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Is it inevitable that due to rapid population growth millions of people will die?

Is it inevitable that millions of people will have to die due to population growth?

  • Yes

    Votes: 14 35.9%
  • No

    Votes: 25 64.1%

  • Total voters
    39
Do you deny that this holiday would instantly lower the population?

After all isn't population your big concern?


My concern is your willingness to murder those whom you disagree with. I think that's very ****ed up.
 
It would make sense if we were locust or even sheep. But we happen to be a species that creates and develops "resources". Not coincidentally, life is just fine in densely populated Holland, and not so comfortable in near-empty Ethiopia. It is about good government, culture and infrastructures, not about how many people are there. The more, the better, as long as they behave.

I'd opine more like exploits resources. Much of the well off parts of the world are on a razor's edge when it comes to collapse. That governments help each other in such times, or not depending on a rather complex matrix of affinity and proximity, helps hide the fact a super storm could end Holland's prosperity. (not to mention much of what we see as the good life in Holland many CONs see as unsustainable due to the taxes needed to maintain that good life.)

The great forests of New England are gone, there replacement a pale shade of scrub regrowth and lumber plantations. The farmers moved west to exploit the vast plains, leaving most of New England to be covered in a scrub regrowth. The vast short grass prairies of New Mexico are gone, the vast timbered slopes of the East Rockies around the Silver Towns are gone and neither will be replaced.

Right now Texoma is in a stage 4 drought. Lakes are at 20 to 30% cap and no real relief in site. No water, no towns- our economy will collapse.

When you study the collapse of civilizations several things repeat. Disease, crop failure, financial collapse, political instability.

We comfort ourselves with the idea science and modern medicine have made epidemics like the black death a thing of the past, but a disturbing trend of 'super bugs' mainly due to an overuse/misuse of antibiotics maybe the tip of the iceberg.

Crop failure is a real possibility, our modern agriculture depends on cheap credit and high industrial inputs. many farmers are only as good as their relationship with their bank. many areas are just one 'good' drought away from ruin. Agricultural productivity MUST have huge inputs of oil, from fuel to chemicals and fertilizer food production must have a steady flow of 'cheap' oil. Political turmoil in the ME can spell millions in extra food production costs. Another financial collapse can end credit to agriculture/food processors bringing food production to a dangerously low level.

Whole continents have had their agricultural base ruined with millions dying due to 'natural' causes. Iceland with volcanoes, Europe and America's 'year with no summer' due to an island in the Pacific exploding, all killed millions of citizens in nations with good infrastructure, governments, culture, financial systems.

Reckless financial policies are as deadly as droughts. Many CONs are certain the EU will collapse under the weight of it's nanny state taxes, but history has shown nations can collapse hard due to maintaining a military state. Casino Capitalism can destroy an economy as well as any war. hyperspeculation can raise prices above what the average man can afford, then crash the prices so his labor is worthless. A huge national disaster in a nation trillions of dollars in debt with a strong political faction willing to collapse the government, could be a perfect storm.

Political collapse is a growing possibility- suicide partisan politics that undercuts a government's bond rating can destroy domestic and, if the nation is big enough, global credit. people without money are people without food as so many live in urban areas. Many empires fell not due to 'barbarian' invasion but a loss of civic duty and sacrifice by the masses who saw the ruling parties as too self involved.

I think your mantra is a bit trite and a lot of wishful thinking. History is a record of mankind behaving badly.
 
My concern is your willingness to murder those whom you disagree with. I think that's very ****ed up.
Are you willing to admit that if you were dead that would make 1 less person contributing to the "overpopulation problem"?
 
