overpopulation

One thing that is kind of stupid is the age in which a person is allowed to be "fixed"...I think it's something like 27, not sure, but doctors won't preform the procedures until that age, even if a person wants them done. I know of a 19 year old single mother who is pregnant again, and they still won't fix her......They just love handin out that welfare don't they?

 

I like the way you say "fixed" like she's a cat or dog You mean have her tubes tied. Things are different here, i don't think there is a certain age. You speak with your doc, see a psychologist to make sure you know what you're doing, if there really is a need.

 

Overpopulation is an extremely BIG problem. We are causing extinction in species and eventually when we've killed everything apart from Humans, then we will be condemning ourselves to extinction.

 

i know we are wayyyyyy over populated..



we are packing too many people onto our small planet..
And shit is already starting to hit the fan...

 

Overpopulation will take care of itself though, there are too many people so they all starve to death, like in china. It won't be long before the rest of the world is having that kind of problems too. I hope I am dead by then :'-).

 

overpopulation will not fix itself! my theory is that the overpopulation problem in china will spread throughout the world. we will build and build to make more room to live while at the same time fucking ourselves over. this is because the land we are building on was once something that produced food or got rid of the incredible amount of human waste. in the future we are all gonna be fucked if we don't wisen up and start protecting what we are depleting and put an end to overpopulation!

 

Overpopulation will take care of itself. It won't be pretty though. Read Malthus.

 

Actually, that's death! haha

Anyways, I agree with what some of you have said, the issue isn't so much population size, but resource consumption...which is of course affected by population size, but not dependant on it. For example, Americans are 5% of the world and use 25% of the energy. And I'm not just talking about energy, I mean food, water, farmland, living space, etc. We need wetlands to absorb toxins, runoff pollution and floods, but we are running out of land to farm and live on, so we drain marshes, put up levees...robbing rivers of shallow, slow currents and forcing them into constricted, fast flowing channels, increasing erosion and the size and force of floods, while flushing chemicals into the seas creating fish die-offs and huge dead zones. It's a vicious cycle and that's but one example.

Check out this link, it's an essay about resource consuption as opposed to pupulation as the real problem: http://www.derrickjensen.org/pop01.html

 

When you say "Fixed" ... Do you mean sterilized? Of course you don't sterilize a nineteen year old girl. No doctor would agree to something that stupid. It's her own responsibility to avoid getting pregnant. What if she gets married at age 25 and would like to have another child? Or if she lost her kids in an accident... She has got most of her life ahead of her. Who says she will be a single mum on welfare in another five years? Sterilization should only be an option for those who are sure they never want to have any more kids. How can you know that at age 19? When I was 19 I didn't want to have kids at all. Now I've got two. And if something ever happened to them I would want to have more kids. I can't imagine a life without children.

As for overpopulation, I think that the more of us there are, the more animal species will be wiped out because of too much hunting and fishing. Because people will NOT become vegans even if we ask them nicely.

The more babies born in the third world - the more children will starve to death in the third world. Because the rest of the world will not see it as their responsibility.

Even if there is plenty of room in sibiria, alaska and the north pole we can't force the people from the over-populated areas to move there. India and China will still be crowded and africa will still not be able to feed it's own people.

People live too long anyway... You're not meant to be 110 years old. It's against nature to keep people alive forever, putting them together with spare parts or store them in life supporting machines. Plague, Typhoid fever, Aids and all other deadly diseases serve a purpose. It's natures way of equalizing the balance between beast and man.

 

if overpopulation is a problem we need to

1.dismantle all nuclear weapons (well, most of em:X)
2.have world war three
3.let the few hundred thousand survivors repopulate the earth but never forget when we completly fucked our shit up

or we could just focus most of our technology on space travel and then conscript 3rd world people to conquer the galaxy

 

And you can't grow crops in Siberia or Alaska. Not so as to feed an ever increasing population. Room isn't the issue. We've got fuckloads of room. But food and other vital resources we don't have an endless supply of, or even enough, right now, to feed the 6.2 billion mouths (and counting). I'd bet we're already well over "carrying capacity" but the shock hasn't hit yet. We're unsustainable at this level, and it won't be long before the crash comes.

