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Thue
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Copenhagen, Denmark
Jan 1970
time: 06:16
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quote:
Originally posted by El Awrence
Well, yes, birth control and family planning could work miracles. But people in the developing world, need their children to help sustain themselves and their families. |
When there is still free land children are a plus. Once an area reaches a certain density the children becomes an expense instead of a help. It is my understanding that this is happening most places in the world.
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Without cash, they have no access to birth control or education ergo family planning. |
Sure, then make more children so they become even poorer on average. I am not saying it is not understandable, just that it is not a good development.
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Plus the high death rates and infant mortality rates, they reproduce like rabbits because they have no better choice. Unequal distribution of wealth again the problem. |
Actually the overpopulation problem is when the mortality rate goes down from it's historic levels.
You keep saying that "Unequal distribution of wealth". The real problem is lack of education and birth prevention means.
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Transcend
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Boulder, Colorado, USA
Apr 1999
time: 22:16
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quote:
Originally posted by drake
How do you figure they were in a better position? Britain had just pulled out and left a country sapped of resources and organization. They went in, raped India andwhen they left, India wasn't exactly what you'd call stable
If not democracy, what does this overwhelming sea of voices need? |
Britain left behind India many industrial facilities, and a railway network that was 5 times as long as China's. More Indians were also better educated than the Chinese under the British rule. Finally, the administration was mostly occupied by the locals anyway. Compared to what Chinese experienced, that was NOTHING. China in 1949 had suffered a civil war from 1912 to 1937, then the Japanese invasion which totally devastated the country, and finally the last civil war in which 1 more million people were killed.
After the War, India was still member of the Commonwealth, and was recognized by the world. The mainland China was not, and could only rely on greedy and unreliable Russians for foreign aid while India got its aid from most Western countries.
If you think India got raped by the British, then China was gang-raped and beaten to half-coma, just for comparison.
As for democracy, do you agree that sometimes the people has to be led? I would be especially suspicious about democracy if 90% of the population were illiterate. Even America, UK, and France didn't extend the voting right to all of its population at once. The general suffrage in these countries didn't exist until hundreds of years into their existence.
The ancient Romans certainly saw the need of dictatorships, and it was the constitutional dictatorship that saved Romans through hard times and prevented them from being defeated like the Greek city states.
Last edited by Transcend on 04-12-2001 at 21:53
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Caligastia
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You can make fun of me if you want, but the fact is that humans have good and bad stocks just like plants and animals and anyone who breeds animals or grows plants for a living will tell you what happens when bad stocks are reproduced.
Humans are animals, and although we are very intelligent our bodies are still subject to the basic laws of genetics no matter how much we would like to believe otherwise.
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Transcend
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Boulder, Colorado, USA
Apr 1999
time: 22:16
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quote:
Originally posted by drake
What does literacy have to do with the need of the people? Does illiteracy somehow = stupidity??
In any case, we're getting off the course....so back to the discussion at hand! |
illiterate = less informed, less knowledgable
A person needs information and knowledge to make good judgements and decisions. A person, who is not knowledgable and does not have good access to information, is very suceptable to demogogues, charlatans, and liars.
Back to topic. I'm an ardent supporter of population control, especially in countries where people's mindset has not caught up to the modern situations(lower death rate, social security, etc). Sometimes draconian measures are needed to break the poverty->more children->less resource/person->more poverty cycle.
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Transcend
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Boulder, Colorado, USA
Apr 1999
time: 22:16
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quote:
Originally posted by Bugs ****ing Bunny
Would all those in favour of enforced reduction of birthrates please scan and post proof that they've had vasectomies, please? Or is it just brown people whose numbers must be reduced?
Caligastia- there are no bad stocks. You weren't born crass and ill-informed. You become that way. |
Enforced reduction of birthrates doesn't imply dragging someone into clinics and have them sterilized. Even China is not doing that anymore.
Educating people, creating a stable social security system, improving the country's economy, making contraceptives freely available, and introducing policies that discourage having more than 2 children are the way to go. However, draconian methods may be needed in the first years to enforce the policy. No pain, no gain.
Once the people are prosperous and educated, they automatically restrain the number of children they are going to have. In wealthy Chinese cities like Shanghai, birth restrictions have been all but lifted, and still the birth rate remains flat.
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Caligastia
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quote:
Originally posted by Bugs ****ing Bunny
Would all those in favour of enforced reduction of birthrates please scan and post proof that they've had vasectomies, please? Or is it just brown people whose numbers must be reduced?
Caligastia- there are no bad stocks. You weren't born crass and ill-informed. You become that way. |
Why do you accept that there are bad stocks for plants and animals, but not for humans? All we are is glorified apes after all.
