Some say that a lack of faith in God’s Plan is the primary problem of the planet. In the year 2050, the earth’s population will be nearing nine billion people unless some Covid event changes that, yet already it seems for many gloom&doomers that we’ve passed the global level of sustainability. Our unique ingenuity has improved the food supply. Medical science has increased life expectancy. The world needs to address the issue of family planning. When would the religionists concede that enough is enough, at 15 billion, 20, 30, 40? Maybe Armageddon precludes their responsibility to do anything. The curve in 2100 will level at 10-11 billion but religion owes 50 percent of the credit to science and the other 50 to the market economy. I mean when will they take the hint and shut up about sex; why don't religious people talk instead about health and wellness, happiness and alleviating human suffering by promoting small families when the evidence for first born and only children who outpreform all other siblings and all other groupings statistically shows the downright stupidity of having child after child. I mean aren't you fed up with this view of life?
Bill Gates may state that a pandemic is our gravest modern threat, and indeed it might be in the top ten, I am no expert on this subject. However, our number one danger is what it has been for the past seven decades: nuclear warfare. Now nine countries have nuclear weapons, so medical experts reacting to global virus crises would be wise to heed the advice of historians and economists and not destabilize world markets as they did with Covid, (which had a morbidity rate of 2 percent, was not a pandemic, was likely human-made, produced lousy emergency vaccines that didn't really work and which had often bad downsides). They may bring about inadvertent conflict which might lead to the use of these most deadly warheads, i.e., like the 2023/2024 Ukrainian border dispute, which would certainly reduce our population substantially, pandemic be damned. We’d at once realize even population isn’t our over-riding concern against all others. Nonetheless, in 1804 the planet had one billion people, this doubled by 1927, doubled again by 1974, and by 2000 was over 6 billion. Since 1790, our population has increased by 800%. (500 cities with a million or more, 27, with 10 million or more, 12 with 20 or more; taken from, Countdown, Weisman).
Population Threatens Our Existence
As a Species if we don’t Find Scientific Solutions.
As a Species if we don’t Find Scientific Solutions.
Reason dictates that the resources of the earth aren’t inexhaustible. Theoretically there is a limit; we just don’t know what it is. The earth’s bio-sphere is narrow. It can’t be increased. We have already punched a hole in the ozone-layer although here science has helped find a solution. Haze hangs over major industrialized areas of the world. Fossil-fuels produce more CO2 which in sent into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. Hot house gases are increasing. We can’t have everything. I am not a proponent of the economist Malthus' theory as expressed in An Essay on Population. How can we know when we've reached a limit as predicted by experts working with an impossible series of complexities? The greatest intricacy is human innovation and has so far been stellar. More hungry people lived on this planet in the 19th Century when there were far fewer people than now in 2023. Indeed, extreme poverty has fallen below ten percent; that’s 800 million people, still a lot, but compared with the past, an enormous achievement of which humans should be proud. One must remember that our home—the earth—has been anything but beneficent. In some important Dawkin’s evolutionary explanation, it’s just this cruel selfish gene mechanism which runs randomly over all of us (and all life on earth) to further its own cause and as Freeman Dyson noticed, we were lucky enough to escape. We became self-aware, progressed through Cultural Evolution, and after the Enlightenment, began to beat the replicating machine.
The economists of the world must unite to take into account not just growth and population, but our limited resource, the planet itself. We can’t breed endlessly or grow infinitely unless we find a way of colonizing the moon, Mars, the solar system and indeed the Milky Way. If we don’t use moderation, recycle and if we don’t find an alternative to coal, oil and gas now, we could commit self-annihilation. (We already have this one solved scientifically in new nuclear technology but the political class stands unified against it.) The pressure of population is being reduced and will soon crest. To see children born into this world brings no greater pleasure to us. How can we think of abortion, condoms, the pill and any other rational methods of birth control? But we must. We must shut down the religionists' superstitious views of sex and reproduction. In regards to sex, they cannot be trusted: this is where they are most irrational and their day has passed. Also, we must shut down the green ideology machine; it is a religion tied to Neo-Marxism: There is no climate crisis and there is no scientific consensus, it is a blatant lie.
The truth may be that if our current standard of living in North America is used as a criterion, the sustainability level of the globe is much lower than eight billion people. We could give complete unconditional control to women over their own reproductive choices. If women have full say over their bodies, I believe the birthrate could be reduced around the globe rapidly. Many religionists do not want women educated about sexual intercourse, reproductive choices and how men should treat them. Some Christian and Islamic misogynists claim that The West run a sort of fascist feminist regime without fathers, a kind of prostitution for women with liberty and equal human rights: many of these mystics really do hate this world and human freedom. Divorced and estranged dads get short-changed and often have to pay the bills for the kids without direct involvement in their lives. Women do sometimes seem to hold the balance of power, but sometimes men are violent toward their lovers, girlfriends and spouses. It’s only to say to males everywhere, “Your seeds are your responsibility and so don’t have unprotected sex or an unplanned child.” If you father a child, you must be there for 18 years at least. Children without fathers suffer a huge handicap as so much scientific literature shows: such boys are more likely to quit school, have less self-control, perform poorly at work, develop less human capital, to have alcohol or drug problems, to smoke, to break the law, to be more prone to violence, to be less healthy, face incarceration more often, and a whole litany of other bad stats which make their lives so difficult compared to boys with fathers. I think that all public organizations should make it exceedingly plain that children are a huge obligation which the law will vigorously enforce. The governments over the world should stop subsidizing birth rates through tax initiatives—nationalism is a form of chauvinism and racism—yeah, sure, by blood alone we’re better than other countries, we don’t have to work at our culture: screw the stats, and damn the science! What about a tax break for vasectomies and tubal ligations instead of churches and large families? Some cultures are far inferior to others, like the ones without fathers for their teenage boys, hint hint, nudge nudge.
"Throughout the world, birth rates are falling. There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved. Until 2002, the United Nations, when projecting future world population density, assumed that birth rates would never fall below 2.1 children per woman in most countries: that is the `replacement rate', at which a woman produces enough babies to replace her and her husband, with 0.1 babies added in to cover childhood deaths and a slightly male-biased sex ratio. But in 2002, the UN changed this assumption as it became clear that in country after country the decline in baby-making went straight through the 2.1 level and kept on dropping. If anything, the decline may accelerate as the effect of small family size compounds. Nearly half the world now has fertility below 2.1. Sri Lanka's birth rate, at 1.9, is already well below replacement level. Russia's population is falling so fast it will be one-third smaller in 2050 than it was at its peak in the early 1990s." The Rational Optimist.