[pitt]

I was having a discussion with friends about overpopulation. There is a video on youtube where Bill Gates says to reduce population

They are calling Bill Gates a devil. I told them that Bill Gates simply said to control population growth and they said that this is wrong because there is no such thing as overpopulation. I agree that the world doesn't have a human carrying capacity but I think controlling population growth may do more good than harm.

Think about countries such as China where if they didn't control population growth, it would be almost impossible to manage their judicial system, reason why they tend to give harsh punishments to their citizens in order to reduce time and costs (I read a report on this years ago, not sure if the country was China, but I am sure it was an Asian country and 90% sure it was China).

Think about countries in development where the less educated people believe that if they have lots of kids, there is a higher probability of being prosperous but this mindset tends to keep them in the poverty line. If you can't afford school for none of your 11 kids, there is a high probability that some of them will become criminals. That means more crimes and a more disruptive system. I could go on and on.

I am not an expert on this subject but because my friends were all against my arguments, I thought I may be missing something and I am sure some of you guys understand this better.

Is it not a good idea that some governments want to control population growth?

[Moma]

I think that governments have always wanted to control population and introduced certain things in place to ensure that population does not overgrow, especially in the West. I do think that there is a relationship between economy and population. In less prosperous countries, where the average person has a lower life expectancy and less resources on hand, they have more children as an insurance policy in order to preserve their gene pool. If you have 11 children, they can begin to help one on the farm or whatever service that the individual's family offers in order to make a living.

I could definitely go into some of the things that Western governments introduce to keep certain groups at bay and prevent overpopulation. There is power in numbers...

[Glaucon]

how can it be good?

[Moma]

(01-23-2015 06:54 AM)Glaucon Wrote:  

how can it be good?

You make a good point.
Maybe another side of the argument could say that there is no such thing as over population but it's really a case of under utilisation. If you can plug in every or most members of that 'over populated' society into skillsets delivering services/wares that benefits the country and adds to its GDP, then it will be a productive country.

It's only when the population is under productive, then it can be seen as over population.

Similar when you got a house full of people and only a few are pulling their weight, the rest of them are lounging on the furniture, eating cereal and playing PS4 all day, then you will feel like the house is totally crowded.

[freeuser]

One just has to take a quick look, at the list of countries by crude birth rate, to notice that the countries on top, only make their lack of economic develovment worse, by having so much offspring:

List of countries by birth rate

[Foolsgo1d]

War, genocide, starvation, plague and natural disaster are the ways nature can keep a lid on human beings. We're just able to overcome these problems through technology, innovation and sheer numbers.

It interests me because in nature you will always see a decline in a species which has become too big for its own good through illness, a new predator or starvation.

[infowarrior1]

(01-23-2015 07:39 AM)Foolsgo1d Wrote:  

War, genocide, starvation, plague and natural disaster are the ways nature can keep a lid on human beings. We're just able to overcome these problems through technology, innovation and sheer numbers.

It interests me because in nature you will always see a decline in a species which has become too big for its own good through illness, a new predator or starvation.

Unless we expand and colonize space. Then the entire dynamics will change and over population will not be an issue as much anymore. Space is theoretically very big after all or even infinite.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

Bill Gates is a rotten piece of shit for other reasons than him claiming that there may be too many people on Earth.

His family was pure into pure eugenics - his father actually quite active in it before the Nazis gave the term a bad name. Gates is pushing vaccines like crazy to malnourished populations who don't have clean water or good sanitary conditions. Plus he is already making plans to transfer his wealth to a foundation just like the Rockefellers did - foundations that his family will still control forever while claiming that he is there to "save the world."

Now here a few facts about overpopulation:

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/content...ease-relax

The earth has it's limits but we are not there yet. For the elite we had too many of the wrong kind of people 200 years ago. Currently most of the problems generated by humans are based on moronic fossil fuel technology & littering earth with useless junk. All those problems could be solved within 5-10 years, but of course that won't happen because then our economy's dependence on fossil fuels, on planned obsolescence and most of all on constant mindless growth due to the fact that we have to pay back useless usury for the top 0,01%.

