Why depopulation is an idiots dream.

I keep running into posts that purport human depopulation is the best and in some cases the only option for our future. Words build bridges into unexplored regions, and depopulation is not a place we want to explore at all. If we were to keep the human population low then we are actively repressing our full potential and maybe even dooming ourselves to extinction. The fact is, If we could sustain populations in the trillions then it’s definitely the right move for the human race. A world with trillions of people is most likely impossible, but we can dream.

Envision a planet wide city. Consider the technology and external resources it would take to maintain the populous. This would mean calamity for lots and lots of species, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles ya know.

Certainly it would be a struggle to achieve this hefty goal, but struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle. Right now, we might as well be in the stone age. A massive population demands we adapt/evolve. It really is the only hope the human race has for survival, as it may be the only path that will lead us to the stars.


"Necessity is the mother of all invention!"


Try as we might the notion of humans hurting planet Earth is entirely fictional. Consider that 98% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct, and consider the worlds past calamities, well at least those we are aware of. There are many events in Earth’s history that make the entire history of human impact seem trivial. I know lots of attention has been paid to global warming and C02, but you need to consider that there have been single events that released more C02 in an instant than humans have in all of history. Life is so very robust that we mere humans could never extinguish it. Just as forest fire makes room for new life, so extinction open the door to diversity, new life etc.

It's manifest destiny!





[edit on 31-5-2009 by Donkey_Dean]

reply to post by Donkey_Dean


Great points, but do we need yet more starving people? This planet's resources have been taken by the greedy, thereby condemning a huge proportion of the population to die of starvation.

Until we overthrow the corrupted people who are ruling this planet, we have no hope.

Originally posted by spellbound
reply to post by Donkey_Dean

 

Great points, but do we need yet more starving people? This planet's resources have been taken by the greedy, thereby condemning a huge proportion of the population to die of starvation.

Until we overthrow the corrupted people who are ruling this planet, we have no hope.

Like I said we are still in the stone age.

Flag and star , I couldn't agree more with your post OP. Would like to see others opinions and where this thread goes.

~Renarism

[edit on 31-5-2009 by Renarism]

[edit on 31-5-2009 by Renarism]

I'm against over population but I don't advocate trimming the number of humans by any radical means (except family planning? )

That said it's okay if people like to keep popping babies by the bagful as long as they live in traditional ways where they have no way of damaging the ecosystem. Indeed, poverty to all is the answer.

Populations increases, especially exponential ones create problems faster then they can be dealt with, and not all problems can be solved with technology.

Believing that a planet that is a giant city is the route to go is pure insanity. I doubt I would not want to live there.


I think a smaller more efficient population would be better equipped to overcome obstacles in our way simply because there would be less people to fret over. We could focus on problems and ideas at hand instead of making more problems for ourselves.

You're basically saying that we should create problems for ourselves so we have a reason to drive progress.

I say we have the will to drive progress without being irresponsibly huge, and creating obstacles for ourselves.

To call it an idiots dream is completely off base, I bet you'd find that many of the worlds most brilliant minds would advocate a smaller population. There's not an advantage to growing it's just an argument made by people who selfishly have to be able to crank out as many kids as they want because they feel its their "right." Everybody knows that.

reply to post by spellbound

Until we overthrow the corrupted people who are ruling this planet, we have no hope.

It's funny people always wanna blame someone or something else for the problems we all face But who are these corrupted people...I mean who cares, what can they do, they don't own you, and if the system is that sickening we could all just stand up and say, enough. Oh wait, we can't, people are too preoccupied with raising there kids to ever do that. Maybe if more people didn't have to worry about raising kids and making ends meet then we could take on these so called corrupters. I think it's the people that are corrupted...not just the elite.

Just had to post this link to a breaking news thread....

it's definitely related tot he topic at hand, dealing with overpopulation.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I couldn't agree less with the OP opinion, I'm tired of posts that assume we all live in some utopia.
The fact is the best and brightest only have one or two children per family normally its the dumb, worthless workshy that have 5,6,7 etc thus in the next 20yrs we will see that the useless jobsworths will be in the majority and the good people of society will be overrun.
I will concede that if we lived in a fair society, depopulation would be a terrible thing BUT we don't there are alot of wastes of dna out there, using up resources that could have been saved up for the future.

reply to post by liquidsmoke206


They are the world leaders, and they own you.
So, any ideas?

Great Idea! I vote for you to be the new world dictator, so when the natural cycle finally catches up to us, the few thousand humans who survived, have you to thank.