I never brought race into this, you did. All races have good stocks and bad stocks.
Transcend - I dont think it is difficult to decide what traits are desirable. Intelligence and a minimum of genetic disease would be a good start.
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Q Cubed
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t3h y3ll0w p3ril
Apr 1999
time: 23:16
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actually, disease may well become an issue again in the 21st century, if the current trend towards resistant microbes continue and no new antibiotics are developed.
the currently new ones, such as vancomycin, have already created some new strains resistant to it; this is why vancomycin is now currently restricted ONLY to those infections that cannot be fought with others.
this is sad;
of all the ways to go, i'd rather be vaporized in an instant by a cleansing nuclear blast than a long, slow, painful infection death.
now, as for population control. there is no real way to make everyone happy by restricting growth; it's just a fact.
this is why i think the governments are being woefully short-sighted with this "space explo-ration bidness". granted, right now, it seems to be on the whole, rather useless... but there will be utility, if and when colonization becomes viable...
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Caligastia
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quote:
Originally posted by Transcend
Measuring intelligence is exactly the problem. Who qualifies as stupid? And how much stupidity is too much? Humans are often specialists, meaning smart at doing one thing, but stupid at doing another thing. How do you resolve that?
Finally, you don't have the AUTHORITY to judge over other people's life and death, and no other humans do. |
To be honest I dont think we (in the western world) need to resort to draconian measures to encourage intelligent people to have more children and less able people to have less. Incentives to have more children or incentives for sterilization would be enough. That way everything would be voluntary. Its not really just about stupidity, its about success. If you are able to survive in this world for long enough to have children it should be because of your own ability, not because you are on a government benefit.
Nobody is judging over life and death here.
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Roman
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Bratislava, Slovakia
Sep 2000
time: 05:16
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quote:
Originally posted by Transcend
Five years of welfare is not much.
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I guess that's subjective, but IMO five years of welfare is a lot .
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However, Europeans with their socialist attitudes will sooner or later decline, just like the Roman Empire back then. Roman rulers made the same mistake by offering 'Bread and Circus' to their citizens, while leaving the work to slaves and foreigners. Does anyone see a parallel happening here? |
I fear you might be right. Unfortunately Europe is repeating the mistakes of the Romans. Instead of slaves, we have extremely cheap labour from immigrants... I am usually pro-immigration, but your post made me wonder. Perhaps Europe should encourage harder work among her own people and give them incentives to have more children. Otherwise, European civilization as we know it might come to an end replaced by something culturally new and nobody knows what. Mind you, the US is doing that to a degree too, but there is lesser danger of societal collapse there, because US is built on recent immigration anyway and naturalizes the immigrants, unlike Europe.
Hmm, reading my post above, I hope I am not turning xenophobic!?!  But then again, I guess it is not wrong to hope to preserve the cultural identity of your country/region/whatever. I guess another solution would be to naturalize the immigrants better, like you do in the US.
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Richard Bruns
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NC, USA
Nov 1999
time: 06:16
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quote:
Originally posted by drake
The whole idea richard is that less people need less natural (not scientific!) resources. Natural resources are not in-definite. I don't care what science people come up with, you dig from a mine long enough and the bounty will run out.
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So we use different resources. Remember the whale oil analogy? 150 years ago we didn't use petroleum; 150 years from now we probably won't need to. The ancient world depended on bronze, that was mostly replaced with steel. And even now steel is beginning to be replaced with polymers and composites. Humans have shown a capacity to grow beyond the need of certain resources, and we will continue to do so. Science may not be able to refill that mine, but it can make the contents of the mine obsolete by replacing them with something else.
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I'm not at all saying we should exterminate a few billion people to level the playing field or anything of the sort. But what is wrong with desiring a bit more moderation in population growth? Why must people breed like rabbits? |
Desiring it isn't the big problem. Forcing it on other people is the problem.
Nobody had to implement a one child policy with forced sterilizations and abortions in the USA, Europe, or Japan. All these areas were once as poor as thirld world countries today, and there was a time in the 1800's when we all "bred like rabbits." We did okay without government or UN intervention. Why can't other countries be allowed to do the same?
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Saying we should keep the worlds population in check isn't cruel Richard, promoting irresponsible reproduction is! |
"Irresponsible reproduction" What does that mean exactly? Is it irresponsible when rich westerners reproduce, or is it only irresponsible for "other" people to reproduce? If you are concerned about resource depletion, you should concentrate population control efforts in rich countries, since people there consume more.
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Where does it stop then Richard? 10 billion? 20 billion? 50 billion? By then we'd all be living in cities, packed in like sardines. Now if thats what you think the world needs, you're entitled to it. But it sounds pretty sick to me. |
Not necessarily. With the population density of New York City, all 6 billion of the world's people could fit in Yugoslavia. Sure the place has slums, but it's not generally considered a horrible place to live. The world has a lot of space, and with science we can
make more and more of that space useful.