The facts:
+ Earth can generate enough food for 15 bio. easily. Africa alone can feed the whole world. Currently we even produce enough for almost 10 bio. people, but it's redistributed wrongly. Those numbers are even from the UN.

+ If you look at densely populated cities, then it seems as if there are too many people on earth, but what they don't tell is you that even in countries like India you have huge areas of land with hardly anyone living in it - jungles, rural areas where you can fly for hours without seeing any human being.

+ To prove how much space we have on earth: If you took for example every family on earth and assumed that every nuclear family had 4 members - then you would give every such family 4300sqft or 400m2 of land, you could literally fit the entire population of earth in the area of TEXAS ALONE! Every fucking human being could live in Texas while having 4300sqft of land for a family of 4. If you took the singles or families of 2 into skyscrapers then you would have likely room for roads.
Now of course no one would do such a thing and squeeze the entire human population into one giant suburbia, but remember - the entire fucking earth - all of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, South America and most of North America - everything would be free of humans. That is how much space we have on our planet.



That said I would not mind having imposed limits on the number of children you can have. 1 child would be too harsh, but 2-3 would be fine. The reproduction rate is by the way around 2,3 which means that if a country is having 2,3 children, then it does not reproduce - it remains stable. In all Western countries we are far below 2,3 and even the Arabic ones like Saudi-Arabia are under 2,3 as of now.

You know what would be the best way to lower population growth? Raise standard of living, but the elite would not like that - they prefer death and mayhem campaigns.

And how would my recommended system look like?

- no usury - everyone can afford a home interest-free based on his income
- no suppression of technologies which give us free energy and other such goodies
- most of humanity either having a nice house with huge garden or living in Hilton-like skyscrapers overlooking parks (In fact Frank Lloyd Wright proposed different modern cities with huge 100 stories-high skyscrapers being built all surrounded by huge green areas - that way everyone having a great life quality instead of the cramped 5-story fucktards of the 17th century city design - where you spend 1 mio. $ to look at the neighbor taking a dump on the other side of the street)
- durable goods which are designed to last decades

Instead our bloody rulers have brought us GMOs with embedded pesticides to cut our life's short, toxic FDA improved food ingredients is another yummy, deadly medical system is another plus (funny when MDs go on strike than mortality rates go down too - http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-p...13689.html - to be fair emergency rooms were still operational - they are doing great work there, but anything else needs a system re-boot). Instead of talking to us and voicing the concerns, improving the system they decided to go the roundabout route and not tell us that they are cutting population numbers in secret.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23126814 Even the BBC asked - "Where are the missing 90 year olds?"
They are dead, that's where they are due to life-expectancy falling versus the one in the 1990s.

Also thanks to willing high level co-workers like Bill Gates. But let the masses kiss his ass and claim that he is such a wonderful man.

[heavy]

Seems like the preface "over-" implies it's not good.

I read on a blog a few months ago, I can't remember which blog now, about how before the modern age (I think industrial revolution) the only way to grow economies was through population growth...because productivity was tied to labor. It was an interesting premise...sorry can't remember the source.

[Paracelsus]

I think we need to remember that one reason third world countries are overpopulated is because of their lack of mechanisation. This seems to be the main driver of declining birth rates in the West - the fact that, perhaps at an unconscious level, we don't breed as many out of sheer necessity. If the family owns a tractor, they don't need to have six kids either hoeing the ground or supporting those who are hoeing the ground.

In addition, urbanisation tends to foster declining birth rates because again, not as many children are needed to tend the farms. And the authors of Freakonomics point out that urbanisation is a major factor in innovation and technological development mainly because it allows the faster flow of ideas - a guy with an idea for an invention is going to have a better chance of seeing it come to life if he lives in a city as opposed to a guy in a rural area simply because it's much more likely the other people necessary to bring that invention to life have a higher chance of crossing his path in a city than they do in a rural area.

(In passing, this is a vital argument in favour of Internet access to the entire planet - mainly because the Internet makes the world smaller and thus ideas are spread faster and wider across it.)

According to wiki, roughly 48% of the planet is at sub-replacement fertility rates. More technologically advanced societies - for reasons including the loss of religiosity and the fact women don't breed in relationships less than marriage - are still slightly increasing their populations because they're importing, so you're looking rather at demographic changes in first world nations for the most part.

