic (along with the other reasons). A world unity of course is not going to come without massive warfare and bloodshed, because simply put a lot of people and cultures are not going to be willing to dissolve, give up self rule, and other things. That's all fine, since the world is overpopulated and wiping out 95% of the people doesn't matter as long as the 5% left are unified. Less people also means the oppertunity to control our population growth, and maintain a high standard of living while not overreaching what the plnaet can support, as we gradually work on obtaining enough space to extent our population and obtain the resources to support them.
To be honest I think there is no really "good" solution to these problems, everything I've said about my personal attitudes aside. We need less people, and simply put we don't have the time for a gradual reduction of the population, we're going to deplete the planet long before we can slowly bring the population down to what it can susptain. Right now we're talking about running out of things like wood and oil within a couple of decades, never mind the hundreds of years nessicary for a slow "natural" population reduction of a species that
lives 80 years or more. We're at a point where it's not a problem people can say "well that's something for future generations to worry about".
I think about these problems every time I suggest something like going to war with China or how we should deal with "The Middle East". People, usually left wingers, will go on morally about "oh, but think of the millions who will die", or "you can't just exterminate 1.5 billion people!!11!!!one!", but then again when I suggest this I'm also looking at global overpopulation and the fact that by definition we need to get rid of billions and I can pretty easily stick to my guns. When you look at the actual situation, people like me are actually the most sane ones out there, since in the end we are going to have to get rid of vast amounts of the population. I'd rather have it happen due to fighting over important things, than say someone deciding to try and implement a "Twilight Zone" like culling lottery. We knew a century or more ago that we had to embrace Zero Population Growth, and well... now we're paying that price.
I have romantic goals, and believe humanity can eventually get to a point where it can colonize and expand it's population as much as it wants to, but I'm a realist enough to realize that to get to that point we have some massively ugly and immoral work that has to happen here on earth before that even becomes possible.
I can reconcile such thoughts with by belief in a higher power and so on, simply due to the fact that we've been waiting for some kind of magical solution to present itself, but it never has. Thus, obviously we're supposed to deal with thisproblem as ugly as it may be. If God, or some alien race intervenes and makes it so we don't have to deal with this, so be it. Short of that... well, we have to come to grips with the simple fact that we'e looking at a mandatory bloodbath. Reality having caught up with morality and showing that we progressed morally well ahead of our time and our abillity to sustain a lot of those ideas.
It's all very depressing to contemplate, and truthfully I've been sort of hoping we'd see more attention paid to the big picture.
