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Humans Will Need Two Earths By 2030
An anonymous reader writes "A recent report warns that humans are overusing the resources of the planet and will need two Earths by the year 2030. The Living Planet Report tells that the demands on natural resources have doubled in the past 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half."
I told you not to take the axiom of choice!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
.. and we've run out of ipv4 addresses "in about a year" for the last decade or so..
and people will probably pay about as much heed to this warning as they do to ipv4 exhaustion.
AND just like ipv4 exhaustion, nothing serious is going to be done about this until stuff actually starts falling apart. And by falling apart I don't mean charts and graphs, I mean "The Day After Tomorrow" falling apart. And even then...
Haven't "scientists" been saying stuff like this since about the mid-1800s? "Peak Oil", "Population Overcrowding", "Global Warming"... all modern-day myths that never seem to die no matter how much they're refuted.
And by falling apart I don't mean charts and graphs, I mean "The Day After Tomorrow" falling apart.
So, superstorms that freeze the Earth, and CGI wolves?
Back when I was growing up, we had those quaint little videos where the Statue of Liberty's hand was the only thing showing above the ocean. And a grandfather was passing on his wisdom to his grand daughter about what they could have done differently to avoid this coast catastrophe. Which happened in 2020.
Now, I know we're still 10 years out, but I would expect NY to be at least a couple inches under water by now.
Humanity will adapt and survive. That's our strength. Fossil fuels run out? We'll figure something else out..oh, we already have. It's just not cheaper than fossil fuels...yet.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
What is the purpose of this post? What does it even mean? What is the purpose of posting a link to a nebulous summary of a highly suggestive report on an extremely politically charged subject on a site that bills itself "News for Nerds"?
If this is true, nobody's really listening. They're embroiled in their own personal battles, and they _know_ that finding a job is hard now. Any radical change 20 years away (good or bad) is almost always false. Global cooling, flying cars, personal robots, futuristic looking cars and buildings...
Quick, someone say "we're using the resources at a larger rate than the earth can provide" ! before the cornucopians come out of their caves to declare infinite growth through infinite resources.
The bottle maybe big but the spout is killing us.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Gimme a break. Somebody is just trying to get a buck in their pocket. Fiddlesticks I say!
"population control"
freudian slip there, lefty? Think you meant to say "birth control"....
This has F-U-D written all over it. Yes, we might need 2.75 Earths worth of *some* minerals or resources, such as tungsten or cork trees, in 20 years, but we certainly do not need 2.75 Earths worth of other, vaster resources, such as breathable air or silicon. To say that we'd need two Earths in order to quench our ravenous thirst for light bulb filaments is overkill, and certainly does more to make me discount these studies than think poorly of how humanity manages the resources we have.
still refuse to discuss population control.
Not true. There are a few that advocate genocide.
But I still remember in the 70s how oil was going to run out by 1990; we seem to have had only twenty years' supply of oil left for as long as I remember. Similarly, half the world was going to have starved by 2000, but instead we've seen population continue to increase.
The hair-shirt left have cried disaster so many times that it's impossible to take them seriously anymore.
So when are we going to start regulating birth rates? I know this is seen as racist by many, since the minorities are the main ones reproducing at an alarming rate, with obvious octomom exceptions, but it is about the future of our planet and the survival of our race at this point. Race isn't even a factor.
Actually, our planet should have been out of easily consumable resources a LONG time ago - but thanks to the Green Revolution of artificial fertilizers and improved farming techniques, scientists like Norman Borlaug have saved more lives than any other group in the history of the world.
The same thing needs to keep happening if we're going to keep increasing our population. We're going to have to convert more sunlight into usable foods, using more than just simple soil in order to keep scaling.
Meanwhile, the "organic food" folks insist that food must be grown using only slightly modified classical techniques, for a variety of reasons from vitamin density (overstated relative to studies, at best), to mystical mumbo jumbo like vibrations and auras. The other argument is that a given technique is sustainable for a given circumstance, or allows for smaller farms - but none of them are sustainable across the populations modern farming techniques functionally do now.
It'll be interesting to see whether populations will continue to curve towards neutral growth on their own, or what decisions people will come to. I certainly hope the Malthusian worldview doesn't come back into dominance.
Ryan Fenton
One child per couple one would lower the population over a few generations to more sustainable number.
Perhaps you should ask the Chinese how wonderful 'population control' has been? First Mao demands more kids to fight the EVIL AMERICANS, and their population explodes. Then they decide that actually they don't have the ability to feed that many people so they'd better stop and demand that Chinese couples only have one child. Now they have a rapidly aging population with about 50,000,000 more men than women.
The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
We've been on the verge of running out of oil, running out of fresh water, and killing our oceans how many times now? I have no doubt that some day humans will go the way of the dinosaurs but it will probably be a long time from now unless a killer virus morphs into something that spreads uncontrollably and kills off all of earth's connected humans. If that happens then the lost tribes in the Amazon and on some Asian islands will probably still be isolated enough and will be able to repopulate the earth.
Is this need for a second earth as urgent as the need to switch to IPv6? Or are they just going to keep pushing it back to a distant future.
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
Why, slashdot, do you insist on posting article after article wrote by Al Gore and the global conspirators of Climate Gate. Clearly if just drill in the Arctic it will solve ALL of our environmental woes.
When you are competing for the minds of as many humans as possible the best way to gain followers is to encourage them to reproduce as rapidly and as often as possible. Very few religions gain members through conversion, so breeding new members is really the only option. It's no coincidence that nearly all major religions discourage birth control or family planning practices, and encourage you to have as many children (and sometimes wives) as you can support. Add to that the selfish and myopic idea that nothing we do in this life really matters (as long as you follow the rules in $HOLY BOOK) and you have a recipe for ecological disaster.
Now, I have met religious people who believe that the earth is a gift to us, and we must serve as guardians of it, protecting and managing its resources responsibly; that living in harmony and balance is what god intended for us. Unfortunately when I compare those beliefs to what is actually said in the bible for example, it's apparent that they are not closely following their religion. The bible is very clear when it comes to the earth: this place is a rental, and it's all going to come to an end very, very soon. If you believe that, truly believe that, why would you bother recycling?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
well then, we just better have a few more large wars, that'll kill off lots of the planetary population - problem solved, right? riiiight...
Fortunately, things are being dramatically better managed than even just 30 years ago. For instance, the birth rate of most densely populated countries has flattened to almost zero; agriculture is far more efficient than before; trees are being reforested in earnest. As things get gradually get worse, people will gradually put more emphasis on sustainability, and an equilibrium will eventually be reached somewhere between the Utopian and Doomsday extremes. Might not be quite as rosy as it is, comparatively, today, but it will be manageable.
Well, all i can say is that everything needs to be recycled, and i'm not big on doing that by any means, but that doesn't mean that companies can't start and work to just divide up all of our waste. I mean, it's not like we are running around eating plastic and metal! It's all still there, we have just decided to put it in landfills. And who care!? It's our nature to grow and expand and evolve! No matter what, the human race will survive. If i make it through or not is not up to me, so why worry about it. I say we continue to grow and strive for better things, no matter what the cost.