I would still argue that more population is better than less - mainly because the knowledge base of the species gets larger as the population gets larger. Yes, I realise that Einsteins and Stephen Hawkings only crop up rarely, but a bigger population perforce creates more chance of creating more of them at the same time. Consider peer pressure - Gladwell's notation that the Jamaican high school boys' sprint times as a group are faster than any American high school boy's sprint times, and not because of genetic advantage as such. If you have more intelligent peers, they reinforce and push each other to greater heights.

This is also fostered by the fact the planet's managed to more or less hang onto its knowledge base and technological innovations since roughly 1700 or so. It's more or less unprecedented in history since as a species when we lose an advanced society most of its knowledge base goes with it - Rome's achievements were mostly lost after the fall of its empire and were only regained incrementally over the next thousand years or thereabouts. I would have thought in our era while it's possible we might all perish in a nuclear armageddon, the odds of losing our knowledge base for how we build things like skyscrapers or microchips are going to be harder to lose. About the biggest threat to humanity's knowledge base now is a catastrophic interruption to the Internet at large, since we're investing so much of our former paper-recorded knowledge into it without a real or viable backup.

I'm always a bit skeptical of overpopulation arguments. It's basically Reverend Malthus by another name, and he keeps getting disproved every day.

[infowarrior1]

(01-23-2015 07:57 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  

Bill Gates is a rotten piece of shit for other reasons than him claiming that there may be too many people on Earth.

His family was pure into pure eugenics - his father actually quite active in it before the Nazis gave the term a bad name. Gates is pushing vaccines like crazy to malnourished populations who don't have clean water or good sanitary conditions. Plus he is already making plans to transfer his wealth to a foundation just like the Rockefellers did - foundations that his family will still control forever while claiming that he is there to "save the world."

Now here a few facts about overpopulation:

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/content...ease-relax

The earth has it's limits but we are not there yet. For the elite we had too many of the wrong kind of people 200 years ago. Currently most of the problems generated by humans are based on moronic fossil fuel technology & littering earth with useless junk. All those problems could be solved within 5-10 years, but of course that won't happen because then our economy's dependence on fossil fuels, on planned obsolescence and most of all on constant mindless growth due to the fact that we have to pay back useless usury for the top 0,01%.

The facts:
+ Earth can generate enough food for 15 bio. easily. Africa alone can feed the whole world. Currently we even produce enough for almost 10 bio. people, but it's redistributed wrongly. Those numbers are even from the UN.

+ If you look at densely populated cities, then it seems as if there are too many people on earth, but what they don't tell is you that even in countries like India you have huge areas of land with hardly anyone living in it - jungles, rural areas where you can fly for hours without seeing any human being.

+ To prove how much space we have on earth: If you took for example every family on earth and assumed that every nuclear family had 4 members - then you would give every such family 4300sqft or 400m2 of land, you could literally fit the entire population of earth in the area of TEXAS ALONE! Every fucking human being could live in Texas while having 4300sqft of land for a family of 4. If you took the singles or families of 2 into skyscrapers then you would have likely room for roads.
Now of course no one would do such a thing and squeeze the entire human population into one giant suburbia, but remember - the entire fucking earth - all of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, South America and most of North America - everything would be free of humans. That is how much space we have on our planet.



That said I would not mind having imposed limits on the number of children you can have. 1 child would be too harsh, but 2-3 would be fine. The reproduction rate is by the way around 2,3 which means that if a country is having 2,3 children, then it does not reproduce - it remains stable. In all Western countries we are far below 2,3 and even the Arabic ones like Saudi-Arabia are under 2,3 as of now.

You know what would be the best way to lower population growth? Raise standard of living, but the elite would not like that - they prefer death and mayhem campaigns.

And how would my best recommended system look like?

