At 3/10/11 01:17 PM, SolInvictus wrote: so you don't have much interest in possible social collapse

My reasoning is that I will have practically no way of saving anybody but myself anyway, so I might as well do that. Nobody is going to bother listening, and even if they do, they wouldn't do anything, and even if they wanted to do something they couldn't reach a consensus in time.

as one should be able to deal with it on an individual level.

Well, obviously the vast majority of people wouldn't be able to deal with it.

yet you have no means of acting individually (or is it that you would rather not divulge the fact your a bunkered-in multi-millionnaire? [smart move])

Even if I were the richest man alive my words would not really change things dramatically. But if I were rich, I could possibly accommodate a few others (or maybe a few hundred others) if I really wanted to. In fact, if I had the means (or the obsession) I would even draw up plans to rebuild society from the ground-up, as well as stockpile the means to do so.

Of course, if I were building a bunker I wouldn't let anybody know about it -- common sense.

but still feel that going along for the ride is the best solution.

It's the only real option you have unless you're willing to save your money up and build a bunker or something.

At 3/11/11 01:42 AM, joe9320 wrote: The reason why it is called a "problem" is because we are using the planet at an unsustainable rate, you pillock.

Who's we?

Bangladesh, a small country in South Asia (look at a map) has over a 100 million people living in appalling conditions, and it is COMPLETELY CROWDED.

Sucks to be them then.

Also, it is called a "problem" because we are causing a mass extinction

And how is this a bad thing, exactly?

We are losing the Amazon rainforest, Australia is being hit by hurricanes and floods, and we have desertification in Africa!

I don't live in any of these places.

We are even farming crops to make gasoline!

That's a useful technology after society collapses. I would imagine conventional oil would be in short supply in such a scenario.

That's taking food away from mouths of humans and animals and livestock

Again, I'm not any of those.

What a heartless fuck. I don't want civilization to end.

I don't want civilization to end either. I just don't want to try doing anything about it because I know I can't.

Cause 6 billion people to die immediately and/or have people leaving for countryside to farm and destroy the environment even worse?

First of all, most of those people will probably starve -- the only farming after the collapse will be subsistence at best, with some pockets of civilization here and there. If you had a bunker wherein you stockpiled guns, ammo, and information, you could take over and create a decent little fiefdom for yourself.

At 3/11/11 01:42 AM, joe9320 wrote: The reason why it is called a "problem" is because we are using the planet at an unsustainable rate, you pillock. Bangladesh, a small country in South Asia (look at a map) has over a 100 million people living in appalling conditions, and it is COMPLETELY CROWDED. How would you feel if I put you with 100 million others in one small space?

Why do we have even the slightest jot of obligation to help these people? Why do "we" need to fix anything?

Why don't you blame the people who are responsible: the Bangladeshis.

At 1/28/11 03:50 PM, frigi wrote: There will be a time, probably in our lifetimes, when overpopulation and lack of resources to sustain the population will become an issue.

It's already beginning right now, particularly in the poorer countries of the world, {i.e Bangladesh, Indonesia, etc.} Not to mention, China and India's population are growing like weeds every year.

Colonizing Mars would take a long time and the resources would have to come from Earth. Terraforming Mars also would take a long time, plus we do not yet know how to nor do we have the technology to do it yet, plus the cost to do it would be astronomical.

That would be about colonizing another planet, not really about solving the overpopulation problem.

We are dependent on resources that are limited. Fossil fuels, coal, and nuclear are the 3 main resources for power that runs our world. There is only a limited amount of fossil fuels and coal in the world.

Considering the fact that oil is due to run out in about 50 years and coal in about 150 years or so, you better believe that powerful nations like America and China are going to stock up on nonrenewable resources if and when they get their chance.

What needs to be done is to heavily invest on renewable resources to a point where they can be as affordable as gas was before the oil crisis of the 70s. The thing is, however is that renewable energies as of right now are too expensive to make in a mass scale, which requires governments to heavily invest in these technologies to offset most of the cost.