I can agree with the forced genocide but I have one request for those who advocate it. You first.
They forgot about 2012! Plenty of room after that!
Well, we could always start by decreasing the surplus population. I vote we start with anyone posting as Anonymous Coward.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
is here. Contains lots of nice, big, hard to interpret charts and stuff.
Sig this!
Somehow I doubt that the groups who created this report are impartial and it is well known that if one goes looking for a specific conclusion, one will find the conclusion whether the conclusion is correct or not.
damn birth control advocates!! will no one thing of the babies that are being killed before they are conceived!!
still refuse to discuss population control.
And so do the non religious, unfortunately. Worse, they seem intent on subsidizing the fecundity of the stupid at the expense of the responsible.
Following an outdated dogma that advocated male over female children is not my problem.
Of course it's your problem. Whenever the government demands that people do something they don't want to do, there are unexpected consequences of this kind; this is why just about anything government does turns out to be a disaster in the long run.
If i keep climbing stairs, i will get like 20 meters in the air over the buiilding. It works in cartoons, why not in real life?
Near the point you used all the resources, population, and/or use of resources will stop growing, just because we reached the ceiling. You can raise the ceiling being more efficient obtaining/using resources, but will always be a limit after which people will die or stop growing.
When people get the idea that getting more children will mean death in short time from them, and religions understand that anticonception save lives instead of terminating them, then we could be at a good distance of such limits.
Bah, joking... they won't change their way to be, and just will die hundreds of millons, by wars, famine or disease, and people will blame whatever they want to blame, except themselves.
You like population control? Then why not set a good example by jumping off the nearest cliff?
AH, Malthus
Sigh
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
an an entire generation that has no aunts, or uncles, no siblings, and a tradition of the children taking care of the parents in old age.
The overpopulation myth. Bottom line - we could provide for every single person living on this planet with just the resources inside the US. Never mind the rest of the world. We're a LONG way from overpopulation... We have a distribution - not resource - problem to solve.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
How many of these so called experts have been proclaiming doomsday now for the past century.
We won't need two Earths, we have plenty of resources here.
The real problem is the social mechanisms we use to get resources, which is mainly through warfare.
(i.e. Invading countries for their lithium supply for example when there is a well known shortage.)
I mean, Africa is rich in mineral resources, most of it undeveloped. Yet the populations are in disarray.
They are meant to be, kept that way by George Soros and friends at the IMF for good reason.
A developed industrialized stable Africa would mean competition, and they don't want any.
So expect Africa and its people to continue to have all sorts of silly woes, like famines....political instability
until the IMF and George decide otherwise.
The author I think is living in a glass academic bubble and should probably investigate trends and get his feet
wet and pound the pavement a little before stating something so stupid.
I mean, we haven't even touched the ocean floors yet which have vast reserves of volcanic mineral wealth.
Technology is being developed to mine the ocean floor in the next 5-10 years in a big way for example.
Same thing with oil. We were suppose to have peaked in 1970's, now we are discovering oil, huge oceans of the stuff
in the earths crust at 32,000 feet or more....obviously produced by geological processes that dwarf anything
in the middle east.
But it is all the same thing, these oil companies NEED you to believe that oil is scarce otherwise they won't be able to charge 100 dollars a barrel for it.
Same thing with the population explosion B.S. Once you provide people who health care, food and water and a place to stay, the motivational operandi goes from worrying about food for tomorrow, having tons of kids to work the farm or look for food...too education and self improvement. In fact, populations start to contract, not grow.
Japan is going through that right now, so is the USA. Well we would be, but our crooked politicians selective enforce the laws on immigration for WalMart and co.
So the USA would be contracting as well in population, so is Europe.
But the whole thing we need two Earths, is a bunch of crap.
We do need two Earths, mainly I would say for:
1) We need two Earths to flee the tyranny and new dark age that the IMF and George and his friends have planned for humanity.
In the past you could defeat tyranny by discovering a new land, building a free nation, and destroying it.
Now, there is no place to flee which means my prediction is the 21st century is going to see incredible civil wars that are very violent because there is no place to go, and people will be forced to fight the police states the IMF have been setting up around the globe.
2) Disaster, I mean acts of God with a big G kinda thing. Asteroid impact, volcanic disaster, solar disaster. If we are only in one solar system, we could get wiped out pretty easily. (All of our eggs in one basket.)
3) Finally idiots. From scientists who think they know everything that want to start tinkering with our atmosphere to the idiots at Monsanto who are passing laws in Congress that make it illegal to grow your own food. The side affects of genetic science gone mad with Vaccines which go wrong (creating super bugs) and other madness we see with the use of Antibiotics on just about everything and anything. (Stop washing your hands with that anti bacterial soap!!!)
I think my reasons for two Earths have much more basis in historic _fact_ than this guy who claims like lots of others, we are running out of everything.
B.S.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
No need. We'll just have a few wars like we always do... and maybe a plague or two. This problem will sort itself out.
First off, why are we linking to a frame/url shortener rather than directly to the article?
But blind extrapolation tells us nothing. If you're an economist then you think exponential growth can happen indefinitely. If you're a biologist you know that populations follow a sigmoidal curve if they approach their carrying capacity. For humans, our population curve will likely fall somewhere in between.
The most developed nations are already at zero population growth, and the developing world isn't going to magically become developed if the resources simply aren't there. For those countries, maintaining an agrarian birth rate despite modern medicine and an economy transitioning away from food production is a good way to ensure lasting poverty. That's a big problem for them, but not for English speaking Internet users. Or, more precisely, it's not "our" problem unless we want to involve ourselves in their affairs (for better or for worse).
In fact, "growth" has become something of a religion itself. In public discourse and political debate, no one ever talks about stability; the need to "grow the economy" is taken as a "given", a commandment from on high. If a company's sales are merely stable from one quarter or year to the next, they are considered unsuccessful (or would be if the economy as a whole weren't currently shrinking). If a country's or state's or city's population isn't increasing, that's considered a sign of problems. There will come a day when that trend stops, whether it's in 2030 or probably much later. The only question is whether we'll bring population growth to a "controlled landing" or to a crash.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Especially by Slashdotters.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Affluence = population control. Note how Europe and the US are experiencing all of their population growth now due to immigration? It doesn't require mandatory birth control measures (or enforced abortion laws, etc) to keep the population down.
All you really have to do is provide the masses with a better form of retirement plan than: 'have a shitload of kids so that at least some will live long enough to care for you when you get old'.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Hasn't this been the story for hundreds of years now? Based on current technology, known resources and consumption of resources to support said technology yes. Give my regards to Thomas Malthus.
The game.