- no usury - everyone can afford a home interest-free based on his income
- no suppression of technologies which give us free energy and other such goodies
- most of humanity either having a nice house with huge garden or living in Hilton-like skyscrapers overlooking parks (In fact Frank Lloyd Wright proposed different modern cities with huge 100 stories-high skyscrapers being built all surrounded by huge green areas - that way everyone having a great life quality instead of the cramped 5-story fucktards of the 17th century city design)
- durable goods which are designed to last decades

Instead our bloody rulers have brought us GMOs with embedded pesticides to cut our life's short, toxic FDA improved food ingredients is another yummy, deadly medical system is another plus (funny when MDs go on strike than mortality rates go down too - http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-p...13689.html - to be fair emergency rooms were still operational - they are doing great work there, but anything else needs a system re-boot). Instead of talking to us and voicing the concerns, improving the system they decided to go the roundabout route and not tell us that they are cutting population numbers in secret.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23126814 Even the BBC asked - "Where are the missing 90 year olds?"
They are dead, that's where they are due to life-expectancy falling versus the one in the 1990s.

Also thanks to willing high level co-workers like Bill Gates. But let the masses kiss his ass and claim that he is such a wonderful man.

A few people like me would like a clean pristine wilderness(and sky free of light pollution where I can see the night sky in all its glory) with a decent minimalist and well designed aesthetically pleasing house.

[getdownonit]

[Gnu]

Fear of overpopulation might have been justifiable in the 1960s, but in the Americas, Europe, and East Asia, depopulation has long been a more realistic concern. Essentially, only the Middle East and Africa are in the midst of substantial population growth curves for the foreseeable future, while the rest of the planet is either stable or on the verge of decline.

Seriously. While the perception may be that the population is out of control, if you live in a developed country, the facts are that any current growth is merely the residual tail of a trend that will reverse toward depopulation in a matter of years or at most a few decades.

[SteveMcMahon]

The term "overpopulation" implies that it's a bad thing. It's a loaded term, like "rape culture".

The overpopulation meme is a very old one that refuses to die despite having been repeatedly discredited over the centuries. It originated with this guy, Thomas Malthus:


"Ladies..."

In 1798, Malthus published his famous treatise that argued poor people were having too many babies and Something Must Be Done or else we'd all starve.

Though Malthus himself was no eugenicist, this strain of thought influenced later abortionists such as Margaret Sanger, who was convinced that brown people were having too many babies and Something Must Be Done.

In truth, more human beings is usually a good thing, and Malthusian catastrophe hasn't yet happened in the real world - apart from a few isolated examples of primitive tribes.

More people are a good thing because every human being has the capacity to make his fellows richer in some way. He might be an Einstein or a Henry Ford or a Bill Gates or a Beethoven or an Elvis Presley. But even us average folks do jobs and give to charity and make the lives of people around us a little bit better in lots of different ways.

More people = more specialisation, more total wealth, more eyes on any human problem you care to name.

The reason why Malthusian catastrophe hasn't happened is because human beings improve and invent resources, and adapt to their surroundings. Crop yields have gone up consistently for centuries. People in urban societies have fewer kids than poor rural people do, which means economic development itself tends to slow population growth.

Here's a chart on global population growth to show you what I mean:



We as free men should reject any notion that human beings are a curse on this planet, that our numbers need to be limited so as to stave off environmental collapse/poverty/starvation/whatever.

They do not.

One thing that is certain is that the Earth has a limited shelf life for human habitation. In a couple of billion years this planet will be too hot to support life, because of changes in the lifecycle of the Sun.

We have a whole universe out there waiting for us to explore. The more people we have around to help us innovate, expand, and eventually take our species to the stars, the better.


Those evil Space Princesses aren't going to bang themselves.

[Glaucon]

(01-23-2015 08:01 AM)infowarrior1 Wrote:  

A few people like me would like a clean pristine wilderness(and sky free of light pollution where I can see the night sky in all its glory) with a decent minimalist and well designed aesthetically pleasing house.

Count me in. There is way too many people in my opinion, especially with the coming automation revolution.

[vinman]

(01-23-2015 07:57 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  

Bill Gates is a rotten piece of shit for other reasons than him claiming that there may be too many people on Earth.

His family was pure into pure eugenics - his father actually quite active in it before the Nazis gave the term a bad name. Gates is pushing vaccines like crazy to malnourished populations who don't have clean water or good sanitary conditions. Plus he is already making plans to transfer his wealth to a foundation just like the Rockefellers did - foundations that his family will still control forever while claiming that he is there to "save the world."

