Yeah! FIGHT that hypothetical! You’ll beat it yet!
Evidence, evidence for the above. It’s not that there’s not enough food but that it’s not being distributed properly. The world can feed itself two times over if we had the proper resources. As for space we can TERRAFORM MARS.
Global warming, mass extinction, topsoil loss, acid rain, the ozone hole etc.
But we can’t get very many people there. That would be useful for spreading humanity, but not for getting rid of excess population. Even if Mars was terraformed instantly tomorrow it would make no difference as far as overpopulation goes.
Solvable problem, being solved.
Excessive conservation extinction rates declining.
Being fixed, better then the excesses of the 80s and 90s.
Obviously techonology will improve and abilities to get people to Mars will improve.
A problem probably too late to solve largely being ignored.
We’ve already done vast damage and haven’t stopped.
But not by enough to make any difference on this kind of scale.
What was happening on the way to 9 million? Lack of education and access to free and safe contraception (incluing abortion) across the world? You know, this nightmare scenario can probably be prevented.
I’ve never seen someone actually vote for malnutrition, starvation and death before.
To the OP’s question. Yes.
That’s implied by “unsustainable.”
No, it’s more similar to too much rainfall can lead to the same problem as drought: non-arable land
I would also hold fast to my views in the other topic: It is more wrong to force an abortion on a woman.
With billions of people, one more isn’t going to make that much of a difference, and no one woman or group of woman can be held responsible for overpopulation. However, an abortion is an intimate and personal procedure, so that we’d be trying to defend her suffering in order to justify relieving, by some miniscule amount, the suffering of faceless others.
Uh, excuse me? Where have you been in the last ten years with the Incovenient Truth. Also most of Global Warming is natural, humans may have contributed to it but it isn’t mostly or even mainly due to us.
Rate of extinction is going down, as you can see several species have been taken off the Endangered Species List.
Who knows in fifty years or eighty years it will work.
To make a dent in the population, you have to be removing percentages of the population at a respectable rate. So if the population is in the billions, then exporting say ten million people a year won’t even make a dent. You have to export them at a rate which exceeds the birthrate, preferably by a respectable margin, which seems grossly implausible without resorting to fantasy techology - or limiting the birthrate enough that with a little more effort you can solve the problem without the exportation.
Birth rate will slow down and possibly even crash even in the Third World. Compare the birth rates in any country from forty years ago to to-day.
There’s no reason to think that beyond right wing lies.
There’s no reason to think that it will EVER be practical.
The current growth rate of human population is 1.3% a year. That’s about 78 million people a year, or 2.5 per second. Even if we had a magical doorway that led straight from Earth to Mars, you’d have a hard time getting that many people through that quickly. And I can guarantee that we’re not going to get any sort of space transportation technology that’s anywhere near that efficient any time in the next century.
What I’m saying is that the birth rate will decline to something of a fraction of your number by mid-century.
I am for mandatory birth control, and any reproduction above replacement [1 kid per person, 2 per couple] requires licensing and to actually have kids requires passing a basic educational course in childrearing [basic nutrition, basic first aid, basic parenting skills.] I am actually pro mandatory birth control for all females above menarch and under 21. I do not think abortion is an acceptable form of birth control, other than for rapes, and failed birth control [i had 3 pregnancies, one on the pill, one on the pill and using a rubber and one over 10 years after a tubal ligation. Fertility was me … *sigh*]
Right - and if you find that that facilitates an “exportation” solution to the population problem, then it will be because the reduced population growth itself solved the population problem, without the exportation effort having significant effect.
Seriously, what you’re describing here is trying to keep a bathtub from overfilling by bailing it with a thimble. Saying “But the water filling it is going to turn off in a bit, so my thimble will have saved the day!” is not exactly granting credit where credit is due.
I absolutely agree with you about most of this. However, I think that even replacement reproduction should require a license. If the world is facing a population crisis because of overpopulation, no one should be licensed for an additional child. Every person should be permitted a singular heir, and that’s it. “Couples” should not enter into it. Women should be permitted to contract to birth heirs for others, (as should men, if a woman wants genetic material, as well), but as in surrogacy, those children will never belong to the genetic donator. So a wife could contract with her husband to produce his heir, and a husband could contract so with his wife, but his baby is his, and her baby is hers, regardless of gender. (A side effect of this is simplification of the divorce/child custody argument.) I also think that despite agreeing with you in personal belief about abortion, I do not think I should be permitted to decide when someone else can make that decision, or for what reasons.
No, absolutely not. Just as I am pro-choice when it comes to choosing abortion, I’m the same when it comes to NOT choosing an abortion. You don’t have the right to force me to stay pregnant, or to terminate my pregnancy.
MY body, MY choice.
A MUCH better program of birth control, absolutely. But forcing women to have abortions – no fucking way.