A smarty pants scientist makes an easy anaology about our planet - And now I am scared.

his analogy stinks, because the test tube food is finite...a better analogy to link a test tube to earth would be to have an earth that only grew one crop of food, then stopped while the population kept growing....by the way, I get his drift on the over-population, but again, the analogy stinks

Mamatus:

It is time to pack up and head for a new world and give this one a chance to heal.

Along with finding your hope admirable, I thank you for the video. However, it is important to realise (and I think you already do and know), that in technological terms, our species is no where advanced enough to 'pack up and head for a new world'. We are a long long way off in being able to do that.

We can just about put a small group of people into the immediate space environment of our planet, but even if we did have the technological capability for long haul interstellar travel, 99.9% of our species will remain and die on this planet. This human virus that we are is going no where else to infect.

As a species we have to grow up. We have to find a way through our cultural differences in order that we can come together to work together to give ourselves and other life forms a chance to sustain. We have got to bring a halt to our rapacious greed for natural resources., and find a respect for the earth's bio-environment which we rely on for our survival.

There is absolutely no doubt we are rushing headlong towards our own demise, and that prospect is growing exponentially with each passing year. It's as if we already know the 'end is nigh' and that not only have we accepted it, but we are progressively speeding it up, and simply partying until the end finally and irrevocably arrives.

I guess we are the next best planetary candidate for self-extinction, because we don't have the 'will' to do what is right. So addicted are we to our present inequitable lifestyles that regardless of all the dire warnings, we are simply not going to check ourselves. We will and are going to rush headlong into an abyss of our own making.

It's very depressing, but where are the signs that we are taking heed of the warnings? They are none existent.

Hmmm... maybe those fellas that erected the Georgia Guidestones weren't so 'sinister', after all.

Maybe, they knew exactly wtf they were talking about.

Maybe.

S&F

reply to post by WhiteAlice


The drop in birth rates in the 70's was likely due to Roe v. Wade.

I completely disagree with the bulk of what this guy is saying...
1. In Vitro Meat promises to reduce world food consumption by close to 40% (since that is the amount currently fed to animals).
2. Nearly two thirds of the earth are sea, this represents new potential farmland with the right kinds of bio-harvesting.
3. Then (excluding further improvements in agriculture) we science has the potential to create synthetic food. Using Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors (which are different to Moderated Reactors) it is potentially possible to destroy more nuclear waste than is created. Whilst fusion is another potential alternative.
4. In ALL the (per capita) wealthy populations couples are having less than two children on average. The only reason why the European-American-Canadian populations continue to grow is because of immigration from poorer countries. Therefore as world wealth grows people will have less children.
5. Eventually (within several decades) so much of the world will be having a great time talking to smarter than human artificial intelligence, and so much of it will be choosing to voluntarily spending it's time in heavenly world akin to benign version of The Matrix, that most people will not bother having (real) children, and then world population will enter a period of terminal decline.

There's more reasons (like all such Doomsayer's -weather scientist or not, being consistently proven wrong for the last 250 years). However that's as much as I'll write for a back of the page post.

reply to post by maddy21


I disagree purely on the basis that, as a species, we have spent most of our history working without formalized education. It doesn't take a degree of any sort to know that another mouth to feed is another mouth to feed. We're talking about survival instincts that would kick in during periods of stress. In fact, fecundity has been found to be directly impacted by external stresses from lowered sex drive at the minimum to outright infertility in the extreme. www.webmd.com...

Furthermore, to say that the only way that TFR works is through education is also a complete misunderstanding of what TFR is. It's not a way of being--it is a statistical measure of actual fertility, a mere calculation that is used to estimate the total fertility rate at replacement based on averages of existing numbers for a given population.

reply to post by Mamatus


That news story is regrettable but I guess expected. My thoughts on the subject of soil depletion are based on having been a biology and botany dual major and examining the precise things that companies like Monsanto are creating as well as the changing climatology. Saddens me to know that my educated guess may very well be true.

reply to post by Mamatus


Fukushima is real, Eugenics and Population Control is Bollocks. David Suzuki spent the last two years with his thumb up his arse downplaying Fukushima, it wasn't until his white wash article in the Georgia Strait where he came under intense scruting and criticism for whitewashing Fukushima, that he retracted and admitted it was quite serious. He is on one hand very smart but on the other too smart for his own good. Ask yourself, what has he really achieved in his lifetime, albeit keeping people exactly where the establishment wants us to be. That being said I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but this guy is no Nikola Tesla.

this is scientific scaremongering.

a horrible analogy ment to suggest something that isnt

where is death in this analogy of his? or is this after we all become immortal?

when u realize that the "food" in his tube is equivilebt to the sun in our " real" worl and it just becomes all that much sillier

my 2 ¢

idiotic posts in here about how the entire population of the world could fit in Texas with room left over?

