So the earth is going to hell in a handbasket, More pending doom

I read most of this article, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/st...1447863,00.html

it seems to sum up what most of the other ones have. Humans are killing the planet.

But nowhere does it say what we should do about it.

here's some of it's points, with my own thoughts.

· Because of human demand for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel, more land has been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined.

yet half the world seems to be starving. So what should we do? Stop feeding people? stop building houses? it's not like at this point we can just stop industry and go back to living off the land. there's too many people. the last 60 years the population went from 3 billion to 6 billon should we just start killing people?


· An estimated 24% of the Earth's land surface is now cultivated.

and again, we still can't feed everyone.


· Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers has doubled in the last 40 years. Humans now use between 40% and 50% of all available freshwater running off the land.

· At least a quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested. In some areas, the catch is now less than a hundredth of that before industrial fishing.

· Since 1980, about 35% of mangroves have been lost, 20% of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20% badly degraded.

· Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown disease to emerge.



I fully recognize that there is a problem.

it's not hard to point out a problem. but instead of spending all their time screaming that the sky is falling, why isn't anyone trying to build a brace to hold it up?

Matt, we all share your concerns about the planet, but from what I've seen on this website and in this forum are a bunch of armchair liberals sitting in their wet diapers and complaining to no end with no suggestions for any type of solution. Everyone on this forum has a complaint but no one does a thing about it. From what I can see those that tend to complain (or even critisize) do nothing about the situation. I would venture a guess that the majority (I would lay odds that everyone) continues to drive around in their cars completely oblivious to the fact that they are hypocrites.

I have often pointed out that the earth is severely overpopulated. The human population reached it's first billion mark in 1930 and today we have nearly 6.5 billion, that's in just 80 years. Christ, why not just stop the population explosion? Here is a very simple means to do that now; remove all tax credits for dependents. Start taxing families that have more than 2 kids.

There's not many long term options out there.
1. Find a way to reduce the damage being done, and maintain a static population.
2. Reduce the number of people to a safer level.
3. Make the jump off planet to find more room for growth, and more resorces to support that growth.

Unfotrunately most humans only care about their own profit in the short term. Unless that thinking is changed, we will just have to wait until Earth resolves it's own problems as it did with mass extinctions in times past.

I could work to develop a really devastating biological weapon to reduce population. Anyone for that option? No? Why not, it would solve the problem. I volunteer Steve as our first victim since he wants to help out.

Get realistic, nobody wants to die, and nobody should be penalized for ensuring their progeny’s survival. While I agree we should improve our efficiency, and recycle as much as possible, the only good solution is to keep expanding into unclaimed territory. As far as I can see there's plenty of room in the universe, so it's not like we will run out as fast as on Earth.

I kind of like my tax credit for my son, but I am doing my part. I plan to produce no more children, and I've often though of killing my teen aged nephew that lives with us to further help out the depopulation effort.

for a broader solution, I say we simply kill all of the idiots on the planet.

problem solved.

Survival of the fittest?

crazy Idea I know.

Mr. Weston, I will meet you at the OK corral at high noon.

Matt, that's a bit extreme, besides, once nephews grow up they can be a blast.

If we kill all the idiots on the planet we could expect a 99.9% reduction overnight. But, what to do with all that 'human waste'? And the Republicans would never lose another election.

Seriously, I have seen the population explosion as the #1 problem for decades now, unfortunately there are individuals that firmly believe that the earth can sustain a human population of 45 billion.

The nearest star to our own solar system is Proxima Centauri which is a little over 4 light years away. The last I've heard no planetary system has been discovered at this star or any of it's neighbors. Besides, with our current rocket technology it would take several genearations of humans to travel that distance in any type of spacecraft meant to sustain life. Does anyone remember the Bruce Dern movie "Silent Running"? Great idea, but not feasible in today's world.

45 billion seems awfully high. You would really have to optimize the system to even come close. It is definitely not realistic.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry about getting to the next star just yet. Getting off Earth has been problem enough. But if you were able to set up large colonies on mars, or have station orbiting the other planets of our system, you could significantly reduce the problems on Earth. Beside, we could just build a huge ship (think large space station), and shove it in the right direction. It might arrive at the nearest star in a thousand years, but for the generations of people inside, life goes on as normal.

A secondary advantage of moving off world is that to do so requires refining technology to be even more efficient. Necessity is the mother of invention. A huge space station cannot be run nearly so inefficiently as Earth bound stuff, if it is to survive. The development of that technology will benefit everyone, even those on Earth.

why go all the way to mars, theres a nice large body much closer than that, the moon, plenty of space, we could send all our idiots there, build big biodomes with self contained environments, really cool i think, and people could jump really high if they wanted too

I really don't see how we can get enough people off world to make a difference. if we move a billion off planet, we still have 5 billion left, and in 10 years they'd be back up to where we are now.

actually at that point, I think the libertarians would take over.

soylient green???

nah, we move them all to the saraha and let them fertilize the desert.

though I'm more lenient than you are, I'm willing to let at least 40 percent survive.

The problem is not overpopulation in the US, it's overpopulation in developing countries such as China, India, some African countries, etc. In fact, the real rate of population growth for the US is negative, the only reason why nominal population is a positive number is because of the influx of immigrants from those overpopulated nations. The average american family produces 1.7 children (spare me if I'm off a bit), which means that even if everybody in the US got married & had kids, and people only died of old age, the population would still shrink (without immigration).

The true problem lies in those developing countries who are continuously over-crowded. China tried their "Golden Child Rule" approach to population control by only allowing parents to have 1 child. However, since it's almost impossible to keep track of everybody, and even if the people who were found with more than 1 child were caught, the 2nd child wouldn't be killed, it's almost impossible to truly control population. (Short of engineering STDs) And what makes matters worse is that the countries who are starving the most show the highest population growth, and vice versa. It's almost like humans tend to work against themselves as a whole.

On a more grim note, war, disease & natural disasters have done much more for population control than humans ever could without these tools. 200,000-300,000 swallowed up by the ocean in a major tsunami. Have one of these every so often until population is down to "reasonable levels". (Hey, don't label me as some apocalyptic lunatic, cause the fact is that without the aid of those "population controls", there would be even more wars fought on the planet today over ever more scarce resources. Again, it's humans seeing a problem, and then doing everything in their power to make it worse)

Hi Matts, All, 'nother cheery topic, and not likely to be stuffed with solutions. Some half-decent plague was the answer last time out wasn't it? Would be nice to think we could help developing countries achieve stable populations but individual greed, religion and history make it very hard. A bit of off-world colonisation would be lovely but we will need to step up the habitable worlds search and propulsion system design a bit.

George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and myself have already started complete unrelated projects towards this end. While I've been busy creating lists and establishing threshhold criteria, these others have jumped into their implementation phases. Currently, Saddam has run into difficulties, and George W. appears to have serious legal problems with the plan (the Constitution requires due process before removing burdens from the planet) so it looks like Kim Jong Il is the wave of the future.

To date, Kim Jong Il is not providing details of his plan or the exact threshhold of what consistutes an idiot -- a serious PR obstacle to wider acceptance of the plan.

Indeed, but he has made it abundantly clear that he considers the U.S. to be some sort of terrible threat to global security. I think that gives us a big hint.

Full-disclosure: I'm an American, and only sometimes proud of it.