All sarcasm aside, The United States doesn't horde the food and water resources like some schoolyard bully. These countries have every opportunity to develop their own, but unfortunately in exchange for money or weapons, the country lets the U.S. or U.N. interfere with the local politics and end up making the situation either stagnant or even worse, sometimes even exploiting the local resources.

Get rid of the greedy, corrupt leaders of the poor countries and refusing to interfere in the local politics will end up with current borders being abolished and tribes being recreated. What we have now in most of Africa is about as close to a situation we can get with a group of Neanderthals and expecting them to quickly adapt to our culture. We have to let these people develop at their own pace, or you get extremely violent confrontations between 'highly advanced' tribes killing each other like in Sudan right now, along with the countless civil wars. Unfortunately, we've become so ingrained in the situation over there, if we pull out, international hatred toward us would be ten-fold what it is now. Not including all the human rights activists presumably trying to burn the white house to the ground.

Back to topic though, the only way "trillions" of humans could survive is if we set up large colonies across a couple dozen planets, which isn't exactly in NASA's short term goals list. And as a side note... how exactly is life supposed to adapt to an environment so completely different than the one it and it's thousand years of descendants lived in? Tree Frogs wouldn't adapt very well from the humid tropics to an industrialized city full of 100 story skyscrapers.

I too think star traveling is the next step for humanity though this situation is not the ideal scenario for it.

reply to post by spellbound


any ideas? yeah....
stop worrying so much about world leaders owning you. I'm up late in the stellar city of seattle, eating cereal and surfin ats...what should I be doing that these world leaders are keeping me from? I do whatever i want.


Much less likely that world leaders trap people, more likely that people trap themselves with kids, responsibilities, codependant relationships. Guarantee you'd only see more of the type of things you are worried about with bigger populations. goods would have to be rationed out, etc....it would be one giant repressed system, probably something in the way of communism.

reply to post by liquidsmoke206


Hi in Seattle,

Yeah, why worry about the world, right?

reply to post by spellbound


this thread is about depopulation not the global elite.

Depopulation, which i am an advocate of because.....I'm worried about the world.

Suppose there is an elite that rules everything. Dont you think if overpopulation didn't directly kill us all off that the elite would to keep us from reaching that point?

They are probably already talking about ways to do it...check this thread for info on there recent top secret meeting about....population control...

wanna save the world? Stop having kids...or at least stop with just 1.

Originally posted by pointtech86
Great Idea! I vote for you to be the new world dictator, so when the natural cycle finally catches up to us, the few thousand humans who survived, have you to thank.

All sarcasm aside, The United States doesn't horde the food and water resources like some schoolyard bully. These countries have every opportunity to develop their own, but unfortunately in exchange for money or weapons, the country lets the U.S. or U.N. interfere with the local politics and end up making the situation either stagnant or even worse, sometimes even exploiting the local resources.

Get rid of the greedy, corrupt leaders of the poor countries and refusing to interfere in the local politics will end up with current borders being abolished and tribes being recreated. What we have now in most of Africa is about as close to a situation we can get with a group of Neanderthals and expecting them to quickly adapt to our culture. We have to let these people develop at their own pace, or you get extremely violent confrontations between 'highly advanced' tribes killing each other like in Sudan right now, along with the countless civil wars. Unfortunately, we've become so ingrained in the situation over there, if we pull out, international hatred toward us would be ten-fold what it is now. Not including all the human rights activists presumably trying to burn the white house to the ground.

Back to topic though, the only way "trillions" of humans could survive is if we set up large colonies across a couple dozen planets, which isn't exactly in NASA's short term goals list. And as a side note... how exactly is life supposed to adapt to an environment so completely different than the one it and it's thousand years of descendants lived in? Tree Frogs wouldn't adapt very well from the humid tropics to an industrialized city full of 100 story skyscrapers.

I too think star traveling is the next step for humanity though this situation is not the ideal scenario for it.

To sacrifice humankinds future for the sake of a doomed environment is insanity friend. We must look beyond the current ecosystem to survive. We are speaking of vast time frames. In all of history there have never been a trillion people. The current ecosystem is crucial to our survival now, but cannot be in the future otherwise we will be bound to its fate. We must not only dominate but for lack of a better word own the means to our survival.

We are still trying to learn how to crawl when it comes to space travel. Sure we can send out probes, but humans are a different story. Had the trip to the moon not had the protection of the magnetosphere then no one would have survived the radiation for more than a few hours.