One of my friends recently got into a heated debate with me as to weather or not millions of people are going to have to die as a result of rapid population growth. His logic was that as resources become depleted, and demand grows, people will be forced to fight over the remaining resources and in the process will have to kill each other. I however disagreed. I stated that I understood the premise behind which this scenario would take place. However I argued the inevitability of this situation ever presenting itself. I stated that through technological and intellectual achievements we will have the potential to maintain a larger more robust population indefinitely. My logic was the following.... Today we live in a world of 7 billion people. 300 years ago we could never have hoped to maintain such a large population effectively. However due to technological and other developments we are able to. Why must this trend which has been going on since the dawn of men stop now?..... My friend went on to argue that the killing of millions of people might not be such a bad thing because it would help others survive more efficiently and allow them to have more resources. HE ARGUED THAT THE DEATH OF MILLIONS WOULD BE BETTER FOR MANKIND. To this I replied, who decides who dies and who doesn't. I also replied saying that he was out of his mind. I just want to receive reassurance that I was not the one with faulty logic because I was in a setting in which 5 people were supporting his thinking and only two other people were supporting mine. (The people who supported the person with this reasoning supported him primarily because they believe he is some freaken diety and because they don't like me)

I believe hundreds of millions or more will die but not mainly because of over population if over population is a factor at all. I think war with NBC weapons and global pandemics will likely be the culprits.

I'm just working from memory but as I recall, the Bible predicts huge portions of the population of the earth will die in a future or possibly present era of global calamity as a result of war, disease and famine.

I checked the numbers earlier today and nearly 40 million people have already died of aids world-wide and another nearly 40 million are alive but carry the HIV virus. In certain parts of the world as many as one in five people are HIV positive with more newly infected every day.

Today man has the technical ability to end life on earth as we know it with modern weaponry. Even peaceful uses of scientific discoveries have the potential to take massive numbers of lives through accidents even when the best precautions are carefully followed.

As a btw: Just because the Bible predicts massive numbers of people will die during a catastrophic period on earth does NOT mean God will personally kill people. I can say due to the laws of gravity, people falling to the ground from 50 feet up or higher will likely not survive the impact but that in no way implies I personally pushed anyone from the balcony of a multi-story condominium to their deaths.
 
If we practiced and encouraged a sustainable society, perhaps similar to the Amish lifestyle, I think we could maintain continuity of species. However, we are a society of have and have nots, and I think the "haves" will be in charge of society and legislate control to benefit themselves. I know the statement is almost cynical, but the haves will decide that many have to be sacrificed for the greater good. Unfortunately, it is just their greater good, eh?
 
Much of the well off parts of the world are on a razor's edge when it comes to collapse. That governments help each other in such times, or not depending on a rather complex matrix of affinity and proximity, helps hide the fact a super storm could end Holland's prosperity..

Yeah, so could a very large meteorite. The point?
And of course the developed international trade and cooperation create a 'safety net'. That's part of being "developed" in general.

The great forests of New England are gone, there replacement a pale shade of scrub regrowth and lumber plantations.

Absolutely not true. The density and diversity of the forests of Maine, New Hampshire and much of Massachusetts is on par with those of any old growth.


When you study the collapse of civilizations several things repeat. Disease, crop failure, financial collapse, political instability.

Yes, of course - with disease and crop failure increasingly failing to cause either financial collapse or political instability. There were no revolutions or regime changes in 1816 in Europe, because even back then the developed infrastructures and trade had soften the blow of the Year without Summer enough to stabilize the situation.


Europe and America's 'year with no summer' due to an island in the Pacific exploding, all killed millions of citizens in nations with good infrastructure, governments, culture, financial systems.

What sheer nonsense. There were some food riots, and prices went up.

There was an epidemic of typhus in Ireland that killed a lot of people about the same time, and malnutrition caused by the food shortages certainly contributed to the death toll, but the early 19th century Ireland hardly boasted "good infrastructure and government".

When Krakatoa erupted just 70 years later, climate changes were not as great, but severe enough. Crops failed in many places. But it barely registered as a blow to developed societies.

Reckless financial policies are as deadly as droughts.
.

And that's what we should worry about - not about running of out air, sunshine, or human ingenuity.

I think your mantra is a bit trite and a lot of wishful thinking. History is a record of mankind behaving badly.

And yet here we are: more numerous, healthier and better fed than ever. Not wishful thinking - just calm observation. Beats disasterbation any time.
 
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I think somebody has been watching too many Mad Max movies.
 
