Opinion: A Word On Today's Society

[halfmanhalfamazing]

As I mentioned already, all dictatorships aren't bad.

Dictatorship is universally wrong.

Life is not so dear and peace is not so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. Price too high.

That's where you end up with this:

[wargames]

Even if individual humans consume less energy, the human population will continue to grow, and thus total energy consumption will continue to grow.

I knew someone would bring that up, that's the logical next step.

Overpopulation is an actual problem. We all agree mass murder is not the solution, but someone needs to do something, and politicians are not going to limit the numer of births because no one would vote them. The Earth as we know it is condemned if the population continues to grow as it grows nowadays.

[GreatEmerald]

In the long run, the sun will burn out and the human species will become extinct, so it doesn't really matter any way.

The sun burning out is a complete non-issue. In fact, Earth as we know it will probably be destroyed way before that (the thermal zone that is suitable for life has been steadily shrinking ? it once included Mars ? and will eventually not include Earth; the solar system will collide with another star system and the resulting gravity forces will throw Earth way off course etc.). But we don't strictly need Earth; even with current technology we would be able to live off-planet for a reasonable amount of time, and in the future we may as well invent the warp drive and then a single planet will be a non-issue. Of course, then we have the galaxy colliding with another one, and then we have the universe collapsing, but that will take enough time to figure something else out.

That, or someone will press a shiny red button and all humans go extinct in an instant. We just don't know, and all we can do is try to navigate for the best.

[freeman]

Originally Posted by halfmanhalfamazing:
Chernobyl was built not by a free people, it was built by a tyrannical communist thug regime that built zero controls and safeguards into it because *GASP* they like all dictatorships do not care about the individual.

Let me try to guess why dont we hear anything about Fukushima anymore (nuclear plant still leaking - disaster much worse than Chernobyl):

[GreatEmerald]

Overpopulation is an actual problem. We all agree mass murder is not the solution, but someone needs to do something, and politicians are not going to limit the numer of births because no one would vote them. The Earth as we know it is condemned if the population continues to grow as it grows nowadays.

The growth may seem exponential, but signs say that it's starting to go into the logistic phase. It's no longer accelerating. It's another problem that is now being dealt with, as people realised that it's an important one. (Well, it would be dealt with one way or another, because there is always the environment carrying capacity, but nature's way of dealing with that would have been way more painful than the diplomatic solution.)


halfmanhalfamazing, good job not seeing that world is in fact not all black and white, and using Qaridarium-style responses... I don't think I want to reply to you any more.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

Overpopulation is an actual problem. We all agree mass murder is not the solution, but someone needs to do something, and politicians are not going to limit the numer of births because no one would vote them. The Earth as we know it is condemned if the population continues to grow as it grows nowadays.

Death is the only cure to overpopulation. (This is a big part of what makes malthusianism and eugenics so whacked out)

Pest companies prove it. (when you call them to your house)
Hunters at hunting season prove it. (Deer/etc season)
Farmers prove it. (locusts)
And dictatorships have been proving it for at least several hundreds of years now. Arguably, dictatorships have been proving it for thousands of years. That's why a "Mainstream" communist newspaper like The UK Guardian made this claim:

Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardi...an-eco-warrior

What did Genghis Khan do that was so good for the planet?

Kill people.

[chrisb]

Death is the only cure to overpopulation.

There are many forms of death. Most people find at least some of them acceptable eg. dying of old age, natural causes etc. Are you against letting people die of old age, do you consider it a form of murder/killing?

[a user]

seeing the comments here, the time it took to write the article was a total waste as the air breath by the commentators is.

[macpacheco]

Death is the only cure to overpopulation. (This is a big part of what makes malthusianism and eugenics so whacked out)

Pest companies prove it. (when you call them to your house)
Hunters at hunting season prove it. (Deer/etc season)
Farmers prove it. (locusts)
And dictatorships have been proving it for at least several hundreds of years now. Arguably, dictatorships have been proving it for thousands of years. That's why a "Mainstream" communist newspaper like The UK Guardian made this claim:

Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardi...an-eco-warrior

What did Genghis Khan do that was so good for the planet?

Kill people.

It's been proven that the only stable solution is a decent minimum standard of life. We are seeing middle class in many developing worlds turning from heavy population growth to negative growth, why ? They now have electricity, air conditioning, are not afraid of having their children killed due to violence, and have large cost of raising children changing their preference from 3-4 children to 1 or 2 per couple. This is seen in Brazil, China, Argentina, Chile, Mexico just to name a few examples. Once 2/3 of a countries population enjoys a basic entry level middle class standard of living this happens naturally.
The world is in the cusp of worldwide erradication of polio. The only countries left are Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many other diseases are reducing their worldwide mortality rates greatly, yet this hasn't caused a pickup in worldwide populational growth, because average standards of living are improving too, bringing down birth rates.

[plonoma]

This used to be a technical forum and website.

Ah well, let's chip in:
Personally I think:

we must improve and make technology more efficient and environmentally friendly.

Using more efficient and cleaner technology goes a long way:
Good thermal isolation, heat pumps to reduce the energy demands of a house.
Using renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, OTEC) and synthesizing hydrocarbons or have other storage mechanisms to deal with the intermittent behaviour.
You can take care to not let old inefficient computers run, replace them with new computers that have lower power consumption.
The lower power consumption is due to shrinking of process and dynamic power management techniques.
Replace any computer that is over 10 years old with new one.

Against overpopulation:
Let's first try contraception and family planning.

Historically most babies died so women had to have many tries to get some decent number of offspring.
Add in the wars and conflict as common when population density got too tense and you see how the whole thing trucked along.
Religions advocated tremendously for having as many kids as possible to overrun the other 'tribes'.

The newer behaviour lags a bit behind. In industrialised countries, people don't have as many kids any more.
Population growth, taking into account more wealthy people = less kids, seems to top out around 2050 and then shrink.

The solution to getting the work done is not an economic system but technology.
Not communism or capitalism has helped. Having technology that makes the work light helps.
Look at how we are all producing comments without getting paid for this due to the easy provided by our computers and internet = technology.

Once humanoid robots with strong AI, AGI are developed, human labour is not a necessity any more. You could change into a society where nobody has to work and laziness is switched with robots doing all the work.

Most people won't do their work but in a large enough population there will always be people who do art, write books and tinker with technology. If you could have good enough technology that is easy enough to make (cost soo low government can replace everybody's job with robots at low cost), then you can actually move to an only work as much as you want society without negative consequences. This is why 3D printing and automation is important. They allow the creative and tinkerers figure out a design once and then share it at no substantial cost to themselves! The open source movement works because copying a piece of software costs next to nothing in resources. That's why you can have communities developing open source software. Because the costs are low enough and the benefits are big enough.

I hope my humble opinion adds some sense into this conversation.