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The Cedars of Lebanon
The Big Problem
Buy Your Own Ticket to The Stars
The Future Does Not Suck
The Great Teleport Debate
Does God Bless America?
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There's Nowt as Queer as Folk
Palace Admits Prince Charles is Gay
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The Big Problem. It sounds dire, but to put things in perspective; All humans on the planet could fit in a square 20 miles by 20 miles. It would be like a crowded elevator, but they would fit. A building in the form of a cubic mile could easily hold all the humans on earth, assuming, roughly, ten foot floors. Again, it would be crowded (2-3 square feet per person). Of course, we could not survive that close. Not enough air, waste problems disease, etc. but.... the world is very big, there are vast tracts of land that are uninhabited, and the human mind, if driven by the proper motivation, can undoubtedly improve and create technologies that will (not meaning to sound too much like Edith Keeler) provide vast (unlimited) free energy, which ultimately translates to unlimited food, shelter, medicine's etc. If human population can grow in the near barbaric conditions that the most populous regions endure, imagine what directed human intellect can accomplish ? I believe humans will someday be able to create as much living space as necessary on worlds as dead as the moon, and also on more hospitable places such as Mars.... not to mention space stations. I think our generous Earth and Sun, along with the moon and human ambition, intelligence and resilience can possibly enable a trillion people to live on the planet, and more out in the rest of the Universe. Of course, this assumes we do not destroy ourselves. It will take
the best in humanity to do what I am talking about, but the Biggest
problem is not over-population, but global under-achievement and
mis-placed motives. The human desire to dominate others is part
of the REAL BIG problem. The BIG problem. NOT over-population.....but human under-achievement. Mat Ember |
Population has to be limited in a limited universe. That simple Malthusian principle cannot be ignored only delayed. Trying to keep a huge population alive will kill the planet.
The way we currently live demands more from our planet than it has got to give. We are using up almost everything the Earth has at an unsustainable rate. Fossil fuels will inevitably run out, the only question is whether we will have destroyed our climate before that happens or whether most of the negative climate impacts occur after the fuel has run out.
Population isn't a single problem, it affects everything. Simple space has never been the issue, neither has over-crowding. Of course we can cope with the basic storage of substantially higher numbers of people, we just let our cities grow and stick people in concrete and steel racking units. More people live in London than in Scotland, if we let the whole of Britain have the same population density as London and its suburbs then there would be room for about a billion people just on these small islands alone. But London is already getting short of water supplies despite the water in the Thames being drunk several times before it reaches the sea. London needs land around it that isn't London to catch rainwater, to store drinking water, to grow food, to grow timber, to bury waste (and the odd few million dead Londoners), to quarry stone, sand, gravel, clay and many other materials and to clean its air and water. Think about fish, if you have got a big lake you don't really need to worry too much about oxygenating the water, providing fish food and stuff like that, nature looks after that for you but the smaller your pond or fishbowl the more effort you have to put in to maintaining a high density of fish in it. If you try to keep a dozen fish in a 100 litre aquarium they are on the equivalent of a life support machine. Cities are like hi-tech aquaria for people. |
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London is definitely using more of the water and food than the area it occupies produces naturally. The same is true for Britain, although not quite so obviously. Unfortunately the same is probably also true for Earth.
The capacity of the planet to support a population of any species is not fixed. It can be boosted artificially. To put it crudely we can find more resources for our species by stealing them from other species. We can make room for more people by stealing the land and food of other animals, with or without exterminating them directly. The usual procedure is to steal the land and let them starve to death somewhere else out of sight and out of mind. We have been doing it for centuries. Some people are even proud of it. I suppose if you live a shitty life in a place where the only thing that takes the breath away is the empty sky you haven't got that much to be proud of except your membership of a species or a nation that quite without any reference to you happens to contain some greatness, largely as a side effect of population size. Both Americans an Chinese get off on the idea that they are big countries with lots of people. Whu-hoo, being born American or Chinese must be such a phenomenally difficult thing, no wonder they are so proud of their achievement. Hell if they had been born anywhere else they'd have to do something themselves before they had the right to feel proud, how lame is that?
Do you really see infesting the universe as a thing to look forward to? I don't. I would like to see the planet of our birth remaining habitable for more than one species and its food supplies.
