For many years now debate about climate change/global warming has raged yet of late one significant factor influencing all our futures on this planet, population growth, is mostly left out of the discussion. We've been lulled into a false sense of security with assertions globally increasing living standards will necessarily go hand in hand with lower birth rates. As there's no certainty in either globally increasing living standards or the reduction in the birth rate I suggest we are faced with a nightmare scenario no amount of carbon sequestration, alternative energy sources etc will be able to alleviate. Why then is it now almost considered politically incorrect to discuss the obvious fact we live on a planet of limited size and with limited resources that can sustain only so many of our species despite technological advances?
The answer is political, not scientific. I grew up in the wake of The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich. The conventional wisdom was that population growth was the greatest danger to human survival. But the book was so laughingly off in it's predictions that eventually even the conventional wisdom had to change. And of course, birthrates did drop in the developed world, just not in the undeveloped world, but when the problem is coming from Black and Brown countries, suddenly you don't want white westerners talking about those people reducing their birthrates, because what could be more racist than that? So if you can't talk about the problem, than there is no problem.
Population is the elephant in the room. First off all these warmers trading out light bulbs and feeling oh so good about themselves and then having children that will need homes to live in cars to drive food to eat etc kinda make me sick. Secondly we are not leaving enough room for other species to survive as we move into every last area on earth. Wolves, grizzlys and elephants are some prime examples
Yes, population growth is the elephant in the room that every politician would never dream of mentioning since they would kiss their career goodbye. Religion needs to realize that populated the earth is no longer a good idea. They could always say that "GOD' has changed its mind and stop reproducing so much because you will populate yourself into extinction. I would guess that the government is trying to come up with ideas to reduce the population but the masses will never be informed of any acts to reduce the numbers.
The funny thing is, virtually every politician had no problem talking about population 40 years ago. Something changed.
The argument is economics not global warming. And whether human beings are considered to be assets or liabilities. If the global economy grows at ~ 4% per year the wealth created will be more than sufficient to facilitate adaptation to the observed rates of global warming of 0.1 deg C per decade. Developed countries have the problem of insufficient birthrates to sustain their populations much less grow them. Europe relies on immigration to provide the economic growth required to fund their retirement and welfare states.
Uncle Ferd says, "Yea... ... by 2050 we s'posed to have like 9 bazillion people on dis planet... ... `cause alla non-white people is breedin' like there's no tomorrow... ... w/o givin' a thought to the day o' reckonin' dat's gonna eventually come... ... when all the food an' resources runs out... ... all dey care `bout is havin' sex like there's no tomorrow... ... an' one day there won't be no tomorrow `cause we gonna run outta ever'thin'."
And nobody anticipated the limits and costs of the so called Green Revolution. We can be very clever in making every square inch of cultivatable land on this planet produce food as efficiently as possible only to have the resultant poplulation explosion convert prime agricularal land into an urban nightmare.
Population growth is about global climate change, but also about economics, the environment, the production of food, energy production, waste control, medical and health, utilization of land, potable water, transportation of people and goods, etc. etc. and all of it in varying locations around the world will unfold unevenly. Whatever current problems exist today will simply be exacerbated tomorrow with increased population growth. IMO it's difficult to make human paradigm shifts when both the people and the governments have inadequate knowledge and thinking skills when considering complex and confusing and contradictory information. Today we have billions of people around the world, including millions in the USA, who are struggling and/or failing just trying to cope with their daily lives. It will be monumental to have these people think about the collective we...
I mean, we're going to be colonizing Mars pretty darn soon, so I expect enough people will want to move there will be enough to off-set this sort of thing. We'll likely have Martian wildlife preserves, Martian citites, etc. With the latest genetic engineering technology, I wouldn't be surprised if we have the resources to terraform it now, and given recent advances in altering pre-existing organisms, it's quite likely we'll live to see it. When people picture 2050 as being some sort of starving wasteland, they aren't quite grasping the exponential nature of technological progress.
Oh, pray tell why it is a 'science fiction dream'? We already have self-driving cars and rudimentary AI, and current estimates are that we'll land on Mars in 2022. Just because its 'cool' and 'groovy' to be cynical doesn't make it automatically correct, and it doesn't automatically make you seem more intelligent.
Nice dream, but we don't know what we don't know. It may turn out that kind of gravity is too low to be healthy, or possible for women to deliver full term. If you can't have kids there, the colonization idea is over.
You see, the thing is that these things are never over. Humanity has always strived, and we have always become better. Technological growth is exponential, and many people don't know what that means. If it really is impossible for women to have children there, we will genetically modify them so they can, or use external 'incubators' and donated eggs for pregnancies. We'll slow the decay of Telomeres and otherwise fix aging, then send our excess population over there; there are infinite possibilities.
It... kind of is. Since, well, forever, technological progress has been innately exponential. Computer power doubles every two years or so since computers have been invented, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down much. We recently invented an even better way of genetically modifying seeds and embryos, we have the entire human genome recorded, people are constantly innovating, 3D printers a becoming practical... I don't really see how we aren't ending up at a Star-Trek like future, even if we never break light speed. Any possibility that logically extrapolates from the present ends up there, and technology isn't going to magically halt at some random point (or at least the probability of it doing so is infinitesimal). Besides, we carry tiny talking supercomputers with us wherever we go. We sort of are in a star-trek future, minus the travel aspects.
Oh yes, we as a species are ever so clever. However, we're so stupid we are creating artificial intelligence with no moral consousness whatever that's gradually replacing us, we gleefully arm ourselves with enough nuclear weapons to wipe ourselves out many times over, we ignore global warming by sticking our heads in the sand pretending measurable phenomena is no more than a conspiracy, we allow secret military facilies to play God with germ warfare research, we fill the oceans with micro-plastic pollution which through the food chain we ourselves end up eating - - the list could go on. For now we need to put aside all those admitedly wonderful science fiction visions of a utopian future and focus on our survival otherwise there soon won't be anyone down here on this planet left to escape it.
Time limit imposed by forum software prevented me correcting typos so her we go again. Oh yes, we as a species are ever so clever. However, we're so stupid we are creating artificial intelligence with no moral conscience whatever that's gradually replacing us, we gleefully arm ourselves with enough nuclear weapons to wipe ourselves out many times over, we ignore global warming by sticking our heads in the sand pretending measurable phenomena is no more than a conspiracy, we allow secret military facilities to play God with germ warfare research, we fill the oceans with micro-plastic pollution which through the food chain we ourselves end up eating - - the list could go on. For now we need to put aside all those admittedly wonderful science fiction visions of a utopian future and focus on our survival otherwise there won't be anyone down here on this planet left to escape from it.
Just the economic reality of space exploration; We can't even fill the potholes in our roads yet we'll find billion$ to colonize Mars? Private funding might be involved but how far will this go if there's no potential for profits? Or the time reality of space exploration; We're a long way from just placing a structure on Mars in which astronauts can visit must less any form of long term habitat. We don't yet know how we will land a human on Mars and remove them from Mars? And, as I think you said; We only know what we know today which means there is NO straight path to achieve humans on Mars...there's a gigantic learning curve for all aspects of this mission, from shelter, to transportation, to environmental issues, to sustainability, to human issues, etc.
