This one was on my agenda before The Cheney heart transplant issue arose.
Thomas Malthus proposed that humanity will reach a point where the human population reaches an unsustainable number.
So here is the question: Who gets to decide what the population should be? AND who gets to live!
Toss in folks like ELF and others with a rather vague, but similar, position and you have one view?
Not gonna offer my opinion… Yet.
Everything on the planet has something that keeps it in check. We have war, disease, and famine. We’ll be kept busy for a long time skirting those three alone.
Famine, poverty, mass starvation…
Oh and maybe the people with the guns get to decide…ya know…Just sayin.
PintoNag #1: Now you get MY opinion. Of course there are natural checks and balances, Dunno if I’d add war, but still…
The Permian extinction, the loss of the dinos, and who knows how many other similar? Just the two WWs accounted for millions,
This portends something different.
The key word is selective!
Interesting question, indeed.
Through these rose colored glasses it’s pretty simple. I get to decide that for myself and no one else. Same for you. Of course, when folks demand that they get to make the decision, but everyone else must pay for it, that does rather change the discussion.
If government assumes the cost of healthcare, then politicians or government bureaucrats must, of necessity, become the arbiters of who receives it, as stewardship of their limited resources. If individuals retain the responsibility for providing and allocating resources for healthcare, then the resources have the potential to expand to meet the needs. And of course, kill all the lawyers…
Malthusian postulation though didn’t account for the great increase in yield totals per acre of arable ground. The problem is less food totals than an inequitable distribution mechanism, largely in existence because of tin pot dictators in shitty countries. If everyone had access to the food stuff now available, everyone could be fat like Americans.
It’s simple. Those with plows, plow – as directed by those with swords.
And Zero: war is indeed a natural condition. It has been with mankind throughout human history. That doesn’t appear to be about to change any time soon.
What TSO says.
These United States, along with Canada,Argentina and Brazil produce enough food stuffs to feed the world’s population several times over. The problem is one of distribution, that distribution being stymied by those who wish to use starvation as a means of population control.
There’s a very good reason why roads and railroads only go about 20 miles inland along Somalia’s coastline. It keeps the warlords in control because the people have to come in to the coastal areas for food when the droughts hit.
It’s been like this since the time of the Pharoahs, when they built huge central grain depositories so as to ration it out by decree.
The Romans did a similar thing in Britain, and areas of Gaul, where they built huge grain collection points, grain being used as a means of taxation then. The Romans would collect a very large portion of everyone’s crop, then return it either as whole grain or as baked bread in times of poor crops, always keeping sufficient reserves for their own use, especially that of their military.
TSO #6 and Aw1 Tim #8: You both seem to be skirting the issue as raised. No flaws in your reasoning I can see, but..
Who gets to decide who lives tomorrow?
Hondo #7: you do have a point in that war is certainly a factor. I said as much, but I won’t concede it is part of the natural limitations we face.
Zero: my point was not that war is a limitation. However, it is often how historically the question of allocating scarce resources has been answered. The allocation of scarce resources often has a direct impact on who lives and who dies.
Comment 11 was mine. Sorry.
Why the f is this even here…shouldn’t this be on some other site
I think the topic is completely germane to this site’s main focus…who do you think will enforce the decrees of the government when it comes time to sift the chaff from the wheat? I can assure you it won’t be the Girl Scouts.
Zero, I think thats where that Hunger Games nonsense comes in………..
Alright, Zero. I believe that Malthus is completely wrong. There will never come a time when the population will become so great that scare resources MUST be allocated/rationed.
It just isn’t going to happen, so there is no need for any government or other type of solution.
That is my answer because I believe that within a very few generations, humans will begin to move off planet and start to colonize new worlds. It will NOT be government sponsored, at least here in these United States. It will be commercially driven, for-profit ventures, in exactly the same manner that our own country was colonized.
It wasn’t the pilgrims who came here first, nor who started things up. It was commercial ventures, driven by the lure of resources and profits that brought people to the New World. That whole Pilgrim thing is a bunch a PR dribble. Yeah, one small, tiny, virtually insignificant number of pilgrims showed up. They counted, number-wise, as, at most, 1/2 of 1% of the folks here at the time.