We need to start thinking about creating a world where even 10 billion people is not a problem.

Therein lies a huge problem, even with massive renewable energy sources available, the overpopulation of certain places are going to create a disaster waiting to happen, most notably in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and parts of Africa, where they live in sub-standard living, and disease, natural disasters and war are going to create the potential for a mass casualty event in those regions.

We need to start really working on utilizing abundant resources like water, the sun, or even wind. We already use it, but it is only a fraction of the power that we use. Most of the power we use is from fossil fuels or coal.

Agreed, read my previous post about oil and coal running out.

However, if we keep on the road we are now, we will not survive. We will be fighting wars for resources. America and China will be the big 2 that are fighting each other. It will be world war 3.
The chances of our species surviving is not good if we keep doing what we are doing.

I don't know about that, but there would be a lot of tension between America, Europe and China if we don't do something about our energy means now. China wouldn't dare try to attack America anytime soon, even if it is for resources, and vice versa., but that doesn't mean some heated words are going to be tossed around at each other from time to time.

I hate how people say "we need to focus on solar, wind, etc... for energy" as if it is a matter of opinion or something. The technical fact that any professor will tell you is that even if you covered an area the size of New Jersey with windmills or solar panels you still would not generate enough energy to supply the population of the United States (and that is assuming the population holds at what it is now). Truth is, these methods simply do NOT generate enough energy to meet demand. Not even close. That is why we don't pursue them.

I do agree with the OP though, there needs to be something done regarding the overpopulation that is happening on our world. This is my solution:

1) Scientists need to discover a means of "reversible sterilization". By this I mean people ought to be sterilized at birth, then unsterilized later on in life. At the very least, this would prevent unplanned pregnancies.

2) In order to become unsterilized, you must apply for a "birth license". The government would issue these on the basis of IQ scores, education, financial ability to raise children, etc... Since the government could control who has kids, and how many, they can regulate the population growth at a more stable level.

*bump*

I suppose I could have feigned an insightful response to disguise the fact that this is a shameless bump, but why lie? I suppose that is insightful enough in and of itself. In all seriousness though, this is a good topic and is worthy of further attention.

At 3/11/11 02:02 PM, Major-n0ob wrote: 2) In order to become unsterilized, you must apply for a "birth license". The government would issue these on the basis of IQ scores, education, financial ability to raise children, etc... Since the government could control who has kids, and how many, they can regulate the population growth at a more stable level.

Personally I would prefer a method where we would have crystals implated in us, then when we turn 21 they would turn black. Then we would be killed. After that we could we could use the dead to feed the living in a process I like to call "Soylent Carousel".

At 3/11/11 07:08 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: Why do we have even the slightest jot of obligation to help these people? Why do "we" need to fix anything?

Oh look, someone who's got it right.

At 3/11/11 02:02 PM, Major-n0ob wrote: 2) In order to become unsterilized, you must apply for a "birth license". The government would issue these on the basis of IQ scores, education, financial ability to raise children, etc...

Yeah, because people would love for the government to tell them how smart, capable, and talented they are. Also, because more government control, especially over one's body, is a good thing. This sort of proposal would essentially tether everyone to the government, and to society as a whole considering that they wouldn't be able to reproduce outside of it.

In other words, it is a slavish proposal for a society of slaves.

Honestly, people, there is no problem. You're simply hallucinating it.

At 3/11/11 10:51 AM, orangebomb wrote: It's already beginning right now, particularly in the poorer countries of the world, {i.e Bangladesh, Indonesia, etc.} Not to mention, China and India's population are growing like weeds every year.

At last! I found someone who believed me about the current problems facing Earth today. With those solutions, we can be able to reverse the damage we did.

Actually, the population in India and the Philippines and certain African countries are growing so quickly. Eventually, India's population outstrips China.

You read National Geographic, by the way?

