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Without sounding unfeeling, do we really want to add to the overcrowding and population explosion problem that much? Earth is full. Our population has doubled

• Blahah 13y ago
  Earth is not full, it is just badly managed. And overcrowding is only happening for poor people in parts of the world historically exploited by people who are now rich. Even if we accepted that Earth is full, surely we don't just let all the poorest people die? And extending that reasoning, why treat any diseases at all? The fact is that we could feed everyone and cure some of the biggest killers in the world today. These are not insoluble problems, they just aren't priorities for the richest nations because they're happening elsewhere.
  • theknown99 13y ago
    IMHO we should focus on quality of life. Not quantity.
    • BasDirks 13y ago
      Yeah, dying from cancer sounds like a great life. You're just babbling.
      • theknown99 13y ago
        35 is too young, and I really do feel for anyone in that situation. But cancer when you're over 60? That's basically just dying of old age...
        • dllthomas 13y ago
          It's still awful and hugely expensive and unpredictable. If you don't want anyone over 60, let's get people living healthy 'til 60 and then go all Logan's Run - it's horrifying, but only more horrifying than the current situation because we're a little bit used to the current situation. And maybe we'll find that we don't need to.
    • jsmeaton 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4
• srean 13y ago
  Are you not yourself adding to it ?
• pbateman 13y ago
  You're getting downvoted because: 1) Despite your disclaimer you are sounding unfeeling. 2) It seems convenient for a (presumably) relatively healthy and youthful person to be advocating large sacrifices that will hit others first. 3) Many of us don't share your pessimistic view of human progress. If we can figure out how to thwart death from disease, we can probably figure out how to deal with overpopulation. 4) And of course the obvious, and entirely heartless rejoinder: if you're so keen on death to reduce overpopulation, isn't it a bit selfish of you to keep on living?
  • ryanjshaw 13y ago
    5) He hasn't offered a sensible and complete policy - what counts as saving lives? Cancer treatment? What about transplant surgery? What about amputations? What about medicines that prevent many conditions from becoming serious? Or lets make things really fun - what about mental illness? How about a person who's solving overpopulation in some way who suddenly contracts cancer? Where does one draw the line and who gets to draw it? This is a slippery slope and the only solution is not to go down it.
    • theknown99 13y ago
      There is no solution I can see, and that's worrying. While we're all running around curing diseases, solving global warming etc, the thing that will kill off our species is our own "success".
      • saalweachter 13y ago
        6. You're expressing yesterday's fear. Population growth in the first world is stable, low, or even negative. We currently have no reason to believe that the third world's population growth won't do the same. Current projections for peak world population are "a little bit larger than now" instead of "trillions and trillions", and the problems of providing for them indefinitely "surmountable".
        • theknown99 13y ago
• ijager 13y ago
  Bill Gates wrote about how saving lives does NOT lead to overpopulation: http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=myth-three http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=myth-three
• bad_user 13y ago
  Don't know if you noticed, but in western countries the population is aging, due to a decrease in birth rate/fertility, a decrease in mortality rate and a higher life expectancy, all leading to a sharp decline in population growth. Europe has a Wikipedia page about it, check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Europe Population growth is not really exponential, it's rather an S-curve. As soon as the quality of life reaches a certain threshold, that growth stagnates. And btw, we have long surpassed the need to be healthy in order to reproduce. Assuming somebody that dies at 35 for various reasons, by then that person could have given birth to 10 children already, something which happens quite often in the impoverished populations of third-world countries. At this point, what we really need to do in order to survive as a species is in fact to eliminate premature death, to raise the quality of life for everybody and to find ways to drop the cost of energy and food to zero - a long shot, but in such a future money wouldn't be needed anymore to simply live, the economy wouldn't depend anymore on birth rate and maybe we would stop feeling the need to destroy our environment for profit. And maybe we won't feel the need to give birth to children in order to survive. Besides, unless you're a selfish jerk (and selfish jerks don't contribute much to our species btw), you should agree with me that nothing is more valuable than human life.