Did it ever occur to you that most major religions discourage birth control (and especially abortion) because it blocks the production of life - something they esteem to hold in the highest regard? Mind you, I'm only discussing the concept, not the practitioners.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Dude, Idiocracy was a funny show and all, but please don't confuse correlation with causation. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Ok, I'm big on conservation, saving the planet, etc., but this report is total FUD. One of the charts on this report illustrates the point perfectly: "In 2007, people used the equivalent of 1.5 planets in 2007 to support their activities." So, either we just decimated the earth 3 years ago and are living on some fairy planet now, or we've got some Library of Congress measurements going on here. What next? Earths Per Minute? Earth calories per square mile? Presenting this kind of data is WORTHLESS except as an alarmist view on the matter to grab headlines. Now, there ARE good pieces of well-established information in the report I saw (such as loss of biodiversity, habitat, excess carbon, etc.) but the way this report presents the (glossed over) data is entirely misleading, pointlessly biased, unscientific, and just shameful. Data should speak for itself, and not need headline grabbing lines such as "We're going to need another planet guys! ZOMG, WE'RE ALL DOOMED!"
Great. Now let's get to the next step: getting affluence without consuming resources.
Define "need". Then define exactly which (and how many) humans. Then we can talk.
...an online survey I took on a "planet-friendly" website. They had a form with questions like "How often do you shower / how much garbage do you throw away / how many miles do you drive." When I entered everything in honestly, I was given a number that was supposed to describe how much of the earth's resources I was using (wasting), and that I need to cut back.
So I tried filling it out from scratch again, only I responded with 0 to every question...basically I could not have filled it out the way I did unless I existed in a cave, or not at all. In the end, I still got a positive number and a report that told me I need to cut back on how much of the earth's resources I used.
Complete bunk.
I recall asking a similar question of my biology teacher way back in high school. Something like, Didn't WW1 and WW2 put a pretty big dent in world population? The answer was, not really.
Wouldn't unchecked growth create poverty, famine, disease, and other social problems? You'd save more lives, and improve the lives of those who are born by advocating responsible family planning practices. If they really cared about life, and the quality of it, that's what they'd be doing. Organized religion doesn't really care about that. That's why they preach that life is all about suffering and pain--just keep enduring it until you die and go to heaven where you'll finally be better off. Make as many more people while you're here so they can donate to the church what little they make.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
i never realized how far behind the times /. was on these "science" articles. it is a week btw
Uh oh, another "non-profit" group must need money to supplement their jet's and expensive dinners.
That is a stupid argument. Imagine you see someone disemabarking from a private jet, wearing a suit that costs more than the salaries of you and I combined, just so that they can attend an expensive dinner in another city. Which is more likely?
Which side of this argument has the most financial interest in arguing either for or against limiting our use of Earth's resources? Let's face it, you don't get super rich by becoming a climate scientist.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout. But no, I am sure that you are right that it is the tree-huggers who are the ones trying to greedily screw us all for money.
Assuming they are correct (they know how many resources are available on the entire planet [I think some natural resource extraction companies would like to talk to you]? They can forecast future technology?) People will invent new technology as needed, tastes will change, and price rationing will take care of the rest. This is like complaining that there aren't enough Aston-Martin DB5s in the world, or that we need to find another Earth to allow everyone to have prime beachfront real-estate.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Wouldn't unchecked growth create poverty, famine, disease, and other social problems?
That's one assumption, but not necessarily true. Note that most organized religion also preaches abstinence and an avoidance of casual sex - acts which are almost perfectly guaranteed to not produce a baby. Hell, even the Catholic Church preaches something called natural family planning, which (unlike the past and oft-derided 'rhythm method'), actually times things accurately around female ovulation.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
We are not going to use all the resources, when the going gets tough we are going to turn on each other.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Our race will at some point in the future develop a source of energy that makes what we can produce today trivial so that we can manufacture whatever type of substance we need. Until that happens they may be wars for resources, countries may be wiped out merely for their natural resources. Even past that point, our ability to produce relatively huge amounts of energy from some future technology will cease and the cycle may repeat itself.
I foresee that in the very distant future our descendants will have the technology to build stars for energy, an extremely refined fusion technology or some tech that is centuries/millenniums beyond our current capabilities. The rate of growth of our technology is at least directly proportional to the rate of growth of our population, the more people that are alive the more opportunities that exist for discovery and advancement.
Humans will survive to some extent short of some intentional trying cause extinction or a planet leveling event. Our numbers may greatly decrease but as long as we can produce energy we can create the conditions however limited to carry on.
If you look at the bloodiest wars that humans have experienced, WWI and WWII, and even add in the genocide of the Jews and Stalin's great purge, that is all still only a tiny blip compared to global population. War (except perhaps before the Industrial Revolution and modern medicine) has never been a significant control on population.
Plagues haven't done much either, except for the Bubonic Plague.
In earlier times (such as during the days of the Bubonic Plague), these things may have been a significant check on overpopulation, but not since the Industrial Revolution and the invention of antibiotics and other parts of modern medicine.
OK, I've read all the posts and apparently I'm the only one (today) who reads this article, goes outside and looks up at the starry sky... Ignoring the article's source and Doomsday message, there may come a day ( in the distant future ) when resources become (excessively) difficult to obtain. Then it will be a good day to notice that this is but one smallish planet in a much larger solar system.
Alright, let's create one on Mars. Send all the Democrats, illegal aliens, moslems, and 2/3s of the populations of China and India there and all will be well.
Parent is accurate. The ensuing wars from USA's demise would severely deplete Human populations across the globe. Think how fast China would invade Taiwan. And Mongolia for that matter. How quickly would North Korea roll South. WWRD? What Would Russia Do? Say bye bye to Georgia, that's for sure. Venezuela invading Columbia? No that would never happen... Iran invading Iraq... I wonder. And these are just off the top of my head.
How is cheating nature by discovering a "natural" way to have sex without conception any more moral than using a latex condom or the pill?
Also, you can preach whatever you want, it's abundantly clear that abstinence WOULD work when practiced...but people don't. So effectively, by promoting abstinence only, they are complicit in spreading STDs and unplanned pregnancy. They either know it's not working and don't care, because more babies is the goal anyway, or they don't know that it doesn't work in practice because they refuse to look at and believe the evidence.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
True: China's approach to population control has been a disaster. Fortunately for the world, there are other ideas for how to run a society.
For example, a less authoritarian approach would do it through incentives and disincentives. Start with free family-planning education and low-cost contraception. In places where couple have lots of children to work the farm, introduce mechanization to make that unnecessary. In places where they do so to ensure that they have someone to care for them when they get old, offer better geriatric care. In a nutshell: stop rewarding people for breeding like fruit flies, and start rewarding them for pulling out once in a while.
You'll still have certain religious leaders who forbid contraception (RCC) or encourage large families so that more souls can be baptized (LDS), but history has shown that in societies where lots of children are no longer an economic necessity (e.g. Europe, Can/US) the population growth rate drops off regardless. It is possible to control population growth, and even begin to reduce population in a slow, controlled trend. There are countries that (intentionally or not) are already doing it. World population is still going up, but the rate at which it's increasing has finally begun to go down in the last few decades. We just need to take what we've learned from countries that have done the job badly (e.g. PRC), and what we've learned from countries which are doing it better (e.g. Japan, Italy), and apply those lessons elsewhere.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Anyway, I live in Cairo, Egypt at the moment. It's a city of 20M people and growing bigger every day. This is the future for most of the world, where most of the growth is happening.