We don't have any destiny or duty. We have a free choice as to what we want to do with our lives, and with life itself. We can and should tell our genes to fuck off. Just because we have arrived at self-awareness as a species because of evolution and gene selfishness does not mean that we have to continue on that trajectory as if we owe it to our genes to propagate them infinitely. We owe nothing. We have minds of our own and just like children we are not obliged to do what our parents wanted us to do: we have free choice. I suggest we choose to be free and happy not yoked to the idea that we owe some ignorant and clueless strings of chemicals any favours to propagate them. There is nothing we have any obligations to. No gods. No destiny. We don't have to be heroes. I suggest we set ourselves achievable goals rather than either literally or metaphorically aiming for the stars.
A lot of sci-fi loving people have taken in without question the idea of a destiny in space which has grown out of late nineteenth century understanding of the nature and "purpose" of man. It is a total myth. We have no destiny. We are not the end to which "evolution" has been working, we are not the custodians of the planet or the brain or the sperm of Gaia. We are just us. We don't have to do anything. If we die out we have failed nothing. There is no test and no judge. There is nothing to fail and no shame in extinction. Unless we set ourselves some goals. I think we should set ourselves some goals but we should be clear that nothing has set them for us. There is no glory in numbers, the human population total isn't a score, still less is the gross weight of the human biomass something we should be eying up as if was important.
Try telling a starving African that our destiny as a species lies in living on Mars. The starving have a much clearer idea of priorities and moral choices for a sustainable future. They haven't been exposed to the corrosive concepts of an ignorant Fascist bastardization of Darwinism and a faith in the virtues of the divine hand at work in free markets that maximizes, optimizes and blesses America all at the same time. They have a much clearer idea, that food needs land and water and more mouths to feed requires more land and water and probably money and oil too. More mouths don't make any more land, any more water or any more oil.
Capitalism requires expansion. It is not acceptable to sell the same amount as you sold last year. Selling the same amount is going backwards. Profits have to go up. Capitalism needs growth or it begins to implode. Population growth is good news for capitalism, it keeps demand and prices growing. The only thing that is allowed to stagnate in capitalism is the aggregate level of human satisfaction. In fact if people did actually become happier that would be very bad news for capitalism, happy people don't need to buy more stuff, constantly increasing consumption requires constant dissatisfaction. If people ever became satisfied the system would break down. Fortunately for the system people seem to conspire to keep expecting happiness to come to them shortly rather than to be something they enjoy all the time.
It is a very bad idea for us to feel we have no choice but to keep on expending, propagating, using up and wearing out. There is no glory in plaguing space or having large numbers of our species alive.
It is a nightmare vision to imagine looking up at the night sky and thinking that out there are people just like down here and they too are surrounded by technological fixes for political and biological problems caused by a failure to stand up to human greed. We don't need to turn our entire solar system into a machine for pumping out more greedy people. There is nothing noble in this vision of raping space because we are too cowardly to face up to the possibility of making do with what we've got.
Infinite greed will not make a single person happy. Infinite greed offers a nightmare vision in which huge numbers of people are consuming and nobody is happy. It is an abuse of science to suggest that such a vision is desirable or inevitable. There is a better vision of the future in which people continue to live on the planet Earth sustained by a biological mechanism that does not need inputs of massive amounts of energy, a system that can be largely ignored because it regulates itself automatically. We need to recognize that we have no destiny. We don't have to live on Mars to show we're a bright species and we should recognize that gee-whizzery shiny space ships and colonies on the moon don't benefit anybody. Trust me, you will still be able to maintain an erection if the number of people in the world goes down and we stop pretending to be Flash Gordon or Captain Kirk.
The Star Trek universe was invented in the sixties. We have learnt a lot since then, not least we have discovered that the interests of the genes that built us are not the same as the interests of us, the people. We don't have to spread our genes and the future doesn't suck. The future isn't what we make it, we're not that smart or that powerful, but we can be plenty smart enough by recognizing that in the long term we're all dead. It doesn't actually matter to me one iota whether I have a billion great great great great grand children living on Titan or whether my descendants get to live in a Dyson sphere. I don't care. I will be dead. We all will. The scale of the future, the projected glory of the night sky twinkling with the lights of ten thousand inhabited worlds is just a silly masturbation fantasy of greedy people who lack the imagination to grapple with serious problems of politics and biology.