  • TausAmmer 13y ago
    One screams kicks and bites off head of snake to just survive. That is value of life. Fear.
• unclebucknasty 13y ago
  I'm not part of your downvote brigade, but I don't think letting people die of cancer is the solution. Aside from the very salient fact that there's usually suffering involved, I believe we have a responsibility to one another to advocate opportunities for full, rich lives. Your comment is also unfeeling (as you suspected), especially in the context of this thread. I think that if you or a loved one were dying of cancer, it's unlikely that your overwhelming emotion would be gratitude that you/he/she are doing your/his/her part to help with the overpopulation problem. That may, in fact, be one point that's earning you the downvotes. Would a subsequent increase in the population present challenges? Perhaps. But, there are other, more humane ways to deal with the problem than just letting people die of cancer. I mean, where does the logic end? Should we let known carcinogens stay in the food supply? Encourage people to smoke again? And, the issues you cited (housing, jobs, pensions) are all fixable immediately. That is, we are not suffering from a lack of wealth or resources in these regards, but rather the distribution thereof. So, you happened to pick some really bad examples that nod to implications of economic injustice. That may be another point that is earning you downvotes.
• Houshalter 13y ago
  Technological progress is outpacing population growth (especially in first world countries where the population is actually stable.) We will likely get to a technological singularity before we run into serious resource problems. I hope we can keep as many living people alive until then as possible.
• brownbat 13y ago
  Malthus was wrong. Hans Rosling, "What Stops Population Growth?" http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth... In Malthus's model, new people only consume food and breed. But we do this other cool thing, too, we also think about human problems and how to solve them. We all add resources to the computer of humanity. Some really cool, like Norman Borlaug, go around the world and teach people how to grow more reliable crops, stopping famines, increasing the reliability and scale of the food supply while lowering the resources it takes to produce the food. It's sometimes said he's saved a billion lives. He did so without increasing the strain on others, but by spreading knowledge and increasing efficiency, maybe even lowering the strain on the planet. Humanity's ability to solve problems isn't in a flat linear relationship with how many people we have either. If we just have 100 people, they all have to farm all the time, and can't stop and think about much. With a billion people, we get economies of scale, so we just need 40% to be farmers, and we can have, say, 20% work on logistics, 10% work on massive aqueducts and public infrastructure, and 10% be scientists and inventors. At a certain point, every additional person makes it easier for more people to survive on the planet. And yes, there is some raw physical limit to population on this rock... but visit the Russian Taiga, Wyoming, Namibia, or Mongolia. We're nowhere near that point yet, it's several orders of magnitude away. And if you note Rosling's points, we probably won't keep growing anyway. He notes that population growth is really a switch towards health systems with lower infant mortality. You have previous generations that keep having 10 kids because only one or two of them will survive, then the health conditions improve and suddenly all of them survive. The next generation or so reverts to normal family planning, having just one or two kids. Malthus was wrong to suggest that people just breed as much as humanly possible. All that said, I don't think you should be downvoted for asking a question. If we buried every premise we disagreed with, we'd never get a chance to lay out the reasons we believe the opposite, we'd never convince anyone. We'd just be insisting on dogmatic agreement, rather than any actual understanding of the complex issues.
  • Houshalter 13y ago
    We've been saved by falling reproduction rates. First world countries have around 2 children per couple. If growth stayed exponential, then no amount of increasing crop yields would help. Exponential growth is a terrifying thing. After a few generations there would be more humans than could fit on the surface of the Earth.
• phatfish 13y ago
  Overpopulation being the downfall of civilization is a complete myth. Even in developing countries such as Bangladesh the average family now as 2 children due to education and great progress in women's rights. I don't have the figures off the top of my head, but population peak will be more than manageable. The problem will providing energy when everyone on the planet wants a washing machine.
  • theknown99 13y ago
    https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&hl=en&dl=en&idim=country:GBR:FRA:DEU#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_pop_totl&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&ifdim=region&tdim=true&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9... World population. Up and to the right.