And if these cultures don't straighten out their act, they'll also be the places where most of the population die-off occurs. Further, population growth doesn't equal economic growth. Most of the places with negative population growth still have positive economic growth.
Of course. Human civilizations are about 3000 years old, but industrial civilization is only 200 years old. Only in the past 100 years has large-scale resource extraction, large enough to make a big dent in potential supply, been feasible. The really rich ores, like veins of copper with over 1% metal, are long gone. Over the next century, lots of stuff is going to run out. Oil production peaked in 2005. There hasn't been a major new energy source in the last half century; just improvements on previous ones.
The "free market will solve all problems" crowd was insisting that peak oil would never happen. But it did. The price of oil has tripled without an increase in supply.
The word you're looking for is "Lebensraum".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Efficiency is a good idea for its own sake. Use less, have more. Even in circumstances of abundance it is a good idea since there is always cost associated with getting materials. If you can be more efficient, then it is a good thing.
However that doesn't make scare crap like this useful. Not only is it wildly inaccurate, but repeated shit like this can encourage people to do nothing. After all, if we are really fucked and the only thing we can do to survive is make drastic cuts or go back to pre-industrial society or to have a massive decrease in population then why do anything? Live it up, waste while you can, enjoy life because it'll all come crashing down.
It is far better to show people what we CAN do, where there are problems, how they can be fixed, how we can work towards a future where we have a better quality of life through greater efficiency. Give people hope and inspiration, because that really is the truth. We can make things better, we can improve things. Shortages are things that can be dealt with.
Unfortunately most of the eco side is dominated by shouting. Predictions of imminent doom unless we all follow their One True Way(tm) which just happens to require massive sacrifices. This, coupled with the fact that they are wrong all the time (as all doomsayers have been). This leads to people just not listening, even when some of what they say is right.
Personally I think we need more people like Saul Griffith, who gave a wonderful talk about the energy problems facing us, and how we can over come them. If we ever get teh media release paperwork straight, I'll post it online.
WTF.
Even at our current levels of inefficiency and wastefulness, all but an insignificant amount of potentially usable energy and resources is not harnessed. The infrastructure simply does not exist to use it.
Predictions about sustainability aside, if our demand currently remotely approached the limit of available resources (let alone outstripped it by half), the economy would completely collapse. If it affected raw materials or energy, industrial growth would stagnate, prices would skyrocket and consumer culture would be dead in its tracks, with governments putting a strategic stranglehold on their remaining resources, and blocking all exports. If "natural resources" refers to biomass or arable land, enormous agricultural subsidies would not be necessary to ensure a stable price floor on produce.
This kind of crap damages the credibility of the very real ecological dangers we are facing - oil spills, rampant pollution in nations with rapid industrial growth, and resulting climate change.
My only question is how many times does this sort of myth have to be debunked? It's getting really, really, old.
should be enough for anybody
Never mind that we constantly continue to find new resources, never mind that our technology continues to change and improve, nah its DOOM the freaking SKY is FALLING, mass extinction, whitey guilt, global colding, lack of DIVERSITY, we need one more planet. I agree with that last part - we need one more planet, because the amounts of STUPID, self righteous, pseudo intellectual, whiny douchebags who believe in wealth redistribution and entitlement has reached the limit. We need a second planet to export the STUPID.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
This is why I advocate letting nature do it.
Multiple drug resistant bacteria are shaping up to be the new black death. Since it isnt stopped by traditional treatments, not even the rich and powerful would be immune. Perfect choice.
Go mother nature.
(And if I happen to catch it, it wouldn't mean a whole lot anyway. I have already decided never to have children, so I'm an evolutionary dead end anyway.)
> Wouldn't unchecked growth create poverty, famine, disease, and other social problems?
Not necessarily. In a free economy, the more people the better. It's broken areas without rule of law, or too much as in the case of dictatorships, that have starvation problems.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
that "the fall of modern society and a return to agrarian, low power" lifestyles couldn't make you happier.
--
http://simplyshrug.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=63:the-overpopulation-myth&catid=31:general&Itemid=50
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Soothsaying Doomsday Futures is a favorite pastime of those with nothing better to do than scare the rest of us with their nonsense.
Conjecture is just imagination. Predicting the future is a challenging business for there are so many possible futures so anyone just giving one possible future is already debunking themselves as they've left out all the other possible futures that contradict the possible future they are soothsaying doomsday about.
"I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS." - Richard Feynman
The evil bastard in me tells me that this only INCREASES the efficiency of the population reduction, since it not only reduces the total number of generation 1 offspring, but exponentially reduces the number of potential generation 2 and latter offspring through reproductive scarcity.
It will cause you to reach your target population cap AHEAD of schedule, at which point you can cease the population control measures.
This is only a problem if you intend to leverage that large population in the intermediate timeframe (like china does--in very large factory cities.)
"According to the Living Planet Report, human demands on natural resources have doubled in under 50 years and are now outstripping what the Earth can provide by more than half"
Then how are we getting the resources? If I can provide 2 apples and the customer takes three where does the third one come from?
"The report said that wildlife in tropical countries is also under huge pressure, with populations of species falling by 60 per cent in three decades, the'Daily Mail reported."
60 percent? O' RLY? I don't think even the National Enquirer would buy that.
"And the report, from the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, said that British people are still consuming far more than the Earth can cope with."
Then how is the Earth coping?
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Affluence = population control
You're confusing cause and effect.
It doesn't require mandatory birth control measures (or enforced abortion laws, etc) to keep the population down.
No, but it does require that there is an appropriate cost to bearing children, borne by the parents.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
EVERY closed ecological system eventually burns itself out. We learned that in the 3rd or 4th grade, when looking at ant farms.
cjacobs001
"Nuclear power is proliferating, but even that will not compensate for increases in conventional pollution of cars and electrical generation"
And the fact that it's not renewable. Sure there's plenty uranium left, but the concentrations at which you will find it in rock is dropping considerably, because we go for the easiest to get stuff first.
"They will continue to lose their competitiveness to the US, South America, China"
Perhaps. The other option is that because we look after our people better, we don't need so many of them to remain competative. I mean you have to look at why our population's dropping: educated females are prefering to have careers rather than just spit out children. This means we can achieve a higher % of our population that's available for work.
"Just for a laugh, I suppose you would claim that Iraq was not a resource war?"
In 1914 when we (Britain) first went in, it was certainly about resources. The most recent time, saying it was about resources is a little harder to justify. We already had their resources, we made sure it was the only thing Sadam could trade with the rest of the world. We weren't profiting from those resources as much as if they were owned by private American companies, sure, but that's about money. There is also of course the major threat of Sadam switching his O4F account from US dollars to Euros, citing "I will not use the currency of my enemy". This was the biggest threat of all, as if other OPEC nations followed suit and switched to other currencies, the USD would be in big trouble. Currently, America has a monopoly on producing the currency required to buy oil, and this helps them run up massive debts. An example needed to be set, because if people around the world all started flushing their dollars in order to buy whatever other currency they needed for oil... the federal government couldn't last a week. So again, this is more about money than oil, although it's easier to see the involvement of oil and just yell "it's about oil", I don't think it really serves the truth well.
