Is the world overpopulated, or are we just underdeveloped?

If I said our purpose was to stop multiplying, would that be any less reasoned out than your statement that our job is to multiply?

 

Right-now,this will likely go 'tits up',because I'm not particularly adept at expressing my thoughts,but I'll try.

I feel this planet can easily sustain the population and expansion thereof,if humans ever learn to stop building destructive weaponry and start building irrigation equipment.

LOOK at this planet,as seen from the Hubble.

VAST areas remain uninhabited,not because,as has been stated,they are uninhabitable-but because there's no immediate profit in MAKING them habitable.

There's no worth in saying some areas are doomed to be uninhabited-look at Las Vegas!

It's in a desert,ffs!

What do you think the very first settler to see that place was envisioning?

It certainly wasn't a multi-story highly illuminated energy-well containing every human comfort tailored to fleecing the gullible,complete with hot-and-cold running bar staff & a flunky to hold the door open for you!

Now;we as humans have put vehicles on the moons of Jupiter.
We've done the same on Mars.
We've ridden around in a solar-powered buggy on our moon.
We've discovered ways to capture energy rather than produce it.
We've eradicated many once lethal illnesses.

BUT

Being humans,and therefore illogical,we thought of a way to get wheels onto the moon before we thought of putting wheels on luggage!

Ergo,we've proved beyond doubt our priorities are wrong.
Once the danger is seen,realised and acted upon,regarding opening up what are deemed inhospitable areas to irrigation and agriculture rather than making bigger faster more effective bombs and missiles,we CAN get this planet fertile in even the most extreme climates,using technology to nurture,rather than destroy.

But we won't.

Two things will stop us.

1/Governments across the globe,regardless of creed,want a return NOW.
Selling arms gives them that-irrigating the Atacama [for instance] desert doesn't.
It's easier to steal the other man's resources than finance new ones of your own.

2/Indolence.
The "What's in it for ME?" mindset.
Xbox,WII,laptops,sky,digital tv,ipods,ps3,flash new trainers...they're seen as essential by far too many people. Why work in inhospitable areas laying irrigation infrastructures when I can play Xbox and collect benefits?

Ok-it'll take a few more eruptions,a few more tsunamis,earthquakes and hurricanes-but eventually even the most obtuse among us is going to realise the Earth is undergoing change.
Traditionally 'safe' areas and several that are known to be on the edge at the best of times,are going to have to be abandoned.
The cost in resources of keeping on rebuilding them each time a natural disaster hits just is not worth the return.
So - irrigate the unused areas,make them fertile...and watch the population shift.

This,by itself,won't cure the cancer of unrestricted population growth-but it WILL show us we need to nurse our resources and use them for necessities,not toys.

The day will come that we do.

It's just a question of Will it be soon enough.

Ok-I said my inexpertly expressed bit.
You've been a wonderful audience-I thank you all.

 

I think it is so arrogant to assume that we should manipulate the earth to hold our population, rather than swallow our pride and stop breeding like savage animals. Irrigate the deserts, no matter the environmental costs! And how long before the newly fertile land is sucked dry like a sponge? Look at Africa and South America. We did a real job on the land there. Some of it was forest, some desert, now it's all agricultural sponge being fertilised with petrolium and gas products year after year. There is speculation about building mountains in the West of the Sahara, to generate rain and fertilise the desert. This will completely eliminate bio-diversity in the area and effect weather patterns around the world, bring extremely undesirable weather patterns to certain areas, which will in turn have a major effect on their non-human inhabitants. Don't you think we've done enough meddling?

Anybody who approaches the population problem with conventional agriculture doesn't know what they're talking about. We will not maintain a healthy environment by solving our present and future problems with destructive technologies of the past. Hydroponic and aeroponic agriculture is our solution to the food (and possibly energy to some degree) problem. We can make whole skyscrapers filled with hydroponics, gravity doing the work of plumbing, the higher altitudes meaning no pesticides necessary, if the building is not growing biomass for fuel then it can be covered with solar energy gathering technology.

If you want to see how humans will solve problems like overpopulation/underdevelopment (if we actually do it) in the future then there is one guy who can show you the way: Jacque Fresco, director of the Venus Project.

