Re: Underwater Colonization = Win
Sorry, I felt like I had to say something: first of all, lemmings do not jump off of cliffs in order to reduce their population - read [[Lemmings]]. Second, it seems to me that the desire to expand constantly is a societal and cultural disease. Has it not occurred to anyone that unmitigated growth is going to destroy us? Also, the solution is pretty simple.
A pretty basic rule of ecology is: as a population's food supply increases, the population grows in numbers. Conversely, if a population's numbers grow, then its food supply must have increased. The only solution to overpopulation is to stop producing so much food. Our agricultural industries are taxed to the limit, and we're always trying to find more and more ways to suck nourishment out of the earth - and this only increases our numbers! Some people say that we're human, we can restrain ourselves from reproducing - unfortunately the mob psychology does not make choices as clear as that of the individual, and our societal behaviours as a whole can usually be modeled pretty accurately by those of animal populations.
The argument that as more and more countries join the ranks of the first world, their population expansion will decrease, is rather baseless since the reason that they are first world countries in the first place is their dependence on the economies of the rest of the world. There's no way that prices in the US could be so low, for example, were not a large portion of our products being imported from places where labor and materials are cheap - i.e. third world countries. Therefore the whole world is not going to just convert into one big first-world-country paradise - in fact, the gap between the rich and the poor is always growing o_O
I think it's time we thought about decreasing our population instead of finding new places to expand to.
-fs
Sorry, I felt like I had to say something: first of all, lemmings do not jump off of cliffs in order to reduce their population - read [[Lemmings]]. Second, it seems to me that the desire to expand constantly is a societal and cultural disease. Has it not occurred to anyone that unmitigated growth is going to destroy us? Also, the solution is pretty simple.
A pretty basic rule of ecology is: as a population's food supply increases, the population grows in numbers. Conversely, if a population's numbers grow, then its food supply must have increased. The only solution to overpopulation is to stop producing so much food. Our agricultural industries are taxed to the limit, and we're always trying to find more and more ways to suck nourishment out of the earth - and this only increases our numbers! Some people say that we're human, we can restrain ourselves from reproducing - unfortunately the mob psychology does not make choices as clear as that of the individual, and our societal behaviours as a whole can usually be modeled pretty accurately by those of animal populations.
The argument that as more and more countries join the ranks of the first world, their population expansion will decrease, is rather baseless since the reason that they are first world countries in the first place is their dependence on the economies of the rest of the world. There's no way that prices in the US could be so low, for example, were not a large portion of our products being imported from places where labor and materials are cheap - i.e. third world countries. Therefore the whole world is not going to just convert into one big first-world-country paradise - in fact, the gap between the rich and the poor is always growing o_O
I think it's time we thought about decreasing our population instead of finding new places to expand to.
-fs
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