Now here a few facts about overpopulation:

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/content...ease-relax

The earth has it's limits but we are not there yet. For the elite we had too many of the wrong kind of people 200 years ago. Currently most of the problems generated by humans are based on moronic fossil fuel technology & littering earth with useless junk. All those problems could be solved within 5-10 years, but of course that won't happen because then our economy's dependence on fossil fuels, on planned obsolescence and most of all on constant mindless growth due to the fact that we have to pay back useless usury for the top 0,01%.

The facts:
+ Earth can generate enough food for 15 bio. easily. Africa alone can feed the whole world. Currently we even produce enough for almost 10 bio. people, but it's redistributed wrongly. Those numbers are even from the UN.

+ If you look at densely populated cities, then it seems as if there are too many people on earth, but what they don't tell is you that even in countries like India you have huge areas of land with hardly anyone living in it - jungles, rural areas where you can fly for hours without seeing any human being.

+ To prove how much space we have on earth: If you took for example every family on earth and assumed that every nuclear family had 4 members - then you would give every such family 4300sqft or 400m2 of land, you could literally fit the entire population of earth in the area of TEXAS ALONE! Every fucking human being could live in Texas while having 4300sqft of land for a family of 4. If you took the singles or families of 2 into skyscrapers then you would have likely room for roads.
Now of course no one would do such a thing and squeeze the entire human population into one giant suburbia, but remember - the entire fucking earth - all of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, South America and most of North America - everything would be free of humans. That is how much space we have on our planet.



That said I would not mind having imposed limits on the number of children you can have. 1 child would be too harsh, but 2-3 would be fine. The reproduction rate is by the way around 2,3 which means that if a country is having 2,3 children, then it does not reproduce - it remains stable. In all Western countries we are far below 2,3 and even the Arabic ones like Saudi-Arabia are under 2,3 as of now.

You know what would be the best way to lower population growth? Raise standard of living, but the elite would not like that - they prefer death and mayhem campaigns.

And how would my recommended system look like?

- no usury - everyone can afford a home interest-free based on his income
- no suppression of technologies which give us free energy and other such goodies
- most of humanity either having a nice house with huge garden or living in Hilton-like skyscrapers overlooking parks (In fact Frank Lloyd Wright proposed different modern cities with huge 100 stories-high skyscrapers being built all surrounded by huge green areas - that way everyone having a great life quality instead of the cramped 5-story fucktards of the 17th century city design - where you spend 1 mio. $ to look at the neighbor taking a dump on the other side of the street)
- durable goods which are designed to last decades

Instead our bloody rulers have brought us GMOs with embedded pesticides to cut our life's short, toxic FDA improved food ingredients is another yummy, deadly medical system is another plus (funny when MDs go on strike than mortality rates go down too - http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-p...13689.html - to be fair emergency rooms were still operational - they are doing great work there, but anything else needs a system re-boot). Instead of talking to us and voicing the concerns, improving the system they decided to go the roundabout route and not tell us that they are cutting population numbers in secret.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23126814 Even the BBC asked - "Where are the missing 90 year olds?"
They are dead, that's where they are due to life-expectancy falling versus the one in the 1990s.

Also thanks to willing high level co-workers like Bill Gates. But let the masses kiss his ass and claim that he is such a wonderful man.

Thanks Zelcorpian for posting this. If it's not "Climate Change", it's this horse shit.

[Hardy Daytona]

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here.
It came to me when I tried to classify our species and I realized that we're not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but humans do not. We move to an area and multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way we can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is?
A virus.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

(01-23-2015 01:02 PM)Hardy Daytona Wrote:  

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here.
It came to me when I tried to classify our species and I realized that we're not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but humans do not. We move to an area and multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way we can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is?
A virus.

Quoting Agent Smith from the The Matrix is truly good. Because the machines had such a great thing going for us:



All the end-of-resources scenarios were wrong the last 200 years.
Nature is brutal and ruthless and species were wiping each other out before we came along. Their "equilibrium" is one in which populations get killed if they cannot adjust to the changing conditions.