 

7billion is probably a comfortable person to acreage population for everyone,but weve got to stop it there,or disease and crop failure WILL stop it at about that.how do we achieve a kind of status quo,though?a limit of 2 kids at atime for EVERYONE seems a good maxim to me,not in the "third world"but in europe and america too,at least until we can sort out how to sustain a larger population.forget space travel,thats just a ploy by government to use more resources on weapon development and the likes.this is where we are,and it would be foolish as an internation to pretend we could just "jump ship"if there are too many people on board.and if ,who knows,we find another planet thats suitable for repopulation,do you think itll be everyday joe and jane soap wholl get a golden ticket?it will in its arse!itll be the richest people in the world wholl abscond,coz they know better than anyone that the "whole shithouse"is going up in flames

 

Watch "Soilent Green", that's how we'll end up living...*cringes at the thought*

We are overpopulated right now...bottom line. Humans ruin the water supply, humans ruin the quality of our air, humans create trash to fill landfills, humans cut down our oxygen sources, humans do everything to fuck up the natural cycle of Mother Nature. The more humans there are, the more damage is done. Sure we can fill up every inch of space for people...but watch Soilent Green and see what happens.

 

I have that film on VHS. Very cool, albeit scary, movie.

I'm going to sound neo-primitive for a moment...

We used to live in a balance with nature. We'd be born, we'd live a short time, and either the predators or more likely the strife of living would bring us right down again. Either way, there weren't as many people around.

Now we live like 3 times as long. We've pretty much negated the predator. We've used agriculture to prevent starvation, at least for the "popular" folks on the planet ( which blows ).

There is no way we could have prevented this. No philosopher 10,000 years ago said "Hey, we are going to overpopulate. Let's starve instead."

I'd say that since nature has a way of taking care of "problems" ( read: us ), those apocalyptic "Oh, man, here comes the meteor/ice age/plague/flood/White Castle" movies maybe aren't so unbelievable.

 

we could using current technology feed 6 billion people in the space of arkansas mostly using hydroponics, if you turned a chunk of non-arable land into hydroponic warehouses and said that money no longer applied to food then that'd be solved.....

then we'd just need to worry about physical space, and if eventually most of the planet became city with well managed natured preserve we could easily have a population in the 20 billion range


not that it'd be pretty....

it would be horrible..... but it could work.....

 

hydroponics would certainly help,but most of the planet being city is indeed a horrible thought.the"countryside" is kinda considered some sort of safaripark,nice to visit at the weekend,but remember youve gotta return to REALITY at some stage sunday evening,i mean ,youve got work monday,and the kids have school.even thogh i appreciate the world party approach,not everyone would choose to live ina city.
a self sufficient unit,wether it be a family unit or tribe or commune or whatever,is a thing id like to see more energy thrown at,not"well,we can always build higher and higher to cope with international over population"babel springs to mind,and as anyone with there head screwed on knowsBABYLON WAS BUILT TO FALL DOWN

 

I totally agree!

 

they had the right idea when our for-fathers got here. get some land with a friend or 2. start a family, garden and hunt within the confinments of your land, support your family, and die at the ripe ol' age of 30. why do youneed to live longer than 50 at the most. your family wouldn't really grow past maybe 30 ppl, you have 2-3 kids watch your kids have 2-3 kids then you die. sounds good to me. We are saving entirley too many lives, ppl need to die.

 

There's actually something to that. Modern medicine has done a lot to increase our population. Being a human and controlling our environment and ourselves means that nature can't be at work. By this I mean, Darwin's idea of survival of the fittest doesn't exist in the human world. If it did exist in the human population, I would have been dead at 12 when I got glasses, my grandpa would have been dead when he had a heart attack, and my brother would have died long ago because he's obese and can't run.

As terrible as it sounds, large disasters such as the tsunami and earthquakes, that have a large amount of casualties, ironically happen in densly populated areas. Could it be Mother Nature's way of shaking some of us off???

 

I love my 20 million. I hope it stays that way.