Tidal energy is where it's at. Bay of Fundy FTW.

Also, geothermal energy is 10 times cheaper than solar energy

"We'll need to produce 15,000KWH's to meet our yearly household electrical requirements. That's about 40KWH per day. Since an average of 4KWH/day is available we'll need a 10KW system to meet our yearly electrical requirements. The electricity produced by this 10KW system would have a value of about $4.00/day and require about twenty five 2 m2 panels that would occupy a surface area in excess of 600 square feet. An installed system like this could easily cost $100,000 at $10/watt. Incentive rebates could cut this cost in half, but even at a cost of $5/watt the payback period would be about 30years. If your good friends with an electrical contractor or if you do your own work you might be able to do a little better, but this is still a major investment for a product that has a live expectancy of 20 years. If the price per watt comes down to $1/watt or the price of electricity increases to $1/KWH I'm sure the ugly power lines that cut across our towns would soon be replaced by roofs decorated with PV panels." - www.jc-solarhouse.com

10 dollars a watt! Do you people REALLY think this is realistic? There are much better ways of harvesting energy than solar. Until the day we can harvest the sun itself I think we should focus on less expensive alternatives.

There are several obstacles here. Somewhere in some point there is a vocal minority who will stop contraceptives, deny climate change, or may not like wind farms.

At 3/14/11 12:54 PM, GoatBeak wrote: If people who had the power to do so, would fund sexual education in third world countries,

They do, but it doesn't really work. Condoms, however do. But fundie Christians were opposed to this and stopped them from being part of aid programs provided by the US, and spread all kind of nasty propoganda ie condoms help spread AIDS

At 3/20/11 06:10 PM, SadisticMonkey wrote:
They do, but it doesn't really work. Condoms, however do. But fundie Christians were opposed to this and stopped them from being part of aid programs provided by the US, and spread all kind of nasty propoganda ie condoms help spread AIDS

Refer to my post. Fundie Christians did the same thing in the Philippines, and as a consequence, we have 100 million people living in appalling conditions. Christians wanted to do this because of their message of "be poor and suffer like Jesus did".

At 1/28/11 03:50 PM, frigi wrote: By 2012 we will reach 7 billion.

well that doesn't matter we'll all be dead after that.

At 3/20/11 05:25 AM, joe9320 wrote: There are several obstacles here. Somewhere in some point there is a vocal minority who will stop contraceptives, deny climate change, or may not like wind farms.

if we're freaking out about life on earth at high population densities, whirling blades of doom all over the country-side are bad news for our flying friends.

they've started picking on bats now too.

At 4/2/11 02:55 AM, Tobsmth wrote:

At 1/28/11 03:50 PM, frigi wrote: By 2012 we will reach 7 billion.

well that doesn't matter we'll all be dead after that.

No we ain't. Stop worrying about this, we should worry about some flare that will knock out our electricity!

Oh, and also, we had reached 7 billion.

At 3/11/11 10:57 PM, Camarohusky wrote: Personally I would prefer a method where we would have crystals implated in us, then when we turn 21 they would turn black. Then we would be killed. After that we could we could use the dead to feed the living in a process I like to call "Soylent Carousel".

So:

Despite all the vitriol and hyperbole in this thread, it seems like there's a lot of angles still to be covered, and might be worth resurrecting.

I thought about overpopulation as an aspect of the argument tied to raising the minimum wage. It may seem disparate, but with most minimum wage jobs being in service-oriented fields, would a decrease in the need for those services (via a decrease in population) be a plausible means to a permanent increase in minimum wage (i.e. the value of general "unskilled" labor)?

[I think it should be raised anyway, but I'll save that for that thread.]

Here's where the thought-rabbit-hole begins. Almost every time I'm stuck in traffic or in some other undesirable situation caused by overcrowding, I jokingly say to myself something like "We need a new plague, already. Geez."