We humans are the pinnacle species of this planet despite our often moronic behaviors. But if you observed any time at all how intelligent animals view the humans who show them love, then you would realize that those animals are absolutely fascinated with us - to them we are a mystery and a marvel at the same time.

We humans can make this earth a paradise or hell - but until you have a definite answer what the reason for life itself is for all living creatures, then you cannot decide about the worthlessness of one living being or not. We are what we are - we make the best of it, but we humans also contribute to the planet - billions of dogs & cats cannot err We can be stupid assholes, but we can be loving individuals too.

And there are gazillion inhabited planets - no reason to wallow in self-loathing - gazillions of alien races have been born, will be born, will rise, then fall and extinguish over the years - it's better to embrace life and also the more conscious existence of a sentient species despite the growing pains that we may have.



Each one of those blots is an entire galaxy like our huge Milky Way. Agent Smith was a viral asshole - don't be one by quoting him.

[WalterBlack]

In third world countries people used to have a lot of kids back in the day because many of them would die and few people expected all of their kids to have a long life. For a lot of families of my parents’ generation (born in 1940s), only 2 or 3 kids make it past the age of 5. There’s usually 5 or more sibling who died very young. Also a lot of people were farmers and needed more hands to work the land.

There’s been a population boom in a lot of third world countries due to better medical care being available, plus more food since food supplies are now controlled in a better manner. There hasn’t been a famine in India for around 70 years now, whereas before people were fucked if the annual Monsoon rains failed.

Population growth is now slowing down, since more women enter the workforce, and tend to have less kids.

[Collide]

Overpopulation will mostly center around Africa. Previous estimates were not concerned about overpopulation because they assumed that as health increased in Africa, Africans would stop having as many children. That prediction so far has been false.

http://www.inquisitr.com/1623948/overpop...predicted/

Quote:

“Our new projections are probabilistic, and we find that there will probably be between 9.6 and 12.3 billion people in 2100,” Raftery told Medical News Today about the expected extent of overpopulation at the start of the next century. “This projection is based on a statistical model that uses all available past data on fertility and mortality from all countries in a systematic way, unlike previous projections that were based on expert assumptions.”

Raftery examined the latest data on fertility, population and mortality. His prediction adds up to an addition five billion more people than previously expected in less than a century, according to Medical News Today.

“Our new projections are probabilistic, and we find that there will probably be between 9.6 and 12.3 billion people in 2100,” Raftery told Medical News Today about the expected extent of overpopulation at the start of the next century. “This projection is based on a statistical model that uses all available past data on fertility and mortality from all countries in a systematic way, unlike previous projections that were based on expert assumptions.”

One difference between Raftery’s projections of overpopulation and previous projections is that the fertility rate in Africa was expected to decline more quickly than it actually is declining. Experts believed that developing countries would begin to mirror the scenario of lower fertility, healthier adults and delayed mortality that developed countries experienced last century. Raftery’s overpopulation research found that in Nigeria, though child mortality rates have declined with development, women are still having an average of six children.

[speakeasy]

(01-23-2015 07:57 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  

Bill Gates is a rotten piece of shit for other reasons than him claiming that there may be too many people on Earth.

His family was pure into pure eugenics - his father actually quite active in it before the Nazis gave the term a bad name. Gates is pushing vaccines like crazy to malnourished populations who don't have clean water or good sanitary conditions. Plus he is already making plans to transfer his wealth to a foundation just like the Rockefellers did - foundations that his family will still control forever while claiming that he is there to "save the world."

Now here a few facts about overpopulation:

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/content...ease-relax

The earth has it's limits but we are not there yet. For the elite we had too many of the wrong kind of people 200 years ago. Currently most of the problems generated by humans are based on moronic fossil fuel technology & littering earth with useless junk. All those problems could be solved within 5-10 years, but of course that won't happen because then our economy's dependence on fossil fuels, on planned obsolescence and most of all on constant mindless growth due to the fact that we have to pay back useless usury for the top 0,01%.

The facts:
+ Earth can generate enough food for 15 bio. easily. Africa alone can feed the whole world. Currently we even produce enough for almost 10 bio. people, but it's redistributed wrongly. Those numbers are even from the UN.