ANYONE who says that the current population is sustainable obviously has no comprehension of the fact that we are at the start of the massive drop after peak oil, the dive-bomb in the bell curve. We have only sustained ourselves with oil, now it is drying up fast. The human population will dry up along with it under the current power structures. EVERYTHING is run on oil now, even the farming, most the food you eat was fertilised with stuff piped/sucked out of the ground, unless you eat only organic. Organic farming may be sustainable but unless we localise food production like the examples set in Havana then organic still faces massive issues. As of yet, we have nothing that will replace oil.

 

His ideas and way of thinking is brilliant. Peter Joseph to the best of my knowledge is trying to continue his work, by tell everyone. Jacque is 94 or 96 years old and he looks great for his age. They are still trying to send a message. I support both of them. Everything they continue to talk about is nothing but positive viewpoints. The hardest obstacle is that we live in a monetary based world, which is the starting point of our most evil situation.

Even with the technology he presents i'm still a firm believer we have far too many people. More is not always better. Why anyone thinks 6.8 billion is not that many baffles me.

 

Right there with ya. If we worked it out we could feed 15 billion people, if we really wanted to. The sad truth is that it does look grim, despite a universe of potential.

 

Probably not. It could go either way. But as you know, any statement or theory on the future/non future of our species is purely speculative. Everyone has their little theory. Some people share one.

Out of curiosity, what WOULD the reasoning behind that theory?

 

Teleological, mostly. We're not going to survive as a species if we make our environment uninhabitable by overproducing. Seems a lot better than the mechanistic argument that we must reproduce rabidly - we desire to reproduce, therefore we should doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

 

I understand your point. When it comes to theory, everyone is split different ways. Its all explainable in theory, luckily I'll live long enough to see something of a personal aftermath.

 

Peter Joseph is good at making movies, he should stick to that. I am considering that he may have been assassinated or something like that, since he seemed to have vanished after an altercation with Roxanne Meadows. Well, he served his purpose, made some good, informative movies. Now he needs to get out of the way and let people take the world on, not act as a figurehead. Sometimes it annoys me when he is even mentioned because Jacque Fresco is mentioned, why mention him? What solutions does he have? None, really. He just makes movies. Good movies, I grant you but a movie maker can not solve our problems. Fresco is the one with the solutions. Kudos to Peter Joseph, though, if it wasn't for him then I wouldn't know about Jacque Fresco.

 

I did SAY I'm not very good at expressing myself,MLV.

I'm a LONG way from arrogant.
I don't assume we should do ANY particular thing.
I didn't even give mention conventional agriculture.
I'm aware oil is running out.

My only point was that we're stuck with a population of nearly 7 billion,like it or not,immoral number or not.
However,this planet has a lot of unoccupied land.
We can replace oil requirements the way we've replaced the horse,sail and coal,all of which were once considered 'cutting-edge',by advancing technology along the right path. A path that makes room for indigenous creatures while increasing organic food production-plus many natural fibres.

I stand by my musings-after all that's all they are.

If we can build cities in barren lands,we can FARM in barren lands.
All it takes is co-operation.

My apologies for any offence. Non was meant.

 

New problems are coming up all the time: the oceans are now becoming ruined because of our population
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13796479

If we keep expanding we might get to a situation where massive suffering might occur due to lack of food, etc

 

OK, to start with, I wasn't just addressing you, likewise apologies for any offense, none was meant.

You are seeming arrogant to me because you seem to have an inflated sense of pride in the fact that you are human, seems like you say that it puts you above everything else so you can go and flood deserts and do what the hell you like just to keep your stupid worthless population alive.

If you don't assume we should do any particular thing then what was the point in that post? Can I suggest that you find something that you can assume that we do? Humanity will go nowhere without direction.

You spoke about irrigation. Irrigation is conventional agriculture. You speak about using land as farmland, that's conventional agriculture.

Stuck with 7 billion? You can't talk about the human population as a static figure. If we continue as we are then population will be so massive as to be completely out of control soon. It is an exponential sum. To find a doubling time in anything that is steadily growing (take the mean for fluctuating patterns) all you have to do is divide it into 70. Example = 7% = 10 years (if that's your unit of measurement) doubling time. Population growth, as it stands, is producing around 70,000,000 new people a year and that's after subtracting all the people dying.