One of my friends recently got into a heated debate with me as to weather or not millions of people are going to have to die as a result of rapid population growth. His logic was that as resources become depleted, and demand grows, people will be forced to fight over the remaining resources and in the process will have to kill each other. I however disagreed. I stated that I understood the premise behind which this scenario would take place. However I argued the inevitability of this situation ever presenting itself. I stated that through technological and intellectual achievements we will have the potential to maintain a larger more robust population indefinitely. My logic was the following.... Today we live in a world of 7 billion people. 300 years ago we could never have hoped to maintain such a large population effectively. However due to technological and other developments we are able to. Why must this trend which has been going on since the dawn of men stop now?..... My friend went on to argue that the killing of millions of people might not be such a bad thing because it would help others survive more efficiently and allow them to have more resources. HE ARGUED THAT THE DEATH OF MILLIONS WOULD BE BETTER FOR MANKIND. To this I replied, who decides who dies and who doesn't. I also replied saying that he was out of his mind. I just want to receive reassurance that I was not the one with faulty logic because I was in a setting in which 5 people were supporting his thinking and only two other people were supporting mine. (The people who supported the person with this reasoning supported him primarily because they believe he is some freaken diety and because they don't like me)

I agree with both of you. If that makes sense. Here are the facts your friend states that I agree with:

A) we have too many people.
B) there is 1 cure for the number.
C) our resources cannot sustain population growth at the current rate.

Disagreements:

A) millions dying over a fight is not the only way for populations to drop. Reduction of population could occur if the death rate climbs over birth rate...via populations like china or India having economic growth, political change, and people reducing the number of children they have. Essentially social changes. Essentially the only factor though is that anything that causes death rates to rise, or birth rates to drop (condoms) could do the trick.

Your points:

A) yes our technology will enable us to sustain larger populations.
B) death is bad.

Disagreement.

A) our technology is not strong enough to sustain a billion more people. That is why people starve all over the world. Resources are limited. We can't expect them to continue on forever.
B) death is the only cure. It isn't good. Just the answer. And we need to understand that death is beneficial. It is not desired. It doesn't require death of millions. Just a birth rate drop and death rate increase.


Personal view:

I think we are too stupid and greedy to handle rising populations. I think we will experience a natural die off. Like other animals. Disease is a potential killer. Natural disaster (earthquakes and volcanos seem most likely to do the most harm). War for resources is likely as well. We are victims of our success. I think it is inevitable that our population drops. There is no technological development except space travel and colonization that could allow us to grow on this planet. There is a ceiling. All animals hit that ceiling at some point.
 
Exactly!

If they all committed mass suicide then that would alleviate their overpopulation concerns in one fell swoop.

Why would anyone seriously advocate killing to deal with overpopulation?

Maybe we could make a holiday out of it where one day each year it is perfectly legal to murder everyone who has professed that the planet is "overpopulated".

Problem solved.

Call it the Anti-Hypocrite day.

Bizarre comments… yikes.
 
Why would anyone seriously advocate killing to deal with overpopulation?



Bizarre comments… yikes.
How else would you solve overpopulation except by population reduction?
 
How else would you solve overpopulation except by population reduction?

I don't have a specific intent to actively and directly curb overpopulation. I don't advocate genocide, homicide, or mass suicide, or even (in most cases) mandatory contraception. The fact that you presumed I did is kind of strange, frankly.

If our population has overshot the carrying capacity of the ecosystems in which those high concentrations of people reside, then sustaining those high concentrations depends on the energy source that brings food, water and other necessities to them, and carries their waste away from them. In other words, do we have metropolises worldwide whose population densities far exceed the ability to subsist? Absolutely we do. There is no questioning that. So therefore we depend on whatever mechanisms keep that going. Specifically, we depend on efficient large-scale industrial food production processes, wide distribution, complex waste management systems, etc. These processes are all extremely energy intensive, and therefore our ability to sustain even our current population completely depends on extracting enough fossil fuel energy at a sufficiently high EROEI to keep it going.