Idiotic with a capital EYE.

Capitalism is a system which can best be summarized as sprinting down a dead end, the wrong way.

I liken it to running down hill. Like running along the top of a ridge and slowly the trail begins to go down hill? Slowly your legs start going faster and faster until you are running at full tilt heading down the slope and there is no way on God's green earth that anyone's legs can keep up with it. The outcome can only be collapse and serious injury.

It is based on constant growth as it is utilized in the real world.

Even as a teenager as mentioned in my above reply, I could see that we were on a finite planet and that the limits imposed by its resources needed to be respected. In my early twenties when I came to understand that the economic system of capitalism was based, as you say on growth and with out growth it would succomb to its own momentum.

sell another one as soon as the older one breaks!

I love all the plastic stuff. Big strong sturdy stuff with one little gizmo made out of plastic which runs the damn thing, a hinge or a bolt or what ever. That little thing breaks that is only worth a half penny and the whole thing is junk.
How many of you here have the Latest and Greatest smartphone simply because your old one was...... dated? Looked down upon for not being New? It's called Artificial Obsolescence. Planned profit through rampant use of resources.

without drastic change our leaders fear to lead us towards for a better future!

As a junior in high school in 64 I read an article in the SF Chronicle. It was about the future and had been written by scientists at a think tank. (they were real then). It basically said here is where we are today and then in a graph, laid out 1964 at the bottom of the graph and then showed different paths we could take as a race, as a people, on the way to 2000 which was at the top of the graph. Across the top were possible futures ranging from a very nice utopian vision and on the other end was basically a fascist dictatorship with martial law. Basically a night mare.

So what this graph depicted was what was needed to be done to the current course of human development to arrive at any of the possible futures depicted on the 2000 row of the graph. To end up even close to a hopefully world wide democracy type of future, the changes that were needed were dramatic and immediate. Dramatic and immediate. To end up in the dystopian future all that was needed was to do nothing. Just let things run the course. Of the changes that needed to happen for the world I wanted to see, only a few have come about.

So, I feel sorry for those who are just now , like the op, waking up to our situation because I am afraid that the future that was fed on to feed the greed of the past is no longer the future, it is the present.

We have to also consider the possibility of a foreign bacteria/virus that comes to our planet. With all this ison debris, planet x talk, i can't help but wonder that the same scenario may happen to us(with a foreign organism). Now I only like to entertain this thought for fun, but i've noticed many reports around the world already of "flu" like symptoms.

Here is something i came across just recently, and it's saying that the cause of the "red rain" is an organism that doesn't use DNA to replicate. Now i don't know about you, but that sounds alien to me. What's more scary is that we don't know how adaptive or how quickly they evolve. How many reports have you read recently of entire rivers turning red?


Maybe just me, perhaps just doom porn, but i've believed for a while now that we're in the last 5 minutes as the OP's video mentioned.

reply to post by St0rD


Right on!

This guy is an idiot as far as I am concerned.

He didn't take into account things called variables.

Life is not grown in a sterilized vacuum sealed labratory.

reply to post by jaxnmarko


You see as I do. We are literally driving off a cliff and we are screaming: " Yessssss! I win!".

When that something (ie war, pestilence, famine, natural disaster) bites us in the arse. Discipline will be okay for some but not for others, and some will always want more then thy neighbour. How do you solve that problem? The problem of human nature? You know the one that old stories that make no sense say we have like greed, lust, pride, gluttony, envy, wrath, sloth. The same old stories explain that we will just stick up our noses at the past and with our eyes looking up we will walk right into the mouth of a dragon. Old wisdom that knows we have this dark side, with another side that is battling this "darkness" that makes us righteous in our choices when we know why we need to make these choices.

We absolutely must understand where, where we came from. How can you know where you are going if you don't know where you came from? Our past is the key to giving us the right frame of mind for imagining the future. Because,right now, we resonate with lies and lies damage us in the long run, it derails us, deceives us from truth of who we are. I feel like if we would clear up this whole confusion about our origin, created or not, it truly would lift a great weight off my chest.

For now I must have faith, in this absence of knowing, I will have faith.

