7 billion

"Done because we are too menny."

too fucking many and people need to put it back in their pants.

or at least have less hetsex more homosex like proper civilized people

idk i think we could use a little more

ok yeah im cool with more homosex

voted 'not enough' cos y'know what are you sayin to #7000000001 otherwise?

I vow not only to contribute to overpopulation, but to give birth to the next 7 billion all by myself.

too many!

everyone with an even number of letters in yr last name, yr out

countin the 'mc' or not?

counting

Respect yourself, man! The Mc always counts!!!
Signed
McDepressed

"pfft, 7 billion?"

-people living in a world with more than 7 billion

we're chopped liver compared to the cockroach population. you think they complain? they are the 53%!

i do think the earth is overpopulated by humans, but it doesn't matter because scientists believe we've only got 100 years left.

im a scientist and i dont believe that (note: not actual scientist)

if we maximize reproduction for the next 100 years, how many would we be then?

by we do you mean just ILX?

cuz I'll sign on

The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth ... and kill!

alternative question: if we start all killing each other now what will the population be in 100 years?

tired?

well presumably some percentage will be said

'start'

Keep 'em coming imo

underrated food source imo

soylent green

too fucking many

and too many fucking, amiright?

u just jealous

THERE'S 7 BILLION PEOPLE OF EARTH WHERE ARE THEY HIDING
THERE'S 7 BILLION PEOPLE OF EARTH WHERE ARE THEY HIDING
THERE'S 7 BILLION PEOPLE OF EARTH WHERE ARE THEY HIDING
THERE'S 7 BILLION PEOPLE OF EARTH WHERE ARE THEY HIDING
THERE'S 7 BILLION PEOPLE OF EARTH WHERE ARE THEY HIDING
THERE'S 7 BILLION PEOPLE OF EARTH WHERE ARE THEY HIDING

(/cabvolt)

this thread is like a gentrified neighbourhood everyone says went downhill *just* after they arrived

Ok, dumb argument I had at work today:

Coworker: "You know, disease and famine used to be nature's way of keeping equilibrium. Now, with science overcoming those things, eventually we're going to overstretch the earth's resources."

Me: "Well, when that happens, lack of resources will be nature's way of keeping 'equilibrium'"

Coworker: "But that leads to wars, and that's not good."

Me: "Well disease and famine aren't good either!"

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JK067av17xw/Th9ThMPzJEI/AAAAAAAAAIw/UaMzh3bbrxw/s1600/soylent+green.jpg

Disease and famine affect humans, but in general do not disturb the rest of the planet. Resource depletion has profound effects on the planet.

When you consider that we are already out-competing other species for the earth's resources and they are going extinct in mass numbers while our population continues to grow, then it is reasonable to assume that resource depletion at levels that would limit global human population would ensure that extinction rates would be even higher than at present.

That's a bunch of bullshit. Would you accept a 35-year life expectancy and ultra-high infant mortality rate for greater biodiversity?

I mean, it isn't "bullshit," I've just never met anyone who's actually willing to live with the implications of that line of thinking.

I'd accept universal access to contraception and exercise of restraint. I think what you have there is a straw man.

xpost

well, that's a strawman.

it's not impossible to have healthy people AND live within the planet's means. it's difficult, because we're already using more resources than can be sustainably reproduced, but they're not mutually exclusive.

Can you elucidate how this connects to what I just wrote? The connection seems hazy to me.

That was xp'ed to Hurting 2.

Is seven-billion people too many?

"Research shows the best way to stabilize and reduce population growth is through greater protection and respect for women's rights, better access to birth control, widespread education about sex and reproduction, and redistribution of wealth.

But wealthy conservatives who overwhelmingly identify population growth as the biggest problem are often the same people who oppose measures that may slow the rate of growth. This has been especially true in the U.S., where corporate honchos and the politicians who support them fight against environmental protection and against sex education and better access to birth control, not to mention redistribution of wealth.