After having that notion roll around in your head long enough, you start to envision what the aftermath of something like that might look like. Following the conclusion and recovery from a hypothetical major worldwide pandemic that wiped out a fairly significant chunk of the populace (say, anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2), do you think that the overall standard of living would increase or decrease? Would employment be more ubiquitously available due to less numerical competition?

Admittedly, it's a somewhat fucked up stream of consciousness, but sometimes you can't help but wonder about the benefits that could arise from a catastrophic scenario. Thoughts?

At 1/28/11 03:50 PM, frigi wrote: There will be a time, probably in our lifetimes, when overpopulation and lack of resources to sustain the population will become an issue.

267 people are born ever minute and 108 people die every minuteSource

Colonizing Mars would take a long time and the resources would have to come from Earth. Terraforming Mars also would take a long time, plus we do not yet know how to nor do we have the technology to do it yet, plus the cost to do it would be astronomical.

True but it's also too cold there. And what about moving to different countries that have a low population?

By 2012 we will reach 7 billion.

That's actually 2011

At 8/2/15 11:18 PM, X-Gary-Gigax-X wrote: Did you notice how empty the earth is?

I don't think that open space is really the issue at heart when it comes to overpopulation. That's a pretty reductive view. I don't think it's hunger, either. Like someone else in said earlier in the thread, there already exists enough foodstores to "end" hunger, there's just no profit in it.
Don't you think it has more to do with the resources we consume in order to maintain what we see as an acceptable modern standard of living, with more and more people demanding it as time goes on? This also includes the residual effects of that inreasing demand. Doesn't any of that factor in?

At 8/2/15 11:18 PM, X-Gary-Gigax-X wrote: We have plenty of room

Room isnt neccesarily the issue. It's output of land v. the consumption of the population. Tokyo, Manhattan, and other cities are proof that we can safely cram many humans into small spaces without losing quality of life (don't get too subjective on me here). The issue is can the available land support the infrastructure (i.e. natural resources and agriculture) without eliminating nature. That's not to say nature needs to be left untouched, but doing what Brazil is doing to the Amazon should be avoided.

Overpopulation is overstated. The long run trend is actually looking like it's going to be underpopulation. When a society develops, children become more expensive and the payoff from them takes longer, thus there is less incentive to have them. Just look at modern society; it's increasingly becoming normal to not have children at all. When you look at past and modern industrializing societies you mostly see people having alot of children, which then go to work in factories to bring home more income. When you look at agricultural societies you see children working at farms, thus parents on both these societies have alot more children. In modern societies children are expensive and may take 2-3 decades to start paying back if they ever do. You need to pay for so much maintenance for each child which is astronomical relative to the previous societies and they aren't even guaranteed to pay off. Thus people have fewer children, especially with the introduction of birth control methods. This is why Europe, Japan and the native whites in America are declining in population; it's not attractive to have alot of children. Other countries are trying to follow in the steps of the West, and so their populations are booming for now but will slow down and start declining in time. In fact the world was growing at a rate of 2% in 1960, it has since halved to 1%.

At 8/3/15 12:47 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 8/2/15 11:18 PM, X-Gary-Gigax-X wrote: We have plenty of room

Room isnt neccesarily the issue. It's output of land v. the consumption of the population. Tokyo, Manhattan, and other cities are proof that we can safely cram many humans into small spaces without losing quality of life (don't get too subjective on me here). The issue is can the available land support the infrastructure (i.e. natural resources and agriculture) without eliminating nature. That's not to say nature needs to be left untouched, but doing what Brazil is doing to the Amazon should be avoided.

The reason there is alot of Deforestation and South and Central America is because they're creating more farmland. It's not logging companies going in and destroying whole forests to create paper, those companies get their paper from tree farms. So what they're doing is destroying the natural habitat to expand their resources. Now of course it doesn't appear to be sustainable since instead of using the same land by replenishing the soil, they're just going to new land. That's caused problems with native tribal people's who'd rather not be involved in modern society.

