OT: Earth is a finite space
and we keep filling it up with people since it's not PC to tell people what to do with there gamete's. Although I think China and Japan may have figured this one out.
anyway...my pondering is thus:
we, as humans occupying this finite space, actually need wars and famine and pestilance to check out population since we're too stupid to do it ourselves.
what would the world's population be if all the millions of people who have been killed in all the wars and black death's and genocides had lived to reproduce?
the world population grows by 75 million people every year.
is it any wonder that we are losing species of animals every year?
geez, we need to be killing 75 million people a year just to stabalize.
and if this is a wrong way of thinking then what is a right way?
eventually, probably in the not too distant future, we'll eat ourselves out of existence anyway.
my best answer is to pull the cork on the space program and open it up to commercial interests and get some of us of this friggin planet.
Re: OT: Earth is a finite space
Quote:
Originally posted by Oso
my best answer is to pull the cork on the space program and open it up to commercial interests and get some of us of this friggin planet.
I've always been highly dubious of the relative rewards of the space program. An ocean program would yield significant rewards far sooner, be far more economically efficient, and would translate directly into a more efficient space program upon it's culmination. Aiming for Mars when we haven't dipped our foot in the majority of our own planet seems a little misguided.
Another excellent answer would be to address population distribution rather than population itself. The earth as a whole, even restricting ourselves to habitable landmass, is far from being overpopulated - it's just that the population we have is poorly distributed. Again, rather than aiming for Mars, we should aim for information, energy, and good distribution to allow for a more distributed mode of living.