Population, environmental, and social-justice issues are inextricably linked. Giving women more rights over their own bodies, providing equal opportunity for them to participate in society, and making education and contraception widely available will help stabilize population growth and create numerous other benefits. Reducing economic disparity — between rich and poor individuals and nations — will lead to better allocation of resources. But it also shows that confronting serious environmental problems will take more than just slowing population growth."

otm

rrrobyn otm

Tho i kinda agree (tho less vehemently) with hurting re:extinction of the stragglers, can't always be apologising for winning imo

eh, we're in the middle of the 6th Great Extinction event in the history of the planet, and it's driven by humans (which is why our era is now commonly referred to as The Anthropocene). what's occurring is not so much a darwinian process of weak/less-adaptive species dying out, but closer to humans deliberately cutting away at the foundation of our own civilization.

you sound like l ron hubbard cmon now

Read one Song of the Dodo by David Quammen and get back to us.

it does seem absurd and vaguely sci-fi i guess, to some people, but as elizabeth kolbert put it in the final paragraph of Field Notes From a Catastrophe: 'It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.'

don't get all srscat guys it was a throwaway ffs

i'm calling the ecopolice on you

;_; busted by the founder of the ecoscientologists

rrrobyn, it is absolutely true that all of that stuff greatly slows population growth -- education and rights for women lead not only to fewer births per mother, but also to waiting longer to have kids. Increased generation size/childbearing age = HUGE reducing effect on population growth (it's basically compound growth that's compounded much less often).

However, there's another problem, before we get too smug and self-righteous about this. People in those western, educated countries where people have one or two kids starting at age 29 also consume WAY more per person than people in poor countries with high birthrates, like 4x or 5x as much. It seems that all that education and delayed reproduction also correlates with wanting and being able to afford a lot more stuff. And I'm not only talking about people who drive SUV's and live in McMansions -- just living in what I think most ilxors would consider a normal sized apartment, using some form of temperature control, using common appliances like refrigerators and computers, eating a standard (non-obesity-producing) varied western diet, regularly using some form of powered transportation -- even public, taking the occasional vacation, and you're already probably using far more resources than the earth can stand per person.

I believe in reducing consumption and increasing awareness about such things for sure, and I try at least in small ways (take public transit, don't own a car, no choice but to live in a modest sized place, prefer windows to A/C when at all bearable, limited meat consumption etc.), but ultimately I'm a futilitarian on this, unless technology solves the problem.

One thing I think we can all agree on is that severe undernourishment, parasites, and pervasive exhaustion all tend to lessen the urge to procreate. Just to look at the bright side, y'know. (/chirpy callousness)

(just in case anyone would attribute his words to me, my whole post was a quote from David Suzuki! whom i love)

i always think the eternal debate about population (we need to reduce population growth in the least developed countries (through improving education, family planning, health, etc) VS the West needs to reduce their consumption) is a false choice, since we should be doing both.

there are solutions that exist today that dramatically help to reduce consumption and our general ecological footprint, and they can be implemented today. put a price on the use of carbon that approximates the cost that it imposes on society, for example. we don't need to wait for a silver bullet, we just need to deploy solutions that already exist.

Of course we should be doing both. But is anyone on this board going to swear off airplane trips? Limit computer use to, say, an hour a day? Go vegan (if not already vegan)? Willingly live in a tiny apartment til death?

We could indeed increase the cost of "carbon" but I use the scare quotes because what you really mean is increasing the cost of consuming pretty much everything, because you're talking about the process of making and/or growing your stuff and the process of getting it to you. Maybe that's a good idea, although it's certainly regressive. If resources get scarcer it will happen naturally anyway, may already be happening.

so much to say about that, but i'm leaving work now!

short version is that 1)pricing carbon possibly regressive in the short-term, but it would also help to make alternatives to carbon more cost-effective and significantly speed the adoption of clean energy through economies of scale. nothing would be more regressive than the collapse of an antiquated energy infrastructure without a capable (clean energy-enabled) alternative infrastructure to replace it, and 2)there's an idea that as resources get scarcer and the climate shit hits the fan, we'll adjust our resource use in tandem and everything will be fine, but that ignores huge lags in various systems. on the energy side, again, clean energy infrastructure takes a very long time to develop. on the climate side: even if you somehow reduced GHG emissions to 0 today, GHG concentrations in the atmosphere would continue rising at a steady pace for 30 years because the majority of CO2 reaches the atmosphere through a lengthy hydrologic cycle, and also GHG concentrations don't begin declining as soon as you stop pumping them into the air - there are studies that show that they would in fact contribute to elevated temperatures for over a thousand years. all of this means that the response needs to take place at least 30 years BEFORE the worst impacts are seen, not as they are seen. and of course, we've already missed the boat on that.)