Let's take a look at reducing population:

Nearly 60 million people die each year according to statistics. Probably more but they are unrecorded. Let's say that the next 2 generations only have 1 child in 1 relationship, no more than that. 25 years for each generation. So 50 years. 3 Billion people have died. take the adult population, roughly 65% of 7 billion = 4,550,000,000, halve that number to 2,275,000,000 minus those few who (hopefully) choose not to have any children, due to more useful education and real ethics being applied, leaving 2 billion let's say. So in 50 years we've only lessened the population by 1 billion. This does not account for a lot of factors, I know, so overall the population shrinkage would probably be less as there would be more keeping people alive than killing them in a world where you could enact a policy of 1 child in 1 relationship.

In a way, you are right but you left out a little bit of your statement. We are stuck with at least a population of 7 billion.

To be honest, there is nothing out there that come close to fulfilling the requirements of oil. At least, none that we have come close to preparing. The hydroponic and aeroponic method would be what you allude to in terms of organic farming while leaving indeginous creatures to it. Also, the requirements of oil will not be met by anything else while we still have our current power structures and way of thinking applied to our world. We can't really advance any further or deal with our problems anymore without a major paradigm shift.

I would implore you to reconsider farming any more barren lands, that is currently our way of solving these problemss, has been for decades. GM foods are now developed to be farmed in places wehre we couldn't farm before. And all it does is make our footprint-of-fuckup larger than it ever was before.

We need to stop thinking with current day methods, it is the future we are moving into. Technology has long been suppressed but it is about to explode, it is our only saviour now.

 

Our purpose being to STOP multiplying is one we have thought about and can choose.. our purpose to multiply is the base purpose, from before we could think.

 

Our purpose in life can be anything we choose, we have limitless options, or current ways are destructive, selfish, and ego driven. If we all step back and ask ourselves if we want to preserve the human life for generations to come, i think we really need to think about many discussions brought up in this thread.

 

one for the conspiracy theorists :mickey:

http://www.noonehastodietomorrow.com/occult/symbolism/929-929

 

And why, of all people, 'DancesWithRabbits', would you try to argue that reason or logic is superior to, should be more acted upon, or should be chosen more than instinct or heteronomy, after all you have argued to the contrary?

 

The only reason we (modern humans) think we want to reproduce through some natural urge is because we have been conditioned that way, in my opinion. You can raise people to be repulsed by the opposite sex, certainly by the thought of reproducing. We can also raise people to consider the caring capacity of the earth as a higher priority than their own inflated sense of pride in their genes. For some, their instinct IS the logical approach, others make their decisions based a lot more on emotions. Hopefully only the logical ones will survive the nuclear holocaust!

 

To develop more we would have to take away from the other creatures of the earth and it’s just not right people need to stop fucken having so many kids. Birth control for the third world please.

 

We don't need to develop anymore to sub-stain the current population. We don't need to take away anymore land, if anything, we should be giving some back. We already have the technology for new ways of travel, to give everyone food, housing, and security.. Problem is we are careless about how we use our resources, currently. What we have right now, and how we use it, we expect it to never run out. Consume, consume, consume has been the motto no doubt. We have reached a point where we need to rethink everything. Our biggest supporter must come from those who are at the top of the worlds empire, those who fund are world. As far as i'm concerned, they are not taking desperate measures, and i'm rather frightened if they wait tell the last second to really do something beneficial.

Thousands of scientests, enviormentalists, engineers, and professors are trying to sub-stain our current population with new technology. We have the capability to take it steps the general public has not seen yet, it is their. The problem always come down to the global elite aka money makers. The people who decided how the chess board is going to run. If their focus was too better everyones life, and not just their own, everything would be different.

So for us people all the way down at the bottom, trying to fix global problems; the most important thing we can do is talk about it, and spread the word. We personally might not have the technology to fix it, but we can continue to wake people up around us in our own towns, and cities to these global issues that affect us all. We just need everyone to pitch in, not a few people. We are all in this together regardless of skin color wether anyone likes it or not.

 

Actually, I did not argue either side. Someone asked what the difference was, and I highlighted that difference.