But I digress. The Commercialization of space travel will, in a very short period of time, pull a great number of people off planet to new worlds in search of better lives, adventure, the chance to start over, whatever. It’s the way it always is. Folks looking at the horizon and wondering to themselves “what’s over there?”
That’s how I see things ending up. I only wish that I could live long enough to be a part of it.
I can’t tell you who decides who lives in a situation I don’t believe could ever come to pass.
Who becomes President if Horned Frogs suddenly develop heavy munitions and nuclear weapons?
TSO, if that happens, quickly memorize the following phrase (From Futurama): “ALL GLORY TO THE HIPONOTOAD!”
Wow… Ever the optimists here it seems.
While I can’t/won’t fault that outlook I can’t say I fully agree with it either.
Every giant step up the ladder of civilization has started on the back of some poor guy who was either too slow or too dumb to get out of the way.
Oh well, just a Sunday Question.
Well, if these fucktards have their way – http://www.vhemt.org/ – we won’t have to worry about it. I figure they’ll take themselves out voluntarily, and the world will be rid of a band of lunatics it didn’t want anyway.
Malthus wasn’t the first or only to come up with this “theory.”
Competition for resources is tantamount to evolution and short of discovering the trick to immortality we (humans) are subject to that system.
Exponential population growth is one of the major indicators of an invasive species and it ultimately leads a collapse. PintoNag and Hondo hit the nail on the head.
Not surprisingly, the government definition and scientific definition of invasive species differ (mostly on the inclusion of humans). The lawyers that run our country (and many others) are sorely mistakin’ if they think the natural laws that govern ecosystems are subject to their litigation.
Disclaimer: I’m not a hippy!
I’m just reasonably certain that human population will sort itself out and eventually find a state of equilibrium. The answer lies most often in the gray area. This is not an issue that will end in total annihilation.
And @AW1 TIM, your theory of space colonization is fine, but unless you are privy to information on space travel that I am not, you may want to push your timeline back past a few generations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
You can check that video out, but I’ll sum up by saying: We haven’t even made it out of our solar system with an unmanned probe yet.
Meh,
We can start with Mars.
And scientists are constraining themselves with the belief that faster-than-light drives aren’t possible.
These scientists keep using math to try and figure out things rather than actual experimentation. It’s all theoretical to them. For example, no one has actually ever seen, let alone proven, the existence of Black Holes. Quasars, Pulsars and Neutron Stars are other things that no one has actually “seen”. They just use complex equations to support their beliefs that these things exist, in order to try and explain away certain things that defy their own published beliefs of the nuclear origin of stars and a gravitation-based theory of the universe.
However, they wouldn’t need such things if they looked seriously at an electrical model of the universe. I fully support such a model. Considering the titanic levels of energy available in such a universe, if we can tap into them we can, in all likelihood, bend nature to our needs and go wherever we wish in reasonably short periods of time.
See here for more about this.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/01/04/essential-guide-to-the-eu-chapter-7/
We’re way off topic Tim. Interesting outlook though. I’m not familiar with the electrical model so I’ll leave it at that; however, even if I accept interstellar colonization as a postulate, resources will still be finite and populations of all species will still be subject to collapse.
AW1 Tim: Scientists use mathematics vice experimentation in some cases because it’s simply not possible to do the experiment. For example: given current technology, it’s not possible for the human race to assemble several solar masses of anything in order to experimentally verify whether or not a black hole will form given enough mass and correct conditions. And the time scale involved makes some experiments infeasible as well – some astronomical and/or geological processes are thought to take literally take millions or billions of years.
Cost is another factor. Large-scale experiments are generally very expensive, and some require huge facilities. For an example, see the SSC – which was never completed because the expense ended up being too great to be supportable.
Scientists prefer to conduct experiments vice mathematical projection or simulations to validate theories whenever possible. But it just isn’t always possible.