+ If you look at densely populated cities, then it seems as if there are too many people on earth, but what they don't tell is you that even in countries like India you have huge areas of land with hardly anyone living in it - jungles, rural areas where you can fly for hours without seeing any human being.

+ To prove how much space we have on earth: If you took for example every family on earth and assumed that every nuclear family had 4 members - then you would give every such family 4300sqft or 400m2 of land, you could literally fit the entire population of earth in the area of TEXAS ALONE! Every fucking human being could live in Texas while having 4300sqft of land for a family of 4. If you took the singles or families of 2 into skyscrapers then you would have likely room for roads.
Now of course no one would do such a thing and squeeze the entire human population into one giant suburbia, but remember - the entire fucking earth - all of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, South America and most of North America - everything would be free of humans. That is how much space we have on our planet.



That said I would not mind having imposed limits on the number of children you can have. 1 child would be too harsh, but 2-3 would be fine. The reproduction rate is by the way around 2,3 which means that if a country is having 2,3 children, then it does not reproduce - it remains stable. In all Western countries we are far below 2,3 and even the Arabic ones like Saudi-Arabia are under 2,3 as of now.

You know what would be the best way to lower population growth? Raise standard of living, but the elite would not like that - they prefer death and mayhem campaigns.

And how would my recommended system look like?

- no usury - everyone can afford a home interest-free based on his income
- no suppression of technologies which give us free energy and other such goodies
- most of humanity either having a nice house with huge garden or living in Hilton-like skyscrapers overlooking parks (In fact Frank Lloyd Wright proposed different modern cities with huge 100 stories-high skyscrapers being built all surrounded by huge green areas - that way everyone having a great life quality instead of the cramped 5-story fucktards of the 17th century city design - where you spend 1 mio. $ to look at the neighbor taking a dump on the other side of the street)
- durable goods which are designed to last decades

Instead our bloody rulers have brought us GMOs with embedded pesticides to cut our life's short, toxic FDA improved food ingredients is another yummy, deadly medical system is another plus (funny when MDs go on strike than mortality rates go down too - http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-p...13689.html - to be fair emergency rooms were still operational - they are doing great work there, but anything else needs a system re-boot). Instead of talking to us and voicing the concerns, improving the system they decided to go the roundabout route and not tell us that they are cutting population numbers in secret.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23126814 Even the BBC asked - "Where are the missing 90 year olds?"
They are dead, that's where they are due to life-expectancy falling versus the one in the 1990s.

Also thanks to willing high level co-workers like Bill Gates. But let the masses kiss his ass and claim that he is such a wonderful man.

The argument that the world could be put into Texas and given a house thus the world isn't overpopulated is misleading. First off, that fact itself is mind-blowing to me, not comforting. I've driven across Texas before in its entirety from San Antonio to Texarkana. That was ONE FUCKING LONG DRIVE! To think that there are enough people to fill the entire state wall to wall is staggering to me.

But the reason it's misleading is that those people would need far more than the resources of Texas to survive. Each person needs 2,000 calories a day, and fresh water, and enough energy for them to power their homes, cars and computers, and a number of other natural resources. Each person actually requires around an acre of land alone just to grow enough food to survive, as well as a fresh water supply that naturally replenishes as quickly as it is utilized in order to be sustainable(which is a big problem in California these days). Then we must remember that the majority of land on the earth isn't even arable. Think about how many desert areas there are, places that are cold with short growing seasons, mountains areas that don't work for farming, areas with nutrient poor soils. So it's not like all the empty land we have is capable of producing food.

And of course overpopulation is not a uniform thing, it can be present in some places and absent in others. Norway is not overpopulated. Bangladesh is however. It's also a very dynamic definition that can change depending on human habits and productivity boosted by technology. So let's say you have a 100 acres of land supporting 100 people. Well you may be able to stuff more people on that land if you can come up with ever more ways to genetically modify crops and make them bigger using the same amount of soil and water. So this theoretical carrying capacity number is a moving target and nobody is entirely sure what's the maximum amount we can hold. In the days of Malthus there was no Monsanto and pesticides. It's also highly dependent on our eating habits. If we're talking about a global population of vegans, then the amount of land we need goes down. If we're talking about people who eat meat, then it goes up. Fresh water is always a major constraint, but if someone comes up with a cheap and efficient way to desalinate ocean water, then that will majorly change the carrying capacity of the earth. But for the time being, only 3% of the water on the planet is freshwater and most of that is locked up in polar ice.

