Exclusivity...

[Plasma Snake[D]]

Say we somehow learned that this planet has a maximum limit of occupants(it does, its just that we like to think not), how would YOU dwindle the population down? Me I would develop a chemical to make people infertile and administer it to those that meet certain criteria. or eliminate the handicapped and the elderly. Or a war. you know, the only reason I say this is that I know you're thinking "this guy is a psycho loser" but tell me, why is it that nature does it then? is nature unfair, evil, and inconsiderate? no, no, no. Its just that space and resources are limited. Thoughts?

p.s. I really think the government is developing or has developed ways to control the population. Who knows? I dont

[tman_ndsu08]

Mother nature may already have built in population controls: AIDS, Cancer, etc?

[Sonart]

Quote by: tman Mother nature may already have built in population controls: AIDS, Cancer, etc?

LOL Yeah, and haven't they worked like a charm...


.

[ericsp23]

The only humane option is off-planet colonization.

[SteveA]

I believe we promote irresponsible reproduction by placing a lot of the costs of having children on society instead of the parents. Changing that wouldn't fix everything though but holding people accountable to live within their means would be an improvement. If overcrowding becomes more of an issue, the cost of living goes up and people will naturally have fewer children simply because it's more difficult to acquire the resources. Just assure parents know what the real costs are instead of making those who choose to have few or no children bear the costs of the decisions other make, that they have little control over anyway. In many developed countries, native populations actually decline in population with the real increases in population come from subsidized immigration. So it seems as though developed countries themselves seem to auto regulate population levels (again, this is done simply by the markets determining how scarce/expensive the resources are to raise a child and people deciding whether or not it's worth the investment).

Also, oftentimes people ignore the fact that technology can improve the ability for life to exist (yes, it can also be destructive as most any tool can). Look at some of the cities we have now and the improvements to agriculture. I'm not anxious to see an overcrowded world and enjoy some green scenary but we aren't limited to solely what nature provided. We can create more. Truly there almost unlimited sources of energy and it wouldn't be impossible to even live underground and grow food there if we had to. It would take a lot of large investments to make that possible and the incentives would only exist if enough people found it desirable. We have a lot of arid areas in the world that support little life and we can purify seawater or use greenhouses in areas to grow food if we had to. It's all a matter of whether or not people feel the need to make those investments. The cost of living for people has gone up and in heavily populated areas, the birth rates do tend to drop ... all without the need for central planning as well.

Ultimately though, I agree with the above post, that we need to eventually move outside the Earth. Having all your eggs in a single basket isn't a great idea.

[gallo]

Quote by: ericsp23 The only humane option is off-planet colonization.

You can't be serious.

[Critter]

Quote by: gallo You can't be serious.

Why not?

I don't think it's right to determine for ourselves who lives and who dies, and by what method, who can have how many kids, or force human beings to submit to an involuntary sterilization procedure to control the population.

If the Earth DOES reach its limit on population, then colonizing other planets (or underground cities, as someone else suggested) would be the best option IMO.

[gallo]

Quote by: Critter Why not?

How many people per day do you think would have to be shot off into space just to keep the population the same size? Look into it and get back to us.

[SteveA]

Quote by: gallo How many people per day do you think would have to be shot off into space just to keep the population the same size? Look into it and get back to us.

I think (s)he's just saying that it needs to be an object of attention. If we expect the population to grow, at some point it's likely that growth will need to occur outside Earth (either that or we've got a lot of likely impossible engineering challenges in store).

I do agree that instead of people trying to sterilize others (honestly this view seems warped to me), they should simply expect others to bear the costs/burdens of having their own children and simply have a society that protects individual interests.

Look at it this way, if the Earth is like a spaceship with a limited supply of oxygen (not a good analogy though but it'll serve the point), if everyone initially sets out on a journey with X cubic feet per day of available oxygen, if some people on this ship decide to have children, their children aren't automatically entitled to a share of the X cubic feet per day someone else has, or this can lead to problems where people are dying of oxygen deprivation. So the point is that everyone on the ship should be free to have children if they wanted - but it's also their responsibility to assure the children have adequate resources to survive. If the parents need more oxygen, they can offer something in exchange to others for a right to some of their air, or alternately, maybe the parents can discover a way to create enough additional air to support their children, or build a second ship from a few asteroids at hand etc.

The above is better than forced sterilization () in that it doesn't require forceful intervention into the lives of others and still deals with assuring people have enough resources to survive. Now on Earth we can't easily isolate the effects of water or air pollution by simply closing an airlock, but the underlying principle of ownership should still be viewed the same way, IMO, and greater reproductive responsibility should be encouraged (a.k.a. plan on taking care of any children you have yourself - this one area socialism and communism often fail to pay attention to - China even had to make laws restricting childbirths because of this exact issue).

