OK, I started this thread to ask all members what they would do/say/etc. if that Genocidal tinpot Hitler fan Pianka came close to where you lived to give a lecture on his crazy "wipe the world with ebola to reduce the population" "ideas". Now, here's what I really wish I could do: anybody know those old cartoons where Sylvester thinks he's about to get tweety and a giant anvil falls on him? Now, picture me on a plane holding something of equal weight, up above his brainwashed neonazi audience........ you get the picture.

Sorry, but this belongs into BTS or PTS Slugfest

In any case I wouldnt suggest Mr Pianka had a malicious motive for his speech. If you couple the science of usual natural self-decimating process by illnesses with an ivory tower mentality, you are likely to come up with a speech like his´.

Also, since I havent seen a complete recapture of his speech I wont pass judgement and I still give him the benefit of the doubt, since some said he advocated this kind of mass death and others say his statements are taken out of context.

[edit on 29/4/2006 by Lonestar24]

Nakash,

THE WORLD'S NUMBER ONE PROBLEM IS OVERPOPULATION.

The simplest answer to denying a madman's fantasies is to investigate what element of them has truth. And finding a workaround.

There usually is a method to the madness you know.

Some say that, by 2100, this planet will have a population of 10 billion people. When it can only really support 1-2 and would be 'almost comfortable' with 550 million. The kinds of things we will need to do to our environment and the genetics and lifestyle choices that will derive therefrom just to sustain that population base will be horrific in and of themselves. And likely irreversible.

If that is a _bad thing_ in your view, then the immediate answer is to double the standard of living in the poorest places as rapidly as possible while stabilizing whatever subsistence lifestyle they maintain as direct bribery 'between generations' on mandatory birth control. This occuring in every place where a high birthrate exists in an environment of high environmental risk (low support fraction per square nm and/or increased vulnerability to climatologic variables).

If you control your own nature (frustration and lack of opportunity breeds, literally) you don't leave it to nature to 'solve the problem for you'. Otherwise, you get what you deserve, whether the resulting disaster is man made or consequential to natural meltdown.

The REAL RISK is that a mega plague will happen /anyway/ and with today's population density spread, what begins in the poorest nations will migrate to the cities where the majority of those able to deal with the problem will be most-subject to mass killoff.

Imagine a world in which no one was able to sustain a high-tech society because the (nuclear and chemical) engineers, the stockbrokers, the doctors and TEACHERS are all /dead/.

If we suffered a truly wide scale pandemic which broached faster than we could isolate and epidemiologically plot the vectors on, we would have HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dead. Every football stadium packed to the brim with corpses would not begin to account for all the bodies. Inviting further associated 4-Horsemen perils. (Fire, War, Pestilence/Famine, Cultural Death). As a cascade effect AFTER the initial losses.

It would destroy humanity as a function of a societal lifestyle which is too specialist and not generalist enough to survive and too isolated without mechanical transport to create new breeding populations, even in a pristine aftermath where game and safe water were available (which is just next to impossible.).

THE WORLD'S NUMBER ONE PROBLEM IS OVERPOPULATION.

Not in what it does as a social organism feeding on itself. Nor in a direct vulnerability to outside threats inherent to doing so. But in the aftermath of it's own interdependency.


KPl.

Well everything i have read indicates that 'overpopulation' is just another lie to make people feel guilty about doing what humans are supposed to as basic function of being here. Countries like the USA/Japan shows( at least IMO) that culture and education( to name those which foreign powers can least affect imo ) are massively more restrictive in creating general wealth for the citizens of that country than resources( in the ground), political ideology or population size.

I think that with the technology available today the planet could probably sustain populations of a few hundred billion without the planet suffering adverse consequences. The factors that restricts current societies from reaching these levels of wealth and general health is entirely political and due to the restrictions implemented by those who currently , and have for centuries( if not millenia) , wield power and or control energy and scientific resources.

Anyways i would be most interested to hear why you have come to believe that too many people ( are human intelligence not in fact the ultimate resource and thus something worth 'producing' , even en masse?) are the problem and not in fact the solution. So feel free to expound as your opinions have so far always served to enlighten me.

Stellar




[edit on 29-4-2006 by StellarX]