the long version is over 340 pages long btw

haha

Not to turn this thread to environmental issues entirely, but imo (and that of David Suzuki, as above) at this point in history, the state of the earth/environment needs to actually be the focal point when talking about population growth + economic and social/class/sex/race/etc inequalities. If we're asking the question "can we sustain a population of 7 billion and growing?" then we're really asking if our human effect on the planet is sustainable. Climate change science proves that yes, humans are having a profound effect on otherwise natural climate change cycles - the science community has basically been like "oh fuck" for the last decade, and now we have things like this: Jump In Greenhouse Gases Is Biggest Ever Seen. And even with more and more science backing up the severity of the situation, every international climate talk in the past 10 years hasn't really been about the environment at all - it's been about maintaining the economic status quo - and, so, the social status quo, which sees a rising population and increasing inequalities, which many have argued are the root cause of war/"conflict". I'm quite convinced that whatever sad form of international governance has been cobbled together in the past few decades gives not a shit about most people in the world, let alone the world itself.

And so we're fucked, but that doesn't mean things can't be unfucked, yet things really and truly can't go back to anything they once were nor can we somehow maintain this current status quo. I've been talking to a lot of people for my work lately, in many different fields, and it's no wonder I've been feeling overwhelmed, angry and mildly depressed - from public health doctors to journalists who write about organized crime, they're all saying things need to systemically change asap, but it's going to take a revolution. Not even kidding, I have heard the word revolution so many times from so many people lately.

Meanwhile, the conservative/right-wing types I've talked to all say everything's fine, keep on truckin', work hard, go to school, take care of your family now - they don't speculate on the future any further than they have to, because that's the way the markets - and politics - work now. Security isn't about the health of the environment or even about the next 20 years, it's about the next 2 years, if that. It's fucking delusional. For instance, I had a 'famous' venture capitalist tell me gleefully that the Alberta oil sands contain hundreds of years of oil and isn't that great, without a care about the massive (massive!) emissions they create and water contamination, etc etc that happens every day due to the extraction process.

On the other hand, I talked to this old-school journalist the other day and he said we all should be anything but keeping calm and carrying on. In the US and Canada, where oil companies and pocketed politicians are actually outright happy about how climate change is opening up the North to resource extraction, there's hardly a blip on the citizen-outrage meter. Movements like Occupy Wall Street need to attach to every other movement for systemic change out there, especially environmentally based geopolitical ones - this is pretty much about creating another system to overthrow the dominant one, in other words, revolution. Or at least reform. Yet would this solve the so-called population crisis? Perhaps not, but then, if the state of the world - environmentally, economically, socially - is brought back into balance, then a growing population might not be seen as a crisis anyway, balance being what it is. In the meantime, however long that is, there's going to be a lot of pain. Personally, I would rather be wide awake to it than anesthetized by my own or others' accord.

I don't think I really understand what "the planet" is in that account of things. I mean I guess there's one possible scenario where global warming or some other man-made catastrophe makes the earth entirely uninhabitable for all life. But short of that it seems to me like "the planet" will be fine, and even perhaps prosper in a situation where human population suffers. I don't buy into this idea of "balance" either. The thing is I understand exactly what you're saying about the venture capitalist and his precious oil sands, and I agree that attitude will get us worse than nowhere. And yet abundant oil is pretty much the only reason the earth can even support seven billion people without things being much worse than they are. I'm in an especially dark mood tonight, I suppose, but I'm extremely pessimistic. I feel like we're either going to see mass suffering from lack of resources or mass suffering from the byproducts of overconsumption, unless technology saves us, and I'm not saying I think it will, I'm just saying I have basically zero faith in human restraint or political will to accomplish these things.