All that and of course, Israel really wanted the war, and we all know how massive their lobby powers are in the states (but I'll say no more on that subject cuz we all know how sensitive Americans are on the subject)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Technology has not progressed a whole lot this generation and its currently not moving at the exponential rate the population is.
Projections are limited (can't predict the future) and hindsight is easy to be smug about. If everybody was to live the American way, we ran out of earths long ago. If everybody lived the EU way, we'd be 3x over the limit.
You blow this off; thinking somehow new tech will save us-- we'll buy it and then TRASH it and newer tech will save the day... The cycle doesn't go on forever.
Its how you decide to measure things that impacts the results so much. You may not realize we are overpopulated already but a billion people in severe poverty around the world notice it (but may not understand why and just would like to be you... but there are only so many slots available at the top end... yeah yeah, we have enough to feed everybody but its a COST and distribution problem - give them all jobs... doing what? all the livable jobs are filled...)
Peak OIL: already hit it - if you think it amounts to output then you are grabbing the wrong stat. We can produce oil from shale at higher rates of output than ever before... if we wanted. The problem is that CHEAP to produce OIL has peaked and will never be any cheaper (barring the foolish trading games or government subsidies which only can go so far.)
Peak Copper - coming in a decade or two. Copper will still be around but it'll cost more-- recycling it costs more.
The system is designed around continual growth and there IS A LIMIT technology or not.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
happen: Cut down the population of the earth down to, say, 5-10% of the 6 billion people living today. Earth will be able to sustain human life for almost indefinately, in human terms at least. Nature and wildlife may even flourish again with population growth in check.
With population growth following an exponential line, the crash will happen sooner than later, as it does with ALL species on earth.. No, it most probably won't happen by our free choice.. War, famine, natural disasters is our heritage to our children, but hardly new events anyways. This has happened many times before. However, we DONT need to go down with a crash.
We don't NEED cars, holidays abroad, junk food, and lots of other stuff that destroys the environment. Yeah, now it's kinda cool, but we've lost our heritage, we're like orphans, rootless and directionless.
We don't sing, unless in a drunken stupor in a bad karaoke bar.
We don't dance, unless high on some kind of drug.
We don't relax, unless passified in front of the stare-box serving propaganda and lies.
I could go on and on. All of this are just "common" sense facts, but as long as we're immersed in life as it is now, we are unable to see how much better our lives would be without artificial foods, unnecessary junk gadgets and non-challenging lives.
Our best bet would be to start improving our lives now, and it might make it more interesting as well, instead of watching the 10.000th movie, with a plot similar to 100 other movies you've seen.
The rest of the post is left as an exercise to the sincere reader.
Changes will happen, with or without us..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Actually, we might theoretically colonize Venus using structures that float high up in the Venusian atmosphere.
Since we'd be living in sealed units, we probably wouldn't give a damn about pollution, either... so we'd play even less nicely with Venus that we have with Earth.
In some ways, Venus is a more attractive colonization target than Mars.
Wrong...education = population control.
Erm, who are "they"?
Maybe there is some more magical thinking going on here, right in this forum?
I've trouble reading your posts for all those strawmens falling out of it..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The writer ignores technological innovation at his (and the readers) peril.
Malthusianism: scaring the shit out of ignorant do-gooders for more than two centuries now.
You don't deal with many non-profits do you? Even middle-management at many non-profits earn a very healthy income, easily on par with anything the corporate world offers. From the perspective of employees these non-profits are for-profit entities.
That said, some of those executives you describe are directly responsible for the existence of non-profits. The money has to come from somewhere.
Perhaps you should ask the Chinese how wonderful 'population control' has been? ... Now they have a rapidly aging population with about 50,000,000 more men than women.
Dude, I don't need to ask them their opinion to know what a wonderful means of population control they have. Men can't get pregnant. Just a little FYI for ya there. :-)
C//
1) It was not flamebait, but with emphasis on USA's resource consumption
2) My comment does not specify methods of death, so no war is quite needed to reduce the American population (for minimal impact, you can argue that a single knife can be passed around the US population, each person kills someone and hands the knife to another person, costing a total of $1.)
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
So the health of the Earth is in a tailspin and we've still got people/corporations that continue to large-scale strip whatever they can get their hands on.
Tar sands of Alberta, Canada will eventually be the size of Florida, USA. Besides the completely destroyed wildlife habitat, millions (yes, really) of birds will die in the toxic tailing ponds and billions of gallons of pristine glacier water will be made toxic. This when thousands of species are endangered and millions of people don't have safe drinking water.
Shark finning for the Chinese market have caused over 90% of the world shark population to disappear.
What issues are you aware of?
but I need two earths now.
Al Gore was already a very rich man long before Climate Change got so big.
The world is going to end in 2012! Who really cares about a year that won't exist! Any-way, I thought we still had Mars... /sarcasm/
Quote:
copper—which is everywhere around you—will be gone in about 61 years;
antimony—widely used in medicines—will be depleted in 20 years;
while indium, rhodium, platinum, or silver—which are present in many essential consumer electronics—won't last much longer.
And those estimations are only valid if we manage to consume half of what we are consuming now.
http://gizmodo.com/5219598/how-long-will-our-world-last-yes-we-are-screwed
But not to worry that was 4 years ago, before the GFC. Surely the future is so much rosier now.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Ya know, I hear this all the time, yet I have never heard of any sort of viable actual real alternative for the people living in these areas. They need jobs, any sort of income. Old growth is that, old, needs to be harvested, but oh noes, can't use any exotic old growth jungle hardwoods because....people with jobs in the developed nations say so. Can't have more farmland because...no idea, people need to eat, it has to be grown. Ya, maybe it isn't the best land, but *it is the land they have*, it is what they have to use. They have no other choices. They burn their woods down because they aren't allowed to sell the timber in the first place! Of course they would rather sell it, but it is "embargoed" and such like. They have to do something, so the woods there, the old growth forests, "accidentally" burns down instead of being harvested and used to build good furniture and lumber for homes, etc. So then they grow cattle and corn and soybeans for cattle, because they need "exports", usually to pay off rich as snot western bankers/IMF folks
Catch 22 squared.
This is what I hear as an option for hundreds of millions of very poor people, they will all exist on "eco tourism", because they shouldn't be allowed to do anything else, like logging, farming, mining, etc. "eco tourism" is supposed to support hundreds of millions of the poorest people on the planet. Everything else is bad for the environment, and is unsustainable, so they should just suck it up and sit under the dripping trees all day for a living.
They pull this crap in the western US every sumer, can't log, can't build roads, but it is OK to let all that resource burn up in massive millions of acres of forest fires instead. Same people cause that, misguided eco nazis who don't really understand nature and economics, they just can't see how much harm THEY cause by insisting on looney tunes policies guaranteed to keep poor people poor, and guaranteed to WASTE resources.
How quaint. Wait, how do those eco tourists get there to go visit the pristine old ready to croak trees? Oh ya, fly there in smog spewing jets...how double quaint. Then they go home and sit in air conditioned offices and luxury homes and urban apartments and pontificate about how all those poor people need to "stop destroying their environment". They can't even see that where they live and how they live is about as un-natural as it gets and about as energy intensive and resource exploiting as it gets, yet they dis and dump on the poorest for trying to make an honest living *somehow*.