[tman_ndsu08]

Quote by: Sonart LOL Yeah, and haven't they worked like a charm... .

And you haven't considered that maybe these effects don't work until we reach a much higher population? Like maybe 15 billion?

[SoccerfreakAB2]

Quote by: Sonart LOL Yeah, and haven't they worked like a charm... .

That graph, although correct, is still a little misleading. The line does not exponentialize upward forever, but instead curls back around and slopes more gently and not nearly so steeply. Unless maybe we find the cure to a disease, or solve some other disaster for our world, the slope will become more diagnal and straight and not so exponential.

[Critter]

Quote by: SteveA I think (s)he's just saying that it needs to be an object of attention. If we expect the population to grow, at some point it's likely that growth will need to occur outside Earth (either that or we've got a lot of likely impossible engineering challenges in store).

Bingo. Thanks.

Quote by: SteveA I do agree that instead of people trying to sterilize others (honestly this view seems warped to me), they should simply expect others to bear the costs/burdens of having their own children and simply have a society that protects individual interests. Look at it this way, if the Earth is like a spaceship with a limited supply of oxygen (not a good analogy though but it'll serve the point), if everyone initially sets out on a journey with X cubic feet per day of available oxygen, if some people on this ship decide to have children, their children aren't automatically entitled to a share of the X cubic feet per day someone else has, or this can lead to problems where people are dying of oxygen deprivation. So the point is that everyone on the ship should be free to have children if they wanted - but it's also their responsibility to assure the children have adequate resources to survive. If the parents need more oxygen, they can offer something in exchange to others for a right to some of their air, or alternately, maybe the parents can discover a way to create enough additional air to support their children, or build a second ship from a few asteroids at hand etc. The above is better than forced sterilization () in that it doesn't require forceful intervention into the lives of others and still deals with assuring people have enough resources to survive. Now on Earth we can't easily isolate the effects of water or air pollution by simply closing an airlock, but the underlying principle of ownership should still be viewed the same way, IMO, and greater reproductive responsibility should be encouraged (a.k.a. plan on taking care of any children you have yourself - this one area socialism and communism often fail to pay attention to - China even had to make laws restricting childbirths because of this exact issue).

Well said.

[SteveA]

Though I believe population growth, of necessity, is self-limiting that doesn't mean we won't see an increase in the ability of people to support more lives than we currently do. But there are real physical limits that even the best technology couldn't seem to avoid, though I don't think we're near those limits yet. I wouldn't be surprised if a couple thousand years from now we didn't see 10 times the current population or even more (assuming we didn't self-destruct by then ).

And for the doomsday prophets, of which I occasionally sing in harmony with, there's one thing slightly reassuring and that's that life on Earth seems almost impossible to become extinct. We have organisms that live miles underground and live on simply chemicals underground. I'd also heard that they took air samples in a high altitude balloon, and no matter how high they went, they still found life in the atmosphere. We have many areas of the planet that look like a desert that couldn't possibly support life, but after it rains, somehow things flourish in a short period of time. So whether or not life is a cure or a cancer, it doesn't matter because it made a foothold and I don't think it'll be going anywhere in the forseeable future. (Likely some meteors that have hit the Earth have ejected material into space that will probably seed life on a distant planet someday).

But anyway, yet I agree we've got a lot of people though and it appears that it's going to get more crowded. It's not the ideal IMO but I'm certain most the people that will be living in the possibly crowded future will learn to deal with it and not be unhappy they at least had a chance to live also. (Of course we need to assure we have an environment that still supports this in the future but I don't think we're even working that hard yet to maintain it and if things became tougher, we'd just see more people working to preserve or add more natural wealth to the environment. I'm not against conservation, in moderation, but there's a tradeoff and possible abuses of the ideas - like forced sterilization - that people need to recognize).

[Sonart]

Quote by: soccerfreak That graph, although correct, is still a little misleading. The line does not exponentialize upward forever, but instead curls back around and slopes more gently and not nearly so steeply.

You mean in theory...






...but as of right now, however, population remains on the hyperbolic express.





.

[Jack]

...but as of right now, however, population remains on the hyperbolic express.

For the record, I have had no part in this growth. All you breeders...STOP IT right this minute or I'm telling...

[gallo]

Quote by: SteveA I think (s)he's just saying that it needs to be an object of attention.

That's well and good. It is certainly a subject that needs attention. Until now we have been able to continue to increase the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing crops, reducing pests, putting marginal land into production, etc. Not to be a doomsayer or anything, but it won't be too long and the earth will reach its carrying capacity. Unless we can plan on an endemic of some sort to kill off a significant portion of the population. Could the next avian flu be our salvation?