Whenever it is we can't keep up, cheap-energy-wise, the population will find a way to cull itself, so to speak. There is nothing I advocate be done to proactively cull it beforehand, I'm just predicting, reasonably, that the population has overshot its ecosystems' carrying capacity and is utterly reliant on fossil fuels to sustain now.

I do recommend though, at least as a social policy more than a population control strategy, that reproduction be strongly disincentivized among those who have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they are far, far too incompetent to raise children. No right is sacrosanct, not property, liberty, or even life, so I definitely don't think reproduction should be sacrosanct as a right either, when it is clear that beyond any reasonable doubt harm would come to that child.
 
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Of course it is. Right now, more than 147,000 people die every day. The more people we have, the more people will die. It's a natural part of life. Deal with it.
 
Either a mass die off or a dramatic drop in the birth rate. One or the other. I've read some articles and papers on this. Even with some magnificent advances in technology, the current growth rate is unsustainable, so it will have to either drop off, or people will have to die off. Probably mostly in Africa, India and China. In short, we're having a population explosion -- kind of like rats and cockroaches do. At the rate we're going, we'll consume ourselves to death. So either the birth rate will drop, or the population will (or both).

Most convincing arguments have been that war will do it. If not, there's always famine.
 
we're having a population explosion -- kind of like rats and cockroaches do.

Cockroaches do not have science, engineering and international trade.

And I hate to break the news, but the population is not exploding - it is imploding over half of the world. The stuff you have read must be at least 30 years old.

Places as different as Russia and Japan are facing veritable population collapse. Fertility over the replacement level is retained only in Africa and parts of Asia, but the writing on the wall is there as well: Iran has 1.67 births per woman, despite religious and cultural pressures.

I do think and hope that this trend will be reversed at some point in future, but right now we have to worry more about things like not enough young people to support all the pensioner than about too many mouths to feed.
 
No, the natural tendencies of people is to desire to have less children than what is needed and since those outlets are available the only path you will see going forward is declining populations.
 
This is the central fallacy of the left. Resources aren't a zero-sum game. No need for such a scarcity mindset. People CREATE wealth. The more people, the more the pie grows for everyone.

I'm talking about natural resources and their physical limitation. You're thinking about money which is not real.

And I'm not a member of the left so don't bother trying to type-cast me as though it somehow makes your argument more congruent.
 
I'm talking about natural resources and their physical limitation. You're thinking about money which is not real.

And I'm not a member of the left so don't bother trying to type-cast me as though it somehow makes your argument more congruent.

The scarcity mindset you're displaying is the hallmark of the left. I don't know what you're a member of but I know that's what the entire left wing ideology is built upon.

Wealth is not a zero sum game. The pie grows and shrinks depending on how many people are available to work.

BTW I'm thinking money and I'm thinking resources, and both are very real. The more people there are, the more we can develop our planet's natural resources. The more people you have to work the farm, the more food we can grow. The more people we have to work in oil and gas, the more we can develop that resource.

Resources are very plentiful. It's just a matter of having the skilled labor to develop those resources.
 
One of my friends recently got into a heated debate with me as to weather or not millions of people are going to have to die as a result of rapid population growth. His logic was that as resources become depleted, and demand grows, people will be forced to fight over the remaining resources and in the process will have to kill each other. I however disagreed. I stated that I understood the premise behind which this scenario would take place. However I argued the inevitability of this situation ever presenting itself. I stated that through technological and intellectual achievements we will have the potential to maintain a larger more robust population indefinitely. My logic was the following.... Today we live in a world of 7 billion people. 300 years ago we could never have hoped to maintain such a large population effectively. However due to technological and other developments we are able to. Why must this trend which has been going on since the dawn of men stop now?..... My friend went on to argue that the killing of millions of people might not be such a bad thing because it would help others survive more efficiently and allow them to have more resources. HE ARGUED THAT THE DEATH OF MILLIONS WOULD BE BETTER FOR MANKIND. To this I replied, who decides who dies and who doesn't. I also replied saying that he was out of his mind. I just want to receive reassurance that I was not the one with faulty logic because I was in a setting in which 5 people were supporting his thinking and only two other people were supporting mine. (The people who supported the person with this reasoning supported him primarily because they believe he is some freaken diety and because they don't like me)

In a certain sense people have been dying for decades because populations were growing. This is not to say, that we did not produce enough food to keep them alive and we will, barring any unforeseen occurrence, continue to produce enough to feed all. But we are not organized to allocate the food to prevent starvation. We have become much better in the last years. Though the absolute numbers are still about the same, as far as I know, the number of hungry relative to total population has come down considerably. With countries around the world developing as they have been of late, the problem of starvation should shrink.
 