Of course this is the problem; in order to develop these countries have to make hard choices. This is a problem in Africa for example. Ethiopia is one of the major producers of Coffee in the world. This is a problem in a country where famine is a common occurrence. They could perhaps be better suited towards turning their coffee farms into wheat or soy or vegetables etc. that could be then used to feed their starving population. The problem is that they want to make money and coffee brings in alot of capital into the country which could then be used to buy the food these people need as well as develop the countries economy.

At 8/3/15 01:39 AM, Warforger wrote: Overpopulation is overstated. The long run trend is actually looking like it's going to be underpopulation.

I wonder how long that long run scenario might be? It's true that first-world birth rate trends skew negative, but I think the question is whether that will happen fast enough to counteract the massive surges in demanding populations to come. China is apparently about to have a supermassive middle class and will be demanding more oil for electricity and fuel than we've ever seen before. Add to that similar scenarios in India and the archepelago nations (Malaysia, Indonesdia, etc.) and the curbed resource consumption due to declining birth rates in current 1st world countries may pale in comparison.

Guess we'll just have to see how it pans out. Definitely an interesting time to be alive.

I know it will be an evil within argument to spell here, but war is why people survive.

At 8/18/15 03:50 PM, Nacholuskey wrote: I know it will be an evil within argument to spell here, but war is why people survive.

Or, perhaps we could learn to manage ourselves in ways that don't involve bloodshed.

At 8/18/15 03:50 PM, Nacholuskey wrote: I know it will be an evil within argument to spell here, but war is why people survive.

How so?

At 8/18/15 09:34 PM, Fubaka wrote:

At 8/18/15 03:50 PM, Nacholuskey wrote: I know it will be an evil within argument to spell here, but war is why people survive.

Or, perhaps we could learn to manage ourselves in ways that don't involve bloodshed.

Well for you and the other guy. The only other thing I will have to say for this is that.

1. Stop changing what you can't control.
2. Change what you can control in yourself.
3. War is an other word for changement.
4. Our worst enemy is ourself/ ego.
5. Money, politics and fame are wortless, in fact it just a fictionnal intercation that won't get any better in our coming future.
6. Learn diplomacy and authenticity.
7. Stop worring about who or when happen before.
8. Finaly, people are too lazy to do this thing because they don't give a shit and won't make this different. So work on your own and let see if someone will follow up.

Thank you and good bye !

At 8/19/15 12:40 AM, Nacholuskey wrote: [Paraphrased: be the change you want to see in the world.]

Is that about right? I'll be honest, it was kinda tough to discern your points beyond the general meaning.

At 8/19/15 01:05 AM, thebitterroost wrote:

At 8/19/15 12:40 AM, Nacholuskey wrote: [Paraphrased: be the change you want to see in the world.]

Is that about right? I'll be honest, it was kinda tough to discern your points beyond the general meaning.

Exactly, you understand. To change what is wrong and negative in our would, we have to change ourself
before taking charge of the rest and eventually things will get clear at it will be. Because half of the problem
will be out of the main concern.

It's not for nothing that human are what they are thinking.

At 8/19/15 12:40 AM, Nacholuskey wrote:
Well for you and the other guy. The only other thing I will have to say for this is that.

1. Stop changing what you can't control.
2. Change what you can control in yourself.
3. War is an other word for changement.
4. Our worst enemy is ourself/ ego.
5. Money, politics and fame are wortless, in fact it just a fictionnal intercation that won't get any better in our coming future.
6. Learn diplomacy and authenticity.
7. Stop worring about who or when happen before.
8. Finaly, people are too lazy to do this thing because they don't give a shit and won't make this different. So work on your own and let see if someone will follow up.

Thank you and good bye !

I find that a bit presumptuous. Also, I don't think you and I have the same definition of the word 'war'. I can see colonels of truth in your bullet list, but, if I may say so, it needs refinement.

I am not your enemy.

I guess I can strike that one off the list, since I do not want to procreate.