That's why I rarely say "the planet" but rather "the world" because the latter is defined in a more human-cultural way - we can destroy the world as we know it and the planet will still be floating in space. YET I also think we can't disregard the relationship we have with the planet - it's not all new-age babble to say that we are inherently connected to the earth - we're built to breathe this particular chemical blend of air, drink this water, grow food in this soil, and so on. To deny that is to deny our nature, which is the direction things have been going - not a critique of technology and progress but of ways of using and taking from (e.g., oil industry's rapid growth/profit/greed) rather than respecting and working with - so really no surprise that such disconnection to "the planet" has occurred.

I buy into the idea of balance as an unsteady state of awareness and action rather than a steady peaceful state - it's a state that is always being maintained in its ebb and flow and doesn't actually mean equilibrium.

I also think we're going to see mass suffering - and we already have mass suffering.

I suppose I just have more faith in this revolution thing...

xp

it seems to me like "the planet" will be fine

It appears to me that, barring a catastrophic collapse in human population (think: something well under 1 billion survivors), the continued high demand for resources will continue to force large numbers of species into extinction. I grant you that, so long as there is multicelluar life, whatever damage we do will eventually be healed, in the sense that new complex ecologies will arise once our pernicious influence abates, but that would be true only within geologic scales of time. In that scale, five million years would be rather prompt. This doesn't strike me as terribly "fine", but I suppose it's all in how you look at it.

I guess I just don't think most people are really willing to face the true implications of really living more connected to nature, as opposed to some fantasy yoga-on-a-mountain version. Mastering nature and becoming "disconnected" from it has meant a longer, more comfortable, more varied life with less physical suffering.

we may be living longer and more comfortably, but it would seem that people are still physically and mentally suffering though - they're just doing it in front of tv/video games, in cars, while shopping, etc. My pessimism comes from this too, however, as I don't see that as really living and can hardly believe that many people do. Not to say I don't watch tv shows sometimes or go shopping or hang out on the internet, but in the past few years it's been making me even more uneasy. The very idea of "mastering nature" seems disgusting to me.

But I don't blame people, incl myself, for doing what we do; it's a rough world we live in, things are out of control - nature is not mastered, after all... Suffering is part of life and teaches us what to live for, but it's so easily ignored when disconnecting is made so simple.

I was also thinking that the continued desire to conquer other people and the planet is perhaps the real problem in population growth.

Yeah but what do you want to do, pick wildberries? Even farming is "mastering nature."

a numbers game, something
xp

Mastering is one thing, working with and respecting (an ecosystem, in this case) is another. So farming doesn't have to necessarily be about mastering nature.

i am tired and am going to go have some fucked-up dreams now

Nature is not a friend, it is an oppressor. Nature is war, death and chaos. To confront it we must fight with unity.

The flowers must die. The trees must burn. The frolicking dolphins must drown.

In their stead towers of steel, plastic and synthetic materials as yet undreamed of shall rise.

http://grandtradellc.com/images/chicken_parts_photo.jpg

banaka otm

a numbers game, something
xp

Mastering is one thing, working with and respecting (an ecosystem, in this case) is another. So farming doesn't have to necessarily be about mastering nature.

i am tired and am going to go have some fucked-up dreams now

― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Friday, November 4, 2011 12:11 AM Bookmark

Farming ISN'T an ecosystem.

i'm drunk, yeah, but put a goddamn price on carbon. it won't solve everything, for sure, but it would really, really help.

it's like cigarettes. what do we do, everyone likes smoking, everyone's smoked for centuries, there's a whole industry built around it. oh wait, now it costs more. *20 years later* man, smoking sucks

i'm sure it's easy to dismiss that drunken bluuuuugh, but there's a fully formed clean energy infrastructure that's ready to take the place of the 19th century bullshit that's in place right now. all that's needed is an honest price.

as if I would call farming an ecosystem? I was talking about farming works within an ecosystem.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

41 voters who shd off themselves in the interest of moral consistency

Au contraire! My moral stance is based entirely on misanthropy, so that moral consistency would require me to kill as many humans as I can. It is only my moral hypocisy that spares your life.

http://www.whatismetaphysics.com/images/2012-revisited-graph.jpg

don't you want to see how far we can ride this?

IT IS TIME

http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/logans-run.jpg