Cockroaches do not have science, engineering and international trade.

So you think we can stave off a population collapse through science? Science isn't magic, you know. At the end of the day, we still need to draw food from soil, fish from the sea and have grazing land for cattle. We can't just make more of that.

And I hate to break the news, but the population is not exploding - it is imploding over half of the world. The stuff you have read must be at least 30 years old.

Places as different as Russia and Japan are facing veritable population collapse. Fertility over the replacement level is retained only in Africa and parts of Asia, but the writing on the wall is there as well: Iran has 1.67 births per woman, despite religious and cultural pressures.

I do think and hope that this trend will be reversed at some point in future, but right now we have to worry more about things like not enough young people to support all the pensioner than about too many mouths to feed.

Okay, so then you do expect a population collapse, and in fact see one happening right now? Then why are you arguing that we can prevent it? What are we doing to prevent it?
 
The stuff you have read must be at least 30 years old.

1385467522-587px_World_Population_1800_2100.jpg


Not 30 years old.
 
Okay, so then you do expect a population collapse, and in fact see one happening right now?

The collapse is underway in Russia, for example: it had almost 149 million people in 1991, it has 143 million now - despite people living longer (in the last decade) and substantial immigration (from Central Asia primarily). Total fertility rate is about 1.60 (replacement rate being above 2, of course). And that's better than in China, Germany or Japan - and only slightly worse than in Brazil, Iran or Uzbekistan.

While the countries with low birth rates attractive and open to immigrants - like Canada and much of Europe - will avoid actual "collapse", the demographic situation in places like Ukraine or Iran can get pretty desperate, without young people to support the retired multitudes.

Globally, most projections of current trends predict a peak around 2050 - and steep decline afterwards. Keep in mind that the date is pushed hard into future not by any changes in birth dynamics but by the expected sharp increases in life expectancy in Africa and other regions where now people die like flies from treatable diseases and from violence. How steep it will be and for how long it will continue - we can only guess.

Then why are you arguing that we can prevent it? What are we doing to prevent it?

Who said anything about "prevention"? All attempts to directly regulate size of population by government measures had fell so far between laughable and tragic.

(Uzbekistan, Iran, Belarus and Co. can prevent it to a great extent but removing the suffocating statist regimes and making themselves good places to live in. Japan and South Korea can solve the problem by opening immigration gates wide. The second half of the century may well feature fierce international competition for people willing to move around, the Golden Age for Immigrants)

I do expect the trend to reverse itself at some point in future, however. Basically, the human race just has entered the era when you don't HAVE to have many children - because most of those you have survive, and because children do not work anymore to supply much of the family's income. Africa is about to enter. This is not how it was for all of our evolutionary history as a species.

The biological imperative to have many kids is still hard wired - it was simply overwhelmed by the economic and social pressures of this very abrupt transition. Charles Darwin had ten children; my German great-grandmother had 14 (and adopted two more); compare with present-day Englishmen and Germans. When the situation stabilizes and the newly worry-free (in comparative terms) and long-living human beings will adapt to their unprecedented prosperous condition, the large families will reappear. A hundred, three hundred years from now - drawing actual timelines would be silly, but I simply don't believe that the central instinct of life can be erased by a few decades of social confusion in a transition period.
 
1385467522-587px_World_Population_1800_2100.jpg


Not 30 years old.

In other words, since there's no weighting of probabilities for their "highs" and "lows", a graphic representation of "the UN has absolutely no clue", in 5 colors.
 
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