Slashdot Mirror

https://overpopulationisamyth....

http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

http://www.businessinsider.com... (see: "Part Two: Advanced Economies That Will Shrivel And Die")

While the Earth may have its limits for any specific combination of human culture and technology, there is room for quadrillions of humans in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system. Jeff Bezos' take on that:
https://www.space.com/37572-je...

And on current USA human culture and politics and economics:
https://www.westernwatersheds....
"By far the greatest impact on the American landscape comes not from urbanization but rather from agriculture. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farming and ranching are responsible for 68 percent of all species endangerment in the United States. Agriculture is the largest consumer of water, particularly in the West. Most water developments would not exist were it not for the demand created by irrigated agriculture. If ultimate causes and not proximate causes for species extinction are considered, agricultural impacts would even be higher. Yet scant attention is paid by academicians, environmentalists, recreationists and the general public to agriculture's role in habitat fragmentation, species endangerment and declining water quality. The ironic aspect of this head-in-the sand approach to land use is that most agriculture is completely unnecessary to feed the nation. The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices."

Consider, "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?"
https://healthesolutions.com/s...
"Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac? In a classic case of contradictory government policy the pyramids in this graphic clearly show the inverse relationship between federal government agriculture subsidies and federal nutrition recommendations. The chart was put together by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, but its figures still, alas, look quite relevant. Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."

They don't say "female skin is evil".

It's me making fun of their "logic and reasoning".
Do also note that said "negative imagery" of women showing skin is from "FAMILY FILMS" - not porn or even action movies where one might see some "sex sells" scenes.
They are complaining about beach scenes and short skirts and sleeves. Unless they are watching some other kind of "family films".

Which is just half a step away from women covering their hair cause its smell clouds the minds of men - and cause a woman whose smell you can sense on the air is a harlot and a prostitute.
Thus, a hijab, niqab, chador and a burka. To protect men from raping women (belonging to other men) by accident, thinking them to be common whores.
Hey! It's the desert. It gets hot. People's minds go crazy. SOMETHING had to be done about it.

Or if you don't like Islamic insanity, there's plenty of puritan Christian insanity as well.
Just look up St. Mary frescoes (not the modern ones, which show hair) - she's wearing a hijab.
Nuns are closer to a niqab but stop just short of covering the entire face.
Except this is all coming from "Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media" and not some religious sect.
And DO NOTE how that entire bit is an "additional" point.
Women are underrepresented in media - oh and by the way there's too much naked skin in family pictures.

It's like that site about overpopulation being a myth (Which is true).
Oh... BTW, have you tried "natural family planing"? It's this totally the bestest thing ever.
Unlike the evils of "plan b", contraception that will give you AIDS and Obamacare. Think about it.
What a surprise from a group proudly describing themselves and their found as "pro-life".

I'm not saying that it is necessarily "foot in the door" or "door in the face" push for puritan values.
It could be simply that they are overeager to push their message that they are tripping over themselves and coming off as puritan nuts.

Just like the way they are bragging that "The Institute has amassed the largest body of research on gender prevalence in entertainment, which spans more than 20 years". Few paragraphs down, it's "over 25 years".
The institute was founded by Davis in 2006.

Or how they brag about influencing SONY so they "added more females in the crowd scenes and gave the non-lead females a line or two" - in Hotel Transylvania.
Cause nothing says equality like more female monsters. There AND in Monster University. With a "line or two".
Not to mention the Geena Davis' Transylvanian connotations.
Or how they've helped "fix" the inequality in The Little Prince.
Cause nothing says equality like shoehorning female characters into a classic story - and making them into no-fun, gray-colored fun-haters who must be re-educated to learn how to have fun and to love.
By a man.

They may be good-natured, but their approach sure is flawed.

humans, as an entire global race of beings, does need to learn to manage their population growth. We are running out of resources. Most immediately, we are running out of ways to keep everyone fed.

People have made such predictions, endlessly, and they've all been utterly wrong. We have an obscene amount of land area on this planet, enough to feed orders of magnitude more people than exist today... They just won't all be eating steaks all the time:

https://overpopulationisamyth....