The Sierra club had a huge internal struggle between people who wanted to limit immigration for environmental reasons and those who thought it was outside the scope of the organization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Club#Population_control_and_immigration
The Simon-Ehrlich wager is required reading for anyone making or reading about such claims.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Ever heard the parable of the talents? Here's a quick refresher:
A master gives three of his servants some money when he goes to leave on a business trip for a long time, telling them that he will be back someday. One of them gets 10 talents (a talent is a unit of currency roughly equivalent to the earnings a normal person would make in a lifetime), one gets 3 talents, and the last gets 1 talent. They each go and do their own thing, completely clueless to when he'll get back. Years later, the master comes back, and the first two servants have managed to double what their master originally gave them and are rewarded accordingly for being good stewards. The last one simply buried the talent, then dug it up and handed it to the master. He was scolded and then cast out for what he had done.
I think that just about covers it...
So, yes, this place is temporary, but we've been entrusted with it and have been told to be good stewards of the things we're entrusted with. Just because the end of the world will come one day doesn't mean that we're off the hook for what we do in the meantime, otherwise a whole lot of things (e.g. sin, good works, etc.) would be completely meaningless.
The key phrase in tfa looks like "absorb the carbon dioxide they emit." How many earths will be needed if we shift to a low/no carbon economy? Have they factored in any allowance for increased efficiency? It'd it be nice to see some breakdown of the analysis, not just a bald number.
I don't think they discourage birth control, what they discourage are unnatural methods, including abortion because of respect to life. While I don't completely share that point of view, it's different to what you're saying, to me their point of view is pretty simple: Sex carries its consequences, if you're up for them, then go for it. If not, try to be more "naturally" careful.
Give me a break. the issue that the "organic food" folk are concerning about is farm animals being pumped full of antibiotics because they're crammed into confined places in which their walking on, breathing in, and ingesting fecal matter and the remains of other dead animals. This has nothing to do with "vibrations", "auras", or any such bull that you pulled out of your ass, and the fact that you have to lie about the viewpoint that you oppose speaks volumes.
"We're doomed!" Ever since, it has been true for each of us. As they say, "nobody gets out alive."
Can anyone tell me what that is in Libraries of Congress?
Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, Saul of Tarsus, and any extant Cargo Cult all predicted doom within our lifetime. Never happened. Oh! We're running out of oil! (If you believe oil is made of dead dinosaurs, I suppose so. But what if, ==just== what if oil is not from dead dinosaurs? What if it's from the formation of the earth? Oh! we're running out of food! Umm, we haven't. All this doomsday stuff is just like any number of millenial cults claiming we're all going to die. Conserve resources? You bet! But let's not be stupid about this. It's much more likely an ice age is goug to get us than global, er, umm, "climate disruptionn."
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Somebody call Starbuck and get some Hendrix records, we'll have this thing solved by dinner.
You don't deal with many non-profits do you? Even middle-management at many non-profits earn a very healthy income, easily on par with anything the corporate world offers.
Let's see, the CEO of the WWF (the authors of the report) earns a whopping $465,427. Now have a look at this list of CEO compensation by industry type. Can you see any under $1,000,000? How many over $10,000,000? They are certainly not on par with the WWF salaries.
That said, some of those executives you describe are directly responsible for the existence of non-profits. The money has to come from somewhere.
No, not the ones we are talking about. Do you really think that the mining industries are funding the climate advocate groups? No, I don't think so. Sure they have their own industry groups and think-tanks, but none of those could be called "tree huggers".
I don't have a problem with the notion of birth control. Use it myself on a regular basis. I just have a problem with the people that think it should be state mandated. If freedom and self-determination are to mean anything the Government can't regulate our reproductive choices.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It reminds me of when the three CEOs [go.com] of the car industry all took private planes to lobby Washington for a taxpayer handout.
So it would have made more sense for the people that have huge companies to run to waste their time driving there or flying commercial? I loved seeing politicians that regularly fly on private jets (whether it's POTUS on AF1 or Congress-critters that fly on lobbyist jets or military flights) condemning others for doing the same.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It was not flamebait, but with emphasis on USA's resource consumption
Which really isn't that much more obnoxious than the EU or Japan, particularly from the perspective of someone living in the third world. Why didn't you include the EU in your list of places where the people should all die?
(for minimal impact, you can argue that a single knife can be passed around the US population, each person kills someone and hands the knife to another person, costing a total of $1.)
That'll last until you come across someone with a gun. We have a lot of guns in the US ya know ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It seems to me that modern society has a fascination with 'end of the world' scenarios. Whether they be zombie apocalypse, meteor strike or climate change, there seems to be some inherent human comprehension that the planet is overpopulated.
Perhaps this is driven by our biological desire to kill off the competition (literally), or perhaps it is that we have a real internal comprehension that there are too many people on the planet.
Interestingly, our fascination is with a massive reduction in world population due to some external factor. This is very typical of a natural human tendency to avoid taking responsibility. 'Wouldn't it be nice if a meteor came and wiped out 90% of the population? Then, I wouldn't have to do it. And of course, I'd be one of the survivors...'
What concerns me is that human-controlled population growth is very unpopular. Which I find fascinating when there are so many attractive opportunities. Imagine the elimination of every genetic disease and human abnormality. Reduce pre-disposition to alcohol addiction, violent crime, Polio, MS... perhaps even nail some nasty diseases like Herpes. Whilst I don't believe in the Aryan ideals, I fully expect to be labelled as such. One more way in which we are refusing to accept responsibility.
[citation needed]
WAR!!!
Then that would mean that the USA is only working for the greater good!!! By depleting the population of the world of foriegn religious stupid people and replacing it with fewer of our own, we are truly doing something good, noble and worthwhile for the planet... I feel goosebumps!!!
For the same reason that pointing out that a study was funded by an oil corporation gets modded up?
You may find it interesting that in the most recent Federal election in Australia both major parties suddenly, and somewhat unexpectedly, adopted a "small Australia" policy. Both had pushed "infinitely large Australia" previously at the behest of their friends in big business.
Although this new position has the advantage of allowing some pandering to racists/bigots by limiting immigration (a big issue in Australia), I personally also believe it reflects a growing public view that we have plenty of people and a nice amount of space, resources, etc and would be crazy to sacrifice that in exchange for a few large companies making a bit more money via population-driven growth in GDP.
Read Pynchon.
Indeed - get the masses to the point where they don't think 'have a shitload of kids because that's just what you do.'
Read Pynchon.
http://www.vhemt.org
Read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97jan/borlaug/borlaug.htm
Thanks to people like Norman Borlaugh, developing countries like India have actually slowed down the rate of green cover destruction. In the last 60 years, India went from a "basket case" to a net exporter of food, with an increase of just 1% of its farming area.
Short answer, stop worrying! Really!