Quote by: SteveA If we expect the population to grow, at some point it's likely that growth will need to occur outside Earth (either that or we've got a lot of likely impossible engineering challenges in store).

Let's do some back of the envelope arithmetic. Estimates of population growth in the next 50 years from some of the sites already referenced are right around 3 billion. Just assume that that increase will be spread out evenly - I know that's not true. The increase in the later years will be more than in the early years. But this is just to get an average. That means that the population will grow by 60 million every year, or 164,383 people every day. Perhaps I'm just a pessimist, but I just can't imagine building enough rockets to send enough people off to colonies in space to make a difference. I realize that population growth is an increasing problem, but imagining that you can send enough people off into space to shift population growth outside the earth just isn't realistic.

[Jack]

As long as we keep having wars, we'll always have at least one avenue for decreasing the population.

[Sonart]

Quote by: Isherwood For the record, I have had no part in this growth. All you breeders...STOP IT right this minute or I'm telling...

I couldn't help it, I tell ya... it was my evolutionary instincts... yeah, that's it!

.

[Jack]

Yeah, I know.
"What caused the defendant to have sex with that young woman?"
"Your Honor, it's in my jeans...err, ah, genes."

[SteveA]

Quote by: gallo That's well and good. It is certainly a subject that needs attention. Until now we have been able to continue to increase the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing crops, reducing pests, putting marginal land into production, etc. Not to be a doomsayer or anything, but it won't be too long and the earth will reach its carrying capacity. Unless we can plan on an endemic of some sort to kill off a significant portion of the population. Could the next avian flu be our salvation? Let's do some back of the envelope arithmetic. Estimates of population growth in the next 50 years from some of the sites already referenced are right around 3 billion. Just assume that that increase will be spread out evenly - I know that's not true. The increase in the later years will be more than in the early years. But this is just to get an average. That means that the population will grow by 60 million every year, or 164,383 people every day. Perhaps I'm just a pessimist, but I just can't imagine building enough rockets to send enough people off to colonies in space to make a difference. I realize that population growth is an increasing problem, but imagining that you can send enough people off into space to shift population growth outside the earth just isn't realistic.

Use an elevator!

The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality
http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._020327-1.html

(Here's a clip from the article regarding the current construction of carbon nanotubes)

"Stronger than steel

The hurdle to date, Edwards said, has been the commercial fabrication of carbon nanotubes. Both U.S. and Japanese firms, among others, are ramping up production of carbon nanotubes, with tons of this now exotic matter soon to be available. "That quantity of material is going to be around well before five years time. It's not going to take long," he said.

Given the far stronger-than-steel ribbon of carbon nanotubes, a space elevator could be up within a decade. "There's no real serious stumbling block to this," Edwards explained.

"The making of carbon nanotubes is moving very quick," said Hayam Benaroya, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers in Piscataway, New Jersey. "We're moving from the scientific stage of just developing them to actual commercial entities producing them in ton-like quantities," he said.

"Perhaps within our lifetimes we might actually see real designs of skyhooks and space tethers, these kinds of things. They may be feasible at reasonable cost," Benaroya said."

It'll be a while before we have the technology to colonize other planets, and modernistic technologies always seem to take longer to materialize than expected but I have a feeling once we've done it a few times we could eventually see the growth of commercial businesses around it.

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Humans still only occupy a small percent of the surface of the earth and we've demonstrated a (perverse? ) ability to be able to pack people into 40+ story skyscrapers.

Energy isn't even truly an issue despite concerns over oil, long term energy prices are clamped on the high side by atomic sources and France has been using atomic energy fine.

The primary issues then are food which requires some sort of ecosystem. The real question is whethe or not, for example, food could be grown using artificial sources of light underground and from of the pot raids, it appears this is possible though could that be done in a totally enclosed environment? For example, could humans live in an underground biodome?

I know that sounds rather funky but consider what life could be like with a large increase in the population and what challenges people would face. Likely people would spend more time working in agriculture and possibly energy (though likely less). What percent of the population is currently devoted to agricultural work? Not a lot and yet America still grows enough food that we can inexpensively acquire diabetes and whenever I drive to Las Vegas it becomes obvious how much land is out there that noone is utilizing to grow anything. It wouldn't be impossible to enclose areas in a greenhouse and use solar powered condensors to extract moisture from the atmosphere and recycle it to grow food if people were desparate enough but they aren't. And of course if these were difficult to construct and laborous to maintain, people would simply find it difficult to provide for children and would have fewer (assuming we didn't have a system that placed these cost involuntarily onto others) so I don't see the doomsday predictions as unavoidable or even likely unless it's a matter of unnecessarly destructive actions like war, or possible epidemics or natural catastrophes, but given a peaceful and safe environment I don't see any reason why we couldn't support at least 10 times the current population in the future.