See: http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

In general, as Julian Simon wrote, the (educated, nourished, healthy) human imagination is the ultimate resource that invents all other resources, so in general the more people you have, the more imagination you have. For example, woudl we have the internet if someone in the 1600s had decided there were too many people because London was overcrowded and killed off all but a million humans on the planet? The solar system can probably support quadrillions of people living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore like JD Bernal imagined in the 1920s.
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That list is very similar to what I had listed here in back in 1999 (minus a few fanciful ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
        Autonomous military robots out of control
        Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
        Ethnically targeted virus
        Sterility virus
        Computer virus
        Asteroid impact
        Y2K
        Other unforseen computer failure mode
        Global warming / climate change / flooding
        Nuclear / biological war
        Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
        Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
        Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
        Religious / philosophical warfare
        Economic imbalance leading to world war
        Arms race leading to world war
        Zero-point energy tap out of control
        Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
        Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)"

But in the end, I think the issue raised in my sig is the biggest challenge: the perilous irony of people using the tools of material abundance in a war-like way as if material scarcity was still a major concern, as well as derivative issues like the moral problem of creating artificial scarcity under capitalism and so on. There are possible solutions to such issues (basic income, expanded gift economy, improved subsistence via 3D printing and personal agricultural robots and indoor agriculture and solar panels and so on, participatory democratic planning supported by the internet), but ideology and existing artificial-scarcity-based power structures stands in the way. Still, the dominant ideology is slowly shifting top a more open and abundance-oriented one. As Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...

http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

I agree some technoligies should be banned or heavily taxed because they create unpaid for externalities like pollution. However, in general, what we need are more efficient technologies, technologies that create new resources out of abundant materials (like fusion of hydrogen), and also technologies that let us expand out into space (or responsibly in the ocean or desert or Antarctic, or underground).

The human imagination is the ultimate resource, The more (educated, well-fed) people you have, the more imagination.
"The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment"
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

If I told you that someone had (really) just invented fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar), and someone else had invented automated indoor agriculture, and someone else had invented 3D printers that can recycle 100% of everything they print in a non-polluting way -- even electronics and houses, and together these technologies could feed a trillion people on the planet and house them and clothe them and so on, would your feelings change about "over population"? BTW, we are not very far from all three of these technologies or equivalents.

Even if for aesthetic or environmental reasons we might want to limit the population of humans on the Earth at any one time, the carrying capacity of the solar system, even just with essentially known technologies discussed in 1980, is probably in the quadrillions of humans (plus much more of everything else in supporting ecosystems).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...

In any case, the bigger issue is that populations of industrialized countries are peaking already with non-immigrant female citizens in most generally having less than two or so kids each, so less than replacement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

As I wrote here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal. :-)
But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?
And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

By me on that theme:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...

So, plenty of room for at least another 1000 years of exponential growth. After that, it's someone else's problem, and there are more minds to think of solutions (like tapping zero point energy to create energy and matter in the void of space, creating new dimensions, etc.).

See also:
https://overpopulationisamyth....

We never have. We probably never will.

http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

And people are dying early now due to the rich-poor divide. So why not fix that now?
http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

Also, such research ignores the low-hanging fruit of better nutrition as I mention here: http://science.slashdot.org/co...

How to get healthier for most people in the Western world: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
https://www.lef.org/magazine/m...

But it is hard to make huge profits from suggesting people live well and clean up their environment and thus prevent and cure disease... There are a lot more profits to keeping people on patented drugs by just treating chronic "conditions" or reducing the pains associated with them.

To be clear, I'm not against anti-aging research or genomics. I'm just saying, we as a society and scientific community are often ignoring the obvious well-proven paths to better health and extended life-span and diminished "frail span" for most people.

Of course, genomics also has a dark side -- the potential for customized plagues that may destroy humanity in the next few decades, like I worry about here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

So, I'd suggest we build healthier and more secure and equitable communities for everyone right now, before the plague potential of genomics fully emerges, in order to have the community spirit needed to deal with the dark side of such innovation.

the more likely scenario is collapse due to over population and limited resources.

There's ample space across the surface of the earth for several orders of magnitude more people, without resorting to even basic technology like high-rises, let alone exotic technology like landfill in the oceans, space stations, etc.

http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

And just what resources are "limited"? With enough energy you can extract the carbons from the air to make more oil from scratch, pull trace elements of anything out of seawater, etc. And with cheap energy it's a no-brainer to start mining the moon, Mars, or asteroids for anything we'd want.

I see this assertion time after time -- that we must feed 8, 10, 15 billions of people -- without asking the question, "Does the planet need that many people?"

There are many problems with your reasoning.
First, fertility rates are plummeting. Much of the world (including the USA) is already below replacement rate, leading to problems such as population aging and cultural weakening. Some countries still have large fertility rates, but even there it is falling fast. As a result, world population is projected by the UN to peak at 9B or maybe 10B, then start falling.