A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions
In fact, "growth" has become something of a religion itself. In public discourse and political debate, no one ever talks about stability; the need to "grow the economy" is taken as a "given", a commandment from on high. If a company's sales are merely stable from one quarter or year to the next, they are considered unsuccessful (or would be if the economy as a whole weren't currently shrinking).
For roughly the last 200 years, the economy has been growing exponentially (along with several other factors like population and computer speed during different periods). If a company's sales are merely stable for a period, then they are shrinking exponentially in comparison to the economy as a whole. It means that the company is losing relevance and customers are spending less and less of their incomes on the company's products (presumably because they are spending it on competing products). Nations with zero economic growth are similarly passed up by other economically growing nations, losing their relevance and strategic position. In this kind of environment it is unsurprising that stagnation is viewed as backwards.
In an overall stable system though, growth is unusual and exciting while stability is the norm. I'm sure people would get used to it quickly. After all, if a businessman or politician knows they can't deliver on growth, why would they hold themselves or others up to that lofty standard? It would make them look bad to say "growth" and deliver stagnation.
There will come a day when that trend stops, whether it's in 2030 or probably much later. The only question is whether we'll bring population growth to a "controlled landing" or to a crash.
How far can we grow without losing it all back when it stops is a very important question, perhaps even more relevant than whether the transition will be rough. Will our growth stop today? or will it end with us building a Dyson sphere and settling down into a cozy virtual world of our own design? or maybe somewhere in-between? If we still have a long way to grow, then we'd best not put the brakes on now.
We should procure another planet.
A witty
Thanks to people like Norman Borlaugh, developing countries like India have actually slowed down the rate of green cover destruction. In the last 60 years, India went from a "basket case" to a net exporter of food, with an increase of just 1% of its farming area.
Short answer, stop worrying! Really!
I'm not worrying. Just pointing out the obvious, that continued significant population growth, which only seems to happen in the poorly developed parts of the world, will eventually lead to problems like die-offs. For example, it's already happening in Africa with the AIDS epidemic (which is by itself significantly curtailing fertility and birth rates in parts of Africa). Population growth didn't directly lead to the problem, but poor infrastructure, which IMHO correlates with population growth, kept the epidemic from being controlled.
so wait. does this mean that we're just going to be out of oil in 20 years? who cares? we have electric cars, and we have solar and wind farms! its not like we "NEEEEED" an entire new earth!!! plus the likelihood of us finding a suitable world for us within 20 years is isn't looking very good. much less constructing transportation to ship necessary oil-gathering equipment there!! it would take a lot longer then 20 years!!! by the time it gets to the new earth. we'll already have adapted to what we have! so i think that option is a no-go. imo
A somewhat sweeping statement. Most Christian denominations worldwide take a fairly "modern" view on contraception. And you have to wonder about the influence of the Vatiican when highly Catholic Italy has a catastophically low birth rate.
Atheism has only had about a century in which to wield political power, but it has caught up fast on the genocide front.
Virtually serving coffee
If you really believe that you are delusional. In most emerging economies you're getting 5-10% year on year growth. Thats real growth. In the US what is it this year? 1.5%? Same in most of Europe. The only way these countries will grow as consumer based societies is to make more consumers, and that will mean greater immigration. This is also why many predict that in 20 years most people will be speaking Spanish and Mexican in the US. It all comes down to demographics.
We have just under an unlimited amount of resources on Earth.
Oil is just a fraction of all the resources we have. Coal is just a fraction of all the resources we have.
We could invest in proper nuclear reactors, with minimal waste. We could invest more in fusion reactors. Fuck, why even care about such complicated ways of extracting energy, when we could invest in the likes of solar power, tidal power, wave power, and wind power. Most fuel based power (I cant come up with a better word), like coal, oil, and nuclear, is messy and expensive.
The oil companies are starting to see the problem. I promise, the oil companies (the same companies that rule the world) are going to get the same retard safety net that all the banks got, and i don't think we will recover this time.
In the end, it's all about energy, and thats is something we have plenty of.
Who wants to design some open source/open schematics alternative generators?
One thing that people do not think about is how bad policies should not be supported. In the long run, this means that people will die due to shortages, and perhaps the rest of the world should let this happen.
Look at China, and I mean seriously look at China. The levels of pollution are getting so high, I predict there will be mass deaths due to how bad the air quality is, if that has not already started happening. If the rest of the world does not help, the population in China will go down over time, reducing the demand for resources. I am not saying it is a good thing, but the Chinese government is pushing for production at all costs, and at some point, all that pollution will end up killing their population off.
There have been starving children in Ethiopia for decades....and if people would stop helping over there, the population would drop, there would be fewer children, and things there would balance out, rather than having people reproducing when they can't even feed themselves.
If there are food shortages to the point of starvation, do you really think that the rest of the world will jump in to help if they are also having problems with food production? Most countries already are taking the attitude that they can not help in the event of a natural disaster, and the USA is the only country that has been taking on additional debt just to help other countries when they have a problem. When the USA stops bailing out the rest of the world, then we will see things balance out a bit when it comes to supply and demand. This may sound cold, but honestly, if people are predicting that there will not be enough food to feed everyone in only 20 years, then we SHOULD let those who have no hope of feeding themselves just die out NOW, since an increasing population of people who can't help themselves is the problem.
Oil and such is an issue that the USA is dealing with by looking for other ways to generate power, and if oil were to suddenly become unavailable, do you honestly think that any other country would help US? Helping friends is one thing, but just trying to "save the world", is hurting the world more than helping. Getting people past a natural disaster is only useful if the people getting help NOW will be able to take care of themselves. But, we should not save people from themselves, because that just isn't a viable long-term solution. If the Chinese government wants to kill off the population of China with pollution, let them! If after 40 years Ethiopia can't provide enough food to feed the population, then isn't it time to let the population there SHRINK to the point where they can feed themselves?
One has a financial interest (the businessman), the other has a political interest (the Climate Scientist - especially if he's a post-normal scientist) and his employers (most likely an academic institution) have a financial interest. It's likely that the scientist will be involved in consultancy, so he will actually have a financial interest tangentially too. Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. The minerals still exist it's called recycling.
Never happen. Long before we need the resources of two earths, the population will start dying off in huge numbers as they starve to death. Its a self-limiting system.
We always had plenty of food growing up on the farm, therefore every resource is overabundant.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I see. We should blindly accept everything from sources YOU like or that support your views while blindly rejecting everything from sources you DON'T like or don't support your views. Yes, very reasonable there.
No, I don't think so.
There is this thing called critical thinking, maybe you should try it some time.
Then in 2031 we'll need 4 Earths... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&p=6A1FD147A45EF50D&index=1&feature=BF
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
"If we still have a long way to grow, then we'd best not put the brakes on now."
Why not? What would be bad about halting population growth before it was essential to do so?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
umm I get 3 sodas for tomorrow and 30 by the end of the month.
Is the asteroid belts worth?
