**What are the limits on technology? Could you have forseen twenty years ago much of what is in our stores now?
Can you name any period in the last thousand years that saw technological innovation cease?
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Technology runs up against walls all the time. Case in point: space exploration. Back in the mid-1900s we all thought we’d have colonies on Mars by now. We don’t even have colonies on the moon, and the space station is just a couple of trailers floating in near-Earth orbit.
There’s also the case of medicine. Medicine made great strides in the 18th and early in the 20th century, but then it seemed to stall. With the exception of pretty much wiping out the polio virus, we haven’t BEATEN a lot of illnesses, we’ve mostly discovered palliatives that let us live a long time with them, as is the case now with diabetes, AIDS, and a number of others. Some very common health problems, like the aptly named common cold, weight control and cancer continue to plague us.
I personally think that in a decade or two advances in microbiology and genetics are very likely to make everything we’ve done up until now in medicine look crude and barbaric, but that doesn’t changed the fact that medicine stalled. It stalled because the early advances of medicine were cases of solving the easy problems, and when we started wrestling with the tougher problems, we found they weren’t so easy to beat.
Just as we found that space is not so easy – or cheap, or profitable early on – to conquer. We may eventually have colonies in other solar systems. We may eventually wipe out disease. But meanwhile, people still die, and meanwhile, we remain confined to this planet. We may eventually find ways to grow food (microbiology and genetics again) that will solve that problem.
But do we grow our population until we are all living shoulder to shoulder and every inch of land that is not developed is under cultivation? When is enough enough? What heritage do we want to pass on to our children? Is rush hour a GOOD thing?
It seems to me that the people who argue against population controls are like spendthrifts who are willing to draw money out of a bank account as fast as they can, without worrying about how much money is actually in there.
If there are no limits on human fecundity, why are many countries at zero or negative population growth now? If there are no limits, the numbers should be rising everywhere.
Thank you for pointing that out. In the countries in which population growth among some segments of the population is negative or less, they aren’t encountering limits to growth like starvation, war or disease. They are CHOOSING not to have kids. This is a good thing. This I approve of. I like people having choices. But as has been pointed out, when people choose to limit their population to increase their living standards, pressure tends to build up for the country to accept immigrants from poorer countries where such choices are typically not being made. How 'bout that? People wanting to live in those countries where people are making good choices. Kinda makes you think.
I was lucky enough to have both parents and my grandmother living at home and my best friend was only across the alley. Mr zoogirl was the eldest of four and he seems to have had to go short a lot of the time. He’s not too close to any of his sibs now.