Second, much of the world is obese, and 1/3 of the food is not even eaten - it is thrown away at any of the several stages of production. Food production per capita is growing. Starvation is not caused by lack of food, it is caused by civil wars, terrorism, or corrupt, authoritarian and incompetent governments.

Third, inflation-adjusted price of many commodities have been stable for a century.

Fourth, there is no clear correlation between population density and income per capita.

Fifth: while we compete for primary resources (but see the third point above), when the population grows we share the benefits of more scientists, engineers, musicians, writers, philosophers, etc.

See
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

But what do you expect people in other countries to do, when the Americans export their movies in which people are living in big houses, with gigantic backyard,

According to the U.N. Population Database, the world's population in 2010 will be 6,908,688,000. The landmass of Texas is 268,820 sq mi (7,494,271,488,000 sq ft).

So, divide 7,494,271,488,000 sq ft by 6,908,688,000 people, and you get 1084.76 sq ft/person. That's approximately a 33' x 33' plot of land for every person on the planet, enough space for a town house.

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth#header-5

You opinion is absolutely not based in reality, and there have been many discredited charlatans before you saying the same things, and always being proven dead-wrong:

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth

It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/

While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.

Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.

The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/

Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/

And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).

The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s

When the world hit 7 billion, did you complain about overpopulation?

Really?

Our population is far too high as is

Clearly, you've never been to Phoenix, AZ... The Southwestern US consists of about 300,000 sq miles of mostly vacant desert land, and only very little else. The US population at large continues to move further south and west every year.

People often like to claim that humans consume without bounds and replicate until all resources are used up and will eventually move on.

Only the highest order fools make such claims.

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth

I find it hard to believe the planet is actually overpopulated. I am surprised that no one else has mentioned this site: http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

The earth can only support so many of us.

That is purely a myth, with absolutely no sound scientific basis behind it. Stop spreading false information.

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
    Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

However, schooling is certainly effective in keeping young people out of the work force. What most of the comments here seem to ignore is that 200 years ago, children at age 4 or 5 were working on farms and in mines and in factories. Now, with automation and electric motors, children are out of the work force generally until they turn 21 (or longer if they go to grad school). Things have changed so much, and many people posting here seem unaware of that. At this point, most work is "make work" related to guarding or pointless zero-sum competition.

I agree with your point about decision makers being out-of-touch with emerging technological realities. See my site for more on that.

And see also:
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
http://anwot.org/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/content/episode-5-7-billion-people-will-everyone-please-relax

For every person we put on this earth, there's less space for the natural world and its forests and oceans which renew our air and water.

Actually, higher population generally results in higher population density in cities. We don't go plow a forest to built more suburban houses, we stop building houses, and start building condos, high-rise apartments, etc., etc.

And in the US, at least, the population is steadily moving southwest every year... The point being, we're generally destroying shrub desert, which previously had thin populations of plants and animals, which contributed almost nothing to renewing "our air and water."

At some point, we will have used up enough land so that pollution, species loss and loss of renewable resources makes us get a Darwin award as a species.

Absolutely, and long ago the exact date of this population crash was predicted. It is going to be... 1890. So said Thomas Malthus. Glad to hear your tremendous intellect has given you the insight to see the truth. Maybe you should form a group, and go climb up to a mountain-top somewhere, and wait for a sign that the population is about to crash.

In the mean time, try this video:

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth

http://www.lifenews.com/2012/07/03/melinda-gates-admits-stop-peoples-lives-from-existing/
Cited here:
http://www.dailypaul.com/243131/eugenicist-melinda-gates-stop-the-poor-from-reproducing