TDawgRex
This guy is an idiot as far as I am concerned.

He didn't take into account things called variables.

Life is not grown in a sterilized vacuum sealed labratory.

exactly!. ever hear the term so smart your dumb lol

Strange, I was hoping to disagree with him, but he's got a good point. I mean india and china both have more people than all english speaking countries combine and they both want to experience a middle class lifestyle where the typical family owns a home, and a car and a has money and stuff. How on earth will that happen? The world can't sustain that apparently. Hopefully soon they'll be this massive economic break down. I'm kinda looking forward to that happening. I want to see a major world event happen that will be a game changer. It's bound to happen.

Yeah, I don't think we have a huge amount of time left

reply to post by spartacus699

Those countries are like canaries in the coal mine in a way.

They are like the world as a whole. Oligarchies with masses of subsistence level peasants. Observing these places "clinically" should reveal the dynamics of the general collapse. When India collapses completely with a mass die off, the rest of the world will really be on the clock.

My personal opinion. I don't think this is going to happen.

Having said that, a friend of mine knew someone who had travelled in China and when the person came back they said, "They eat everything that crawls on the ground except the trains and they eat everything that flies in the sky except the airplanes."

China has a one child per family policy which should generate negative population growth, and yet civil libertarians fight against this and chide China for its totalitarian methods. China is taking responsibility for a problem they created themselves. India is another situation where efforts at controlling population growth are going on but in a less direct and forthright manner.

The stats following come from wikipedia.org:

en.wikipedia.org...

China and India have 36% of the world's population. The US is the third most populous country but only has 4.45% of the world's population.

Singapore, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Mauritius, South Korea, Lebanon, Netherlands, Rwanda and Haiti are all more densely populated than China or India. Those are the most densely populated countries.

India, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and Sri Lanka are also all more densely populated than China.

A lot of countries are quarantined from one another. If they fall there will not be a domino like fall of all other countries. This is particularly true of places like China.

I agree with Suzuki that there has to be a limit to human population growth. What that limit is I am not sure. How that limit will be achieved, I don't know. Fukushima aside, Japan is already at or near population stasis.

Poor central government, as in China and India, leads to population growth because children become the default social security system. Rising standards of living, including modern social security benefits, mean a slow in growth of the population.

I agree with Suzuki that in the final analysis, you can't fight the mathematics, but I don't think we are near the final analysis yet. Will we get a mass die off in some densely populated enclave like the UK? Maybe. Will we muddle through to policies that bring population growth under control? I think so.

What Suzuki doesn't tell you is that the math works both ways. In a minute on his clock, a minute of exponential population decline, we suddenly have a lot more breathing space. Suddenly the germs, once again, have a lot to eat and look around themselves and can't even see a problem.

I would have more confidence in Dr. Suzuki if he laid all the cards on the table. Not doing so gives the appearance of an agenda of some sort, not a truth agenda.

reply to post by McGinty


Because of the one child edict from the government, China now has a whole generation of spoilt males, the girls were aborted, so now China is also exporting wife-less males to look for wives.

Mamatus
This I found just this morning. David Suzuki is an extremely respected scientist. This is a video from him.

With all that has been happening with Fukushima, fraking, the oceans and the life in them, I have come to realize that we are all pretty screwed. IMO Humanity is coming to it's end, maybe sooner than we expect. Could this be the push to colonize Mars? Are we seeking homes in a new test tube? Has humanity nearly run it's course on this planet?

I am posting these links as I think that the Oceans are the Key to life for humans. When we have no seafood left to feed the majority of the world things will disintegrate very quickly.

Whales behaving oddly
Govt fears Atlantic may be contaminated eventually

Toss in the Mass Starfish die off (saw this myself first hand in Bodega Bay last week) and folks, IMO the # has hit the fan. The worst thing of all? There is nothing anyone can do about it. It is time to pack up and head for a new world and give this one a chance to heal. Maybe someday we can come home.

edit on 22-12-2013 by Mamatus because: Gwammer and speeeeling

Dear OP
I would ask the question how can there be un resisted exponential growth
as resource scarcity increases? (It seems his model assumes a constant available resource pool.)
Limbo

who's going to do something about this? it sure wont be superman! most humans are to careless and greedy to stand up and take care of the planet. its so easy to talk about it, then get up off your butt and do something about it! i may not be one to talk. but, if someone was hanging from a cliff would you not do anything to save them? or would you talk about it first? sorry if i am talking out my butt i just get emotional on this subject!