Now everything I'm saying above is only with regards to food. There's also all the other forms of resources we require that we don't eat, like enough forest land to have timber to build homes and furniture, oil to drive cars and heat homes, raw materials like iron for building materials, etc. If everyone on the planet was consuming at an American level we'd need several earths worth of resources. If we're all living like rural villagers in Africa and India who consume basically nothing that they don't make with their own hands, then we could theoretically have many more people on Earth than we do now.

Remember too that we also don't want to have 100% utilization of the planet's resources. As human we also desire things like open spaces, national parks, ecosystem preserves. So even though many of these places could be used as arable land and freshwater sources such as the Amazon, we still need them because those trees are putting oxygen back into the atmosphere and serve as habitats for other types of life.

[TravelerKai]

Killer post Zelscorpion. You nailed it.

[TigerMandingo]

Investigative journalist F. William Engdahl called out Gates on his "philanthropy" a while ago too.

Quote:

Gates and Buffett are major funders of global population reduction programs, as is Turner, whose UN Foundation was created to funnel $1 billion of his tax-free stock option earnings in AOL-Time-Warner into various birth reduction programs in the developing world.19 The programs in Africa and elsewhere are masked as philanthropy and providing health services for poor Africans. In reality they involve involuntary population sterilization via vaccination and other medicines that make women of child-bearing age infertile. The Gates Foundation, where Buffett deposited the bulk of his wealth two years ago, is also backing introduction of GMO seeds into Africa under the cloak of the Kofi Annan-led ‘Second Green Revolution’ in Africa. The introduction of GMO patented seeds in Africa to date has met with enormous indigenous resistance.

Health experts point out that were the intent of Gates really to improve the health and well-being of black Africans, the same hundreds of millions of dollars the Gates Foundation has invested in untested and unsafe vaccines could be used in providing minimal sanitary water and sewage systems. Vaccinating a child who then goes to drink feces-polluted river water is hardly healthy in any respect. But of course cleaning up the water and sewage systems of Africa would revolutionize the health conditions of the Continent.

Gates’ TED2010 comments about having new vaccines to reduce global population were obviously no off-the-cuff remark. For those who doubt, the presentation Gates made at the TED2009 annual gathering said almost exactly the same thing about reducing population to cut global warming. For the mighty and powerful of the Good Club, human beings seem to be a form of pollution equal to CO2.

[GoldHawkStar]

In a few of my classes I took last year (World Geography and Macroeconomics), we were taught that reducing the population would be both good and bad for various reasons.

In my opinion, reducing it would do more good. Economic development would thrive and poverty would go down.

[Switch]

There will be overpopulation in certain areas with population growth that is too fast for food production to keep up. I imagine a place like Nigeria in 100 years or so could run into this problem. A lot of the population fearmongerers seem to think that we will wake up one day with 20 billion people on the planet with food production for only 6 billion. This simply won't happen. Food production will rise, but it will mean more advancements in GMOs (which receive a lot more hate than they deserve) and deforestation.

The planet will eventually reach a human carrying capacity, but humans decide what that carrying capacity is. If we decide to go the "ultra-GMO, deforest every tree and use the land for crops, force everyone to eat vegetarian and put every person on earth in 200 story apartments to save land" route, that number could easily be 30 billion or more people. But if we wanted to maintain natural forests and ecosystems, live in reasonably sized cities and eat organic foods and continue to eat meat, we've likely already reached that number, and probably surpassed it a while ago at 5 billion or so.

If anyone has good knowledge about GMO's they should throw up some info. GMOs are what allow America to work the way it does. If we wanted to all eat non-GMO (different than organic), it would take 4x more land and cost considerably more (today we can produce 4x more corn per acre than just 100 years ago, thanks to GMOs).