Or:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/melinda_gates_talks_eugenics.html
"Eugenics is the infamous idea that governments should decide which kinds of citizens ought to be considered desirable (the 1912 consensus was that these tended to be white, athletic, intelligent, and wealthy) and which kinds of citizens ought to be considered undesirable (these tended to be black, Jewish, disabled, or poor) and employ the power of the state to encourage increases of desirable citizens (positive eugenics) and encourage decreases of undesirable citizens (negative eugenics). The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the idea that the protection afforded by civil society had prevented the kind of natural selection occurring in Darwin's Origin of Species from happening in humans, thus perpetuating the existence of weak and feeble-minded people who would have been unable to survive in the state of nature.
Eugenicists differed on whether eugenics should be practiced in a soft manner, with taxpayer-underwritten incentives, or in a hard manner, using coercive and often deadly force. The movement claimed many adherents. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her British counterpart Marie Stopes were both involved in their national eugenic societies. Margaret Sanger viewed her activism as a way to "assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit." Marie Stopes lobbied for "the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood [to be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.""Eugenics is the infamous idea that governments should decide which kinds of citizens ought to be considered desirable (the 1912 consensus was that these tended to be white, athletic, intelligent, and wealthy) and which kinds of citizens ought to be considered undesirable (these tended to be black, Jewish, disabled, or poor) and employ the power of the state to encourage increases of desirable citizens (positive eugenics) and encourage decreases of undesirable citizens (negative eugenics). The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the idea that the protection afforded by civil society had prevented the kind of natural selection occurring in Darwin's Origin of Species from happening in humans, thus perpetuating the existence of weak and feeble-minded people who would have been unable to survive in the state of nature.
Eugenicists differed on whether eugenics should be practiced in a soft manner, with taxpayer-underwritten incentives, or in a hard manner, using coercive and often deadly force. The movement claimed many adherents. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her British counterpart Marie Stopes were both involved in their national eugenic societies. Margaret Sanger viewed her activism as a way to "assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit." Marie Stopes lobbied for "the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood [to be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.""

I am just shocked at how most slashdotters have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the overpopulation myth.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

As Julian Simon suggests, more people means more imagination, which can mean more wealth for everyone:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

And in any case, the world is suffering more from a demographic pea

Wrong. over population is a myth.

This seems more reasonable to me than all the hysteria: Over Population is a Myth

"Overpopulation is not a problem. That is a myth that has been perpetuated since the latter half of the 18th century. Do the math."

"Brought to you by.
http://www.overpopulationisamyth.com/"

"Copyright © 2010â"2011 Population Research Institute. All rights reserved. "

http://pop.org/about/who-we-are-800

"Our growing, global network of pro-life groups spans over 30 countries."

"pro-life" ....

On the food thing before anyone asks

What food thing?"

As for oil... plenty of energy around, we just need to harvest it more efficiently.

Sorry, but that much space is more than enough for each person to house, clothe and feed themselves at the level expected for a person living in the early 21st century, WITHOUT the use of any technology invented in the last 2000 years.
Not to mention the advancements made in the last half a century or so.

Relax. Watch and read this.
We have a whole planet for ourselves. We just need to be a bit more rational in the use of all the resources at our disposal.
Also, a bit less effort in killing each other and a bit more invested in education NOW might prove highly useful when the population of poorest nations outnumbers the population of the richest by four to one.
40 or so years down the road.

Give or take a couple a hundred million or so...

Also, we could all live in Texas.
And still there be room even there, cause we would have to send of millions to farm African savannah so that everyone in the world could be fed.

Give or take a couple a hundred million or so...

Also, we could all live in Texas.
And still there be room even there, cause we would have to send of millions to farm African savannah so that everyone in the world could be fed.

Besides, you can't fix overpopulation by going to Mars. How many people are born on Earth every minute, and how many could you realistically send to Mars ? Not enough to make a difference.

Did people living in USA and Australia today all come from Europe? Are those two technologically advanced countries?
Colonization is not about exodus, you know? It is about populating an area, preferably one rich in exploitable resources.

Also, there is nothing really there to fix regarding overpopulation. You know... kinda the way nothing needs fixing about unicorns.

But you know what there is on Mars? A basket.
Not really big one, not really safe one... but a spare basket none the less. And one that we could spit-shine into a much better basket with a bit of elbow-grease.
And then we would have two really nice baskets - plus all the basket spit-shining tech we came up with in the process.
Just all the Hobbit-tech (there and back again) is worth the trip or two, not to mention A WHOLE FUCKING PLANET for us.
And by us, I mean us. Not you. You just lost your chance. Along with your Nazi friends you will have your face melted off while we go to Mars and beyond.

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

Malthus wanted to kill the poor so the rich could remain rich. Seriously.

Overpopulation is a myth

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

Please read, learn and revise opinion accordingly.

i just want you to know, that if you divide the population of the planet into families of 4, and gave each family a house with a yard (suburbanite america style) that we would all fit into a city the size of Texas. Yes, thats a big area, but when you look at a map of the planet, Texas don't amount to much of it. http://www.overpopulationisamyth.com/