Also the last time I heard, the biosphere projects had failed miserably. I think this means growing food in a sealed environment is not feasible. We couldn’t put a human on most planets in our own solar system, and the closest stars are hundreds of light years away.

Why would we bother anyway?

Necessity would however pave the road to space.

[edit on 31-5-2009 by Donkey_Dean]

Originally posted by Badfuture
I couldn't agree less with the OP opinion, I'm tired of posts that assume we all live in some utopia.
The fact is the best and brightest only have one or two children per family normally its the dumb, worthless workshy that have 5,6,7 etc thus in the next 20yrs we will see that the useless jobsworths will be in the majority and the good people of society will be overrun.
I will concede that if we lived in a fair society, depopulation would be a terrible thing BUT we don't there are alot of wastes of dna out there, using up resources that could have been saved up for the future.

Just so it’s clear we are speaking of vast time scales. The cold hard fact is that humankind will likely be a short lived affair.

How would you imagine humankind surviving?

[edit on 31-5-2009 by Donkey_Dean]

I don't understand this point of reasoning. How can you say we need to overpopulate the Earth to drive our 'necessity' to get into space? What, because sending scraped together parts to a hypothetical diagram that hasn't been tested, to a set of coordinates that might be wrong might be right, to a theorized planet exactly like ours is the best way to preserve humanity? .

This isn't a well-thought out plan for the survival of Humans. We need to at least somewhat protect our environment for the time being since, as you said, our manned missions to space are at best flailing like an infant.

What you're preaching is insanity. Destroying our only survivable environment, we know of, for some minuscule chance that it would drive inventions and hopefully quickly get as many people off the planet as possible, would be hair-brained at best. What about the next planet? Same deal?

What I'm interpreting from what you said is that somehow we would sustain ourselves fully on industrial everything. Eventually the substances you need to keep so many billion fed and hydrated, would dry up fast, and because we are lowly humans, we have to abide by certain laws of physics, such as the infamous to some, law of conservation of energy, which means you'll eventually run out of usable energy, therefore quickly killing off every living thing on the planet.

Originally posted by pointtech86
I don't understand this point of reasoning. How can you say we need to overpopulate the Earth to drive our 'necessity' to get into space? What, because sending scraped together parts to a hypothetical diagram that hasn't been tested, to a set of coordinates that might be wrong might be right, to a theorized planet exactly like ours is the best way to preserve humanity?

.

This isn't a well-thought out plan for the survival of Humans. We need to at least somewhat protect our environment for the time being since, as you said, our manned missions to space are at best flailing like an infant.

What you're preaching is insanity. Destroying our only survivable environment, we know of, for some minuscule chance that it would drive inventions and hopefully quickly get as many people off the planet as possible, would be hair-brained at best. What about the next planet? Same deal?

What I'm interpreting from what you said is that somehow we would sustain ourselves fully on industrial everything. Eventually the substances you need to keep so many billion fed and hydrated, would dry up fast, and because we are lowly humans, we have to abide by certain laws of physics, such as the infamous to some, law of conservation of energy, which means you'll eventually run out of usable energy, therefore quickly killing off every living thing on the planet.

We are speaking of vast time frames. A trillion people is no small task, all the people who have ever lived don’t even come close.

There are so many variables to reaching a goal like this that I wouldn’t even begin to think upon them as it would be impossible to consider all in a single life time.

This all assumes we can overcome those things which stand in our way. I have heard that Helium 3 is perfect for fusion and the moon is full of the stuff, or collectors can be made to harvest it from the solar winds.

We are already doomed by the way. It’s in the post, 98% of all species that have ever existed are extinct.

We are in it for the species, and leaving us dependant on a doomed ecosystem is suicide.

In your imagining how will the human race survive?



[edit on 31-5-2009 by Donkey_Dean]

How do I imagine humankind surviving?
To be honest, I don't.
These ideas that we as a planet, a species will colonise other planets and spread out into the universe is unrealistic at best. The planet is running out of fossil fuels 2032 I believe was the date. If we haven't come up with a reliable new energy source by then the modern world will go backwards very quickly thus removing any space exploration.
Shell, monsanto, rothchild to name a few have made sure greed keeps us stuck in the present, they spend trilions derailing any research of new energy.
This will ultimately rob us all, of any hope.

Flagged. People assume our technology will remain the same as it is today when it should slap them in the face by now that things are and will turn out just fine. Depop doesn't matter, and in fact would hurt things MORE.