Pretty sure we produce enough corn in the US to feed all of us. We may have to resort to peasant diets, but I don't think the world is doomed. Not to mention, once the fish are gone from the sea someone will try to farm them. Its a sad sad thing, but the only way to fix it is to stop breeding, which people seem to not want to do.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
In my region (southern Quebec), I can see one easy solution that would limit population growth in a hurry. CUT SOCIAL ASSISTANCE! I know a lot of people who are under 30 and have 4-5 children, and are still going at it like there is no tomorrow. why? because they are on social assistance, and the more children they have, the more the government gives them. 1 single person on welfare can hardly survive, but a couple, with 3 children have a decent income, better than a lot of working couples with no kids. One single mother, with 5 kids, that I know actually has a better income than I do, and does nothing. sure, she watches the kids, but they are in daycare during the day so she can shop, and whatever, and her mother watches them in the evenings so she can go out. I work to pay my bills, support my parents, and barly have enough to get by!
Instead of the 1960s steel desk & chair, particle board & plastic took those over & we went on.
We will do with scarcity until someone gets rich with a solution. Someone recently found a dirt-cheap replacement 90% of our use for Platinum. Fluorescent lights skirted the extreme Tungsten scarcity so well that most people didn't even know. Future articles should list unsolved problems so sharp minds can get started.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
It's a good thing that the Singularity is near.
Even if something existed as close as the moon but with the resources of the earth, it wouldn't help.
I don't know the latest figures, but I'd guess you could march the human population of the earth into the sea 10 abreast for ever and the population would still grow due to births outnumbering deaths.
So you can't lift those people off the planet, and bringing stuff back will only help for a while (if at all, it's not really practical to run up and down the gravity well with any significant amount of stuff.
Essentially without cutting births down to about .001% of their current rate, we're kinda screwed--and I don't see that happening voluntarily.
Funny how people come up with observations like this but are so reluctant to follow them to their clear, obvious conclusion (or believe that conclusion when it's presented to them). Humans are funny.
... most major religions discourage birth control (and especially abortion) because it blocks the production of life - something they esteem to hold in the highest regard ...
You refer to 'major', and later, 'organized' religions. Which is to say 'religions with an agenda'. Over the centuries, religions have learned what works for the success of the organization. Early on they discovered that it is easier to replicate devotees than convert outsiders. Those without blinders understand this motivation for the perpetuation of the organization and the rewards for insiders.
It is also true that the roots of these religions are from a rural society without the benefit of Social Security or other retirement plans. Population explosion was less of a problem and replicants were the retirement plan.
Those with blinders will assume that the organizations' continued pressure for them to replicate is somehow for their own benefit.
...omphaloskepsis often...
You're right that the executive's time was worth more than the cost of flying a private jet to the Washington show trial they were extorted into attending. That said, they were remarkably careless not to think that their failure to car pool to D.C. would be a leftist publicity bonanza
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Just don't let our new Earth have too many Windows made by Bill Gates. We will have bugs everywhere!
The people of "this" earth cannot even take care of it, yet, it is said that we need another one? Continuous wars, hatred, racism, greed, a throw away society, and all you can say is, "May I have some more?"
I say, emphatically, no!
You, and I mean all of you, having trashed the land, air, seas, the future, deserve what you have. Lie in the bed you made.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Don't bother to find another planet, earth men. In the 2012, we will reset yours.
Lucky for us there is a large Moon nearby. It has a lot of resources.
As a geologist I once knew had on his bumper, "EARTH FIRST! we'll mine the rest of the planets later."
Meanwhile, a little judicious recycling will be helpful. So will more nuclear power plants. Solar, wind and Hydro all have too many environmental impacts.
If the US has problems with building Nukes, we can always buy them from the French!
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
having 5 or more kids is TOTALLY acceptable.
Privacy is terrorism.
Looking back on it now, I kinda messed up with the quote I picked. I meant general growth (economic, scientific, technological, etc.) not necessarily population growth. Why would we want to stop additional growth in these areas if we can hold onto our gains? Don't we want a bigger pie for when we eventually become more stable? That will mean there's more to divide up.
Some more population growth might even make sense in the context of expanding throughout the solar system or to largely uninhabited areas of the Earth or into newly minted virtual worlds, as we might not be able to fully utilize these resources with our current population, but beyond a certain point population growth means fewer resources per person and/or higher levels of inequality. The only advantages of population growth go to those people who don't exist yet. Since we exist already, we can be selfish and decide that all those other people don't need to exist so we can keep the extra resources to ourselves. It might not even be all that selfish if bringing them into the world would make their lives not worth living.
Also, at least for now we need to keep on reproducing. As long as people grow old and frail then if a nation (or the whole world) falls below the replacement rate, then it will mean there will not be enough young people to care for the old people and eventually we'll grow weak and vanish. Even for stability you need an average of a little over 2 children per female.
Hey, thanks for replying. I know when the trolls come out to play that I must be doing something right! I'm afraid that most of my friends are outside the tech community, so I don't have anyone to call on to mod me up. I can give you some tips on how to get modded up.
People respect you more if they can put a name to your posts.
Don't just post general claims like "global warming is wrong". Make a specific claim. If that claim gets refuted, then you may need to adjust your ideas. If you keep posting the same claims after being shown that they are wrong, then it is you who are peddling the propaganda.
The reason my post was modded up, when the grandparent that made the opposite claim to me wasn't, was that I posted evidence of my position. Once again, if your sources are shown to be posting unfounded propaganda, then you should find some new sources to quote. Don't just limit yourself to like-minded websites. You really should look at what the other side says. You never know, some of it may make sense.
You say I read a little history because it is repeating itself. You should read up on the politically motivated backlash against the scientific community on smoking, passive smoking, vaccinations, asbestos and evolution. The strategies that we see today against climate change are carbon copies of what we saw in the past on those other topics.
Your argument, attempting as it does to attribute motive, is entirely bogus.
Really? Let's have a look at that. You have to construct an elaborate scenario to show climate scientist have an ulterior motive. The climate scientist has a political interest? How many scientists do you see in politics?
The academic institutions have a financial interest? I know people who are researching ethnicity in the arts, which is not going to earn their institution wads of cash. So why is it that when it comes to climate science that the great universities of the world suddenly are assumed to be greedy? They study the climate because they study everything.
Finally, you guess that the scientists have a consultancy to give them a scientific motive. How many scientists do you know who have a consultancy. Exactly who is paying them, and is it based on them coming up with a particular answer in their work? Doesn't it seem quite likely that they might also get a consultancy with someone else if they disputed the majority view? For example, Ian Plimer is a geologist who disputes climate change. He is on the board of three mining companies, as well as being associated with right-wing think tanks.
Now let's see how hard is it to claim a motive for the businessman. He has one job, to make money for his shareholders. If his company is forced to stop polluting the world (or even limit selling their product in the case of mining companies) then the company stand to lose millions, if not billions of dollars. There is no ambiguity there with the financial motive to wanting to sweep climate change under the carpet. I don't have to guess at extensive scenarios to explain away the motives of the businessman.
It seems quite bizarre how you can make up a twisted web of intrigue to show a financial motive for climate scientists and then claim that it is entirely bogus to attribute motive to somehow who has a direct financial relationship to keeping the status quo.
If the entire population of the planet today enjoyed the wealth & prosperity that we enjoy in the USA, Europe & other rich countries, it would require the resources of 2.3 Earths.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.