For a more reasonable example, consider that, with the population density of Japan, about 2.5 billion people could live in the continental United States. Japan comes close to feeding itself despite the fact that about most of the place is mountainous and only 11% is cultivated.
There's plenty of land to go around.
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Say what you want Richard, but people, the masses, whatever you call them, are hurting the world more than helping it. |
Would you have said the same thing in 1900? With 1.6 billion people, the world was groaning under the weight of an absolutely enormous population, and it was obvious to anyone who considered the matter that there were far too many humans for the natural resources to support.
The idea of the earth supporting 6 billion people was as unthinkable in 1900 as the idea of it supporting 50 billion people is today.
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If we as a people don't do something about it, I guarantee nature will take it's course and do it for us. |
Malthus said that back when the human population was about 900 million. Ehrlich said it when we had about 3 billion people. Believe the prophets of doom you want, but history has other things to say about their predictions.
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The world is made up of have and have nots. And eventually the have nots are going to have nothing (except a patch of sand and rocks that couldn't grow a weed, like in Afghanistan). |
Funny how the average standard of living all over the world has increased even as population has mushroomed. Indians and Chinese today are fat better off than they were in 1900, despite the fact that there are a lot more of them in the same area.
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When resources become un-available, there will be wars, great wars to obtain them. (There already have been a few of those in the ME). And nature will take its course. |
Maybe. Or maybe people will decide that replacing a resource is cheaper and easier than fighting for it. The Nazis manufactured their oil in chemical plants in WW2 when they couldn't get sufficient supplies elsewhere. The process cost a lot, but they had enough oil until the Allied bombers hit the chemical plants.
The only reason we don't use the process today is that it is about five times as expendive as drilling oil out of the ground. Even if the world exhausted every drop of it's oil reserves, we'd still be able to make enough of it to function. The price of gas would just go up to about 6 dollars a gallon.
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I don't think the worlds current population is un-sustainable. Hell, its still got some room. But the expansion has to stop somewhere. Sometime. |
Yes, I agree that it has to stop somewhere. Technology does have its limits. So, just for fun, I'll calculate the carrying capacity of an arbutrarily advanced civilization.
This civilization would recycle all material products, as per the law of conservation of mass. So a human life needs the following inputs:
2000 calories a day in food.
About 20 cubic meters of space
5000 liters of oxygen per day
With an oxygen consumption of about , a healthy human can work at a rate of 100 watts.
The Earth recieves about
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Humans havent been around that long on this planet and look what we've already done to it. |
We have used it to support billions of people in a level of comfort and health that far surpasses any other time in history.
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Another few thousand years with the technology we have? I cringe to think of what this world could look like in the next century or two. |
I don't. Nothing prevents the world from looking like Japan, even if there are 25 billion people or so. Overpopulation is not the world's biggest problem. The problem is bad government, lack of education, ineffeciancy, and squandered resources. We should focus on these problems instead of trying to reduce populations.
If we manage things well and respect individual initiative and freedom, we would have no problem supporting any number of people.
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Thue
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Copenhagen, Denmark
Jan 1970
time: 06:16
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quote:
Originally posted by Sandman
So much so that the EU pays farmers to diversify into other areas. |
No need for the americans to criticize this. We know perfectly well the EU farming policy suck.
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MORON
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Vancouver, Canada
Jun 2001
time: 13:16
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quote:
I don't. Nothing prevents the world from looking like Japan, even if there are 25 billion people or so. Overpopulation is not the world's biggest problem. The problem is bad government, lack of education, ineffeciancy, and squandered resources. |
No Oil ....... no trees...... no meat...... super high rice price..... (in Japan, Rice costs 3+ time more due to protectionism) pollution as bad as Japan? I'll pass....
(Note: Japanese population is declining thanks to low birth rates....)
Japan imports huge amounts of nature resources for its uses. Wonder why Japan decided to fight the US in WWII, well an oil embargo is one of them.
However, I'd agree that without the inefficiency and waste of both human and natural resources, much more people can be support. However, it is not infinite.
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well unless you shoot metal into space or into a particle accelerator it can't be destroyed, so all we have to do is recycle. |
Do you want to wait 20,000 years for trees you plant today to become oil?
The current consumption outstrip nature's recycling ability. However, the change in technology have saved us by giving replacements faster than the resources running out.
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I think the gloom and doomers tend to see the world and its resources as finite where as I believe the possiblity of resources are infinite. |
Assuming people can use infinite variety of resources.... yeah right.... or not 
I'll just go drill that borehole....
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04-12-2001 20:00
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