Should the Planet be depopulated, page 3

If the world were to be depopulated, what would be the requirements people would have to meet in order to be allowed to survive?

Or, in the case of those advocating passive depopulation (in other words, the regulation of reproduction,) how would we go about chosing who is allowed to have children and who isn't?

A major problem with passive depopulation is that it's only socially feasible in developed nations. People in developing and underdeveloped countries simply cannot survive without having large numbers of children. Bare with me while I try to explain!

In developed countries, we have the ability to rely on our developed society to help us live within our means. When a person in a developed nation has a child, the raising of that child is delegated to schools, day cares, and so-on. When the child becomes an adult, they delegate the support of their lives to people whom they purchase things from, they often earn a living by being paid for their service to other people, and they rely on the government to keep them safe from the evils of the world. As that adult reaches old age, there is an extensive medical industry to care for them and the government uses taxes on the population to help support them once they can no longer support themselves.

Because developed countries offer an advanced society to support the people within it, children are not a necessity. Our children do not rely soley on their own families to raise them. Our adults do not rely soley on their own families to provide for them. Our elderly do not rely soley on their own families to care for them. They don't need to.

But the so-called Third World paints a different picture. The governments often struggle just to support themselves, let alone do anything for the population. Schools may exist, but often only teach the most basic knowledge. So who raises the children? Why, the child's families! The larger the family, the more people raising the child.

When that child becomes an adult, how do they make a living? They work to suit their own needs and provide for their own families. How do they get this work done? Maybe they do make some extra income from their work, but they can't just buy everything they need. Often their families must fill that demand. Once again, a large family is required to support itself. So multiple children are a requirement. It's not a consideration of population or even passing on one's genes - it's an issue of supporting oneself.

And if that adult lives into old age, there is no Social Security. There are no government pensions or retirement funds built up by decades of working for other people. The only people to care for them now are the children they had earlier, who are now adults. Once again, the more offspring they have, the better off they are.

If you attempted to regulate the reproduction of people in these societies, you will be murdering their people slowly and indirectly. China imposed laws regulationg the number of allowable children, and though they eventually began a steady rise, we could never even begin to calculate how many people died and suffered for that to happen.

The developed nations will fare quite well through this, however. I know of very few people here in the U.S., career welfare collectors aside, whose ability to survive would actually come into question if their number of children were limited. I imagine the situation is the same in other "First World" nations.

Meanwhile, natural resource consumption will hardly be affected. Like someone else said, the developed nations are the ones using up most of those resources. No problems would be solved at all for us, but massive new problems would come into play elsewhere.

Passive population control will only lead to one thing: Increasing the gap in living standards between the rich nations and the poor ones. Everything that is sickly unequal about our world today will be even worse. Clearly this is not the answer to anything.

Active population control opens up an even bigger can of worms. What happens if those being exterminated refuse to go quietly? A world wide civil war? Humanity would be set back centuries, not just in population but in development as well. Our species may survive, but in a stunted form of existance that we can currently prevent, if we try.

And who would go? Who would live? Do we chose by education? Intelligence? Appearance? Physical fitness? Genetic health? And of course, how do would you actively depopulate the world without triggering its total destruction?

The biggest problem is that the survivors would be those least deserving of the title. Those who commit the genocide and do the killing, ensuring that the human race survives but only as a race of violent, heartless barbarians; they would be the ones to carry on in humanity's name. No thank you.

It would be great if we had a population of half a billion or less. The thing is, we don't. We have a population of over six billion. The population is not the problem; the resources are. Eliminating the population will only delay the problem until the population rises again, or the resources run out anyways.

Instead, we must focus on sustainability for the current and future population of the Earth. We must find ways to recycle everything. Garbage, sewage, emissions, waste - all of it must be turned into something useful, somehow. We must find replacements for fossile fuels; not small-scale supplements, but replacements. We have to stop worrying about the boogeyman called "frankenfood" and use our science to make food sources more plentiful.

And once we've done that, we can't stop there. Eventually we'll still run out of room and resources. So we must find ways to live elsewhere. The only solution is expansion. Can we live in space? Under the ocean? Underground?

And once those options are exhausted, would be be advanced enough by then to live in colonies on the moon, or Mars? Some predict that a blimp-like colony could surive in the upper atmosphere of Venus... a hundred years from now, perhaps we could pull it off.

The bottom line is, the human race can go three ways. It can be destroyed completely by exhausting its own ability to survive. It can be shrunk, but at the expense of everything that's good in this world. Or, it can grow, and support that growth by expansion.

The real challenge isn't depopulating the world, it's uniting it to work towards its own survival.

[edit on 29-10-2007 by mattifikation]