    • vidarh 13y ago
      What that doesn't show very well is that the growth rate is dropping fast. It doesn't show this because the year over year growth rate is already small: 1.1% per year between 2000-2005 according to the UN. As such it's a horribly misleading graph. UN projects the population to peak in 2075, at a bit over 9 billion, with yearly growth rates having dropped to 0.33% in 2050 based on current trends. Post 2075 they project a population drop as many more countries will have dropped below "maintenance" birth rates, like large parts of Europe.
      • theknown99 13y ago
        Remember when they said we'd run out of coal in the year 2000? Or that the ice caps would have melted by 2012?
        • vidarh 13y ago
          Who are "they"? Hypotheses and projections are constantly refined. But in comparison to estimates on things like coal or climate, the population growth models are almost trivially simple, and while the numbers are adjusted up and down regularly to account for actual data, all data we have show the population growth consistently slowing down. For starters, one of the things that make the population models straightforward compared to a lot of other things we might try to model, is that we can compare countries, and as it happens there are patterns that have consistently applied to countries as they develop, and that we have detailed data on: As life expectancy increases, growth rates drop to near or below maintenance rates. Unless the remaining countries with rapid growth are somehow drastically different, it would take massive, earth-shattering changes for the population growth not to stop. It's not realistically a question of if it stops, but when and how high the peak will be, and how much the population will fall back afterwards before growth resumes (the expectation is that it will fall back because we get a "bulge" similar to what we're seeing these days due to the baby-boomer generation, and eventually the people in that bulge will start to die off). Even many developing countries have long ago entered into the phase where it is not birth rates that is the cause of ongoing growth, but improving life expectancy, which means that their growth will eventually stop. And with countries like China heading rapidly towards contraction as early as 2030 (with net growth now down to around 1/3 of its peak in the mid 80's, driven by a fertility rate far below maintenance), even the remaining high growth countries would have to dramaticall raise their population growth if we are to continue seeing overall growth.
• Dogamondo 13y ago
  Upvoted. I think these are interesting questions considering the bigger picture.
• vidarh 13y ago
  > edit: Downvote brigade... why am I wrong? Most projections have the worlds population set to start reducing again within a few decades, and then likely stabilise well below the projected peak. Here is UN's latest revision of their "World Population to 2300" report: https://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf https://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wo... This report presents a main scenario with a peak of 9.22 billion in 2075, followed by a drop and slow resumption of growth towards 8.97 billion by 2300. It references older UN projections that indicates a range from 7.4 billion to 10.6 billion for 2050 depending on scenario. This current report assumes 8.9 billion for 2050, and projects annual increases in population sizes down to 0.33% in 2045-2050, vs. 1.22% in 2000-2005 This comes as more and more countries sees rapid decline in birth rates equivalent to those that the developed world has already seen. Particularly look at pages 6-8 in the report, where you can get an idea what we would expect to see if cancer was "cured": Life expectancy and fertility mirror each other closely. As we live longer, we put off having children, have fewer children, or opt not to have children at all. Even if we were to cure all forms of cancer, people would continue to die of other causes eventually. At most a cure would lead the population size to level out at a somewhat higher level because we might have children proportionally earlier in a life span so generations would overlap more. But we have to deal with these population numbers without a cure for cancer too, to deal with the bulge around the peak population sizes expected. While pension-age might be a problem, if people remain healthier longer there's little reason not to increase the pension age, as some countries have already started doing.
• taybin 13y ago
  Because you're a jerk.
• dllthomas 13y ago
  On a more poetic note: http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
• runjake 13y ago
  You have awful situational awareness and empathy skills. This is not the time nor place. Unfortunately, people tried to politely inform you, but you kept at your personal rant. Many of us in the sidelines have survived cancer, have cancer, or have close family dying of cancer. There is a time and place for personal soapboxes. This is not it. Have some compassion.
  • theknown99 13y ago
    I was replying to the parent, who suggested a cure for all cancer cannot come soon enough - I'm not so convinced we should be aiming for immortality. Point taken though...