Are we facing 70 - 90 percent depopulation of world?

This is a scary thought but after seeing the documentary "Infestation" yesterday evening it seems obvious that we need to be concerned about this possibility.

Agriculture done as monoculture does seem to be exceptionally vulnerable to pests of one type or another.



Infestation - Full Documentary - Season 1 Episode 1

 

Could this be the reason why a significant percentage of Americans may soon
try to get away from the urban and suburban lifestyle and head out into the country
where they can grow enough food to survive?

The calibre of the documentary certainly causes me to worry that the price of food
could well double or triple at supermarkets.


Could a real estate boom plus better Fed policy pay off USA national debt?

 

As a lukewarm survivalist, I don't think there will be any big push by most people to move to the country from the city.

The same insect and disease crop problems would affect the big corporate farms in almost the same way they would affect a rural homestead.

You should understand that the vast percentage of urban dwellers in the US are not only too lazy to do farm work, they also feel it is too beneath them to do it.

I grew up on a farm as a kid, so I have some practical knowledge on this issue.

 

To my thinking as a student of parapsychology I guess this may come down to the
calibre of the source of information that near death experiencer Howard Storm was
being fed from?


http://www.near-death.com/experiences/notable/howard-storm.html#a04

I live in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. I have to drive 66.6 kms to the small town of Antigonish that
only has a population of about five thousand people. (Ten thousand when all the students at St. Francis Xavier
are there).

The attitude where I live is phenomenal and indicates to me that rural life has some massive advantages over life in the cities.

 

I am not on the same psycho-spiritual wavelength as you----
----however, having been around awhile and been to many places around the world, I don't think most people are not going to dig living and working on a farm.

I'm sure the people in Antigonish are great, but most people in the US and Canada live in urban areas, and I believe it is wishful thinking imagining the lazy poor hooked on entitlements, and the thugs who are in the narcotics trade are going to give up their way of life to homestead out in the country.

 

Well, nothing last forever, even human societies.
I say, bring it on.

 

We've got close to 8 billion people right now, and some think that we're well on our way to 11 billion people in the forseeable future: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...ation-global-united-nations-2100-boom-africa/

Generally, people in the 'civilized' First-World countries now have stable or slightly decreasing populations. People in the Third World countries are still churning out large population increases. We've got BIG trouble coming, and when today's Millennials are approaching old age, we'll probably have a world war over it, if not sooner.

When I graduated from college, there was a little more than 4 billion people in the world. You could actually find a f*cking place to park your car! What's the world going to be like with 11 billion people in it, fighting over everything? You can HAVE it... I'll be dead by then, and you are welcome to it!

 

I am sure glad that we going into the next four to eight years though with
a USA President who I believe will try his best to greatly reduce the danger that
Americans are in.


Prophesy about Donald Trump from April 2011

 

It will probably peak around 16B....regardless, the odds of a massive destruction of food supplies is unlikely even under the most far fetched scenario because of the vast agricultural diversity. Just think of the many substitutes for wheat we have now in our diets that weren't there 20 years ago. There are many flour substitutes.

India is the country that is out of control population wise. In 5 years they are expected to have more people than China. The best thing they could do for their own national security is to nuke themselves.

 

There are other methods people might find more appealing. Large greenhouses and aquaponics, for instance.

 

Billions of lives could be saved by heavy investment in exactly this!


Done with large scale desalination of ocean water they could even delay the flooding of New Orleans, Florida, The Netherlands and Bangladesh.....

 

Yeah, greenhouses produce much more per square foot, and can be put right inside the cities. It is the way of the future, if we're smart. I doubt it would have any effect on ocean levels, though. The amount of water you would have to displace would be enormous, and these techniques use a lot less water than traditional dirt farming.

 

True... but it seems that perhaps graphene screens may make
desalination of ocean water extremely cheap... which can alter the formula
greatly.

 

Don't get me wrong, desalination is a great thing; billions of people will need fresh water as much as they need food. But the growing techniques we're talking about won't require that much. And even if you could desalinate enough water to actually affect ocean levels, where would you put it?

 

Is it a real possibility? Yes, I think so.. And it seems there are these groups of very rich elites, who own most of the world's wealth that are even talking about depopulating the earth and this is not some tin foil hat conspiracy theory. Yet I highly doubt these sociopaths will ever pull it off. They just have too much time on their hands.

It could happen in several different ways. Pandemics, world wide crop failures by various means, the earth being hit by a huge space object, geologic catastrophic changes, and even a nuclear war.. Or even another EM solar storm as we had when the telegraph was high tech. In fact, I would bet some event will depopulate the earth at some point in time. For it has happened before. And of course, it is inevitable that one day the human species will be extinct. Given the insanity of neocons like Graham and McCain, it may happen in your life time. When Graham said recently in regards to war with Russia, "to bring it on" if his voters elect him again, they should be committed to mental hospitals. For they are a clear and present danger to all life on this planet.

 

Well, we did lose an entire variety of banana to disease, as I understand it, and the ones we eat today are another kind that is similarly vulnerable to some extent. But then, I can't imagine all of our crops suffering some catastrophe of this kind all at once, either. I could see one going down significantly, but then being replaced by something else. If wheat takes a hit, maybe we end up with another kind of wheat or even something as different as rice. Then there's the fact that a pest of some kind will very likely be geographically isolated, so that it won't affect the crop globally.

All in all, I'd say we'll be OK. Our monoculture crops are certainly at some risk from diseases and such, but we're not about to lose so many crops all at once that we starve en masse because of it.

 

New Mexico biologist and coach Carl Cantrell wants to
put a lot of it into North Africa, just above hills and ridges.

Carl Cantrell.

"So how is our problem of continental drying causing global warming? It all has to do with vegetation and sunlight. When sun light hits a plant, it causes a process which we call photosynthesis where the energy from the sun light creates oxygen for us to breathe, water for us to drink, and is stored as sugar for plants and animals to use. When the same sun light hits the soil, all of its energy turns into heat and is radiated back into the atmosphere.. ."

"Therefore, the less vegetation you have on the planet, the more sunlight is being turned into heat and the warmer the planet becomes...."

"Just take a look at any satellite picture of the earth showing heat and you will see that our deserts are the warmest spots on the planet by far. More heat is being generated by just one of the top four or five deserts than by all of our cities combined.... "

"The truth is that you can do more to decrease global warming by just reducing the average temperature for the Sahara Desert by one or two degrees than if we humans completely quit using fossil fuels and returned to the cave…."

"So, how would you start working to resolve this problem? Easy, cool the deserts and get some vegetation growing on them as soon as possible. But the method is much more complex than that. You have to use the prevailing trade winds in relation to the deserts to get the best results as quickly as possible and it will be extremely expensive…."

"Then we build desalination plants along the coast near these water sheds and pipe water to the tops or ridges of the water sheds…"

"We need to start working on this as soon as possible because, if the planet reaches a point to where it is warming faster than our technology can possibly stop or reverse this warming trend, then our planet is lost and all life will cease to exist on this planet within a relatively short period of time. We will need to start with the largest and hottest deserts because cooling them will have the greatest benefit in the least time (Global Warming II by biologist Carl Cantrell)."

 

You go on ahead and live in them and see what you think.

 

Uh, you don't live in the greenhouse, you just work there.

 

Great come back.... I almost wrote something along that line yesterday.......
but the way you wrote it was much funnier!

Well done!

 

Nope, lots and lots of good protein available through bugs.

 

LOL!

Technically... that is indeed true!

 

Huh. Never heard of such a thing. Ambitious as hell, and extremely expensive. But the upside would be tremendous, if it works as advertised. Not just in terms of GW, but also for the huge amount of new farmland, right on the continent that needs it most.

 

(My emphasis)

1. I think you'll be greatly disappointed in Trump's policy - & it may be a stretch to even call it a policy. Thus far, it looks like one series of half-baked ideas, badly worded & badly implemented, after another.
2. Despite his campaign insistence upon a rabid kind of ultra-populism, he's mostly installed charter members of the Billionaire Boys Club to leadership positions in his admin.
3. I don't think the Trump admin (outside of the military & rank-&-file intel communities) actually knows enough about the World to even know where to begin to square the circle. A neat trick, if they can pull it off, & if Trump can muster the political will & keep his party in line long enough to execute.
4. If the Trump admin can't point with pride to @ least some of the things he promised he'd fix immediately as priorities - repeal/replace Obamacare, build the wall on the US/Mexico border & make them pay for it, defeat ISIS, contain N. Korea, contain Iran, bring back the coal jobs in the US, bring back full employment in the US - it's a long list - then I expect that his late partisans will be the first to turn on him in the mid-term elections in 2018 - if his erstwhile biggest fans can't vote him out, they can certainly make his political life even more difficult than he's self-inflicting.

 

Yes, & some places - mostly in the Third World @ this point - are already ahead of the curve - they've eaten insects, grubs, etc. for a long time. However, most of the West isn't going to go for it. If we can take the insects & etc. & pulp them & form them into something like tofu & then texture & add different tastes, that might work. It would still require a massive PR campaign plus to sell the idea to the public as it now stands, though.

All the plans to boost planetary diets @ this point, however, are palliative. They don't get @ the problem that we need cheap energy to run desalinization & vast water transport schemes, for instance. & the growing population issue is just the symptom - we have to get @ the reproduction rates across the World & convince people that they don't need large families in order to provide for their old age. Yes, birth rates are mostly below or nearly below replacement rates in much of the West. We have to be able to show how to keep nations moving forward despite that, in order to convince the countries with birthrates above replacement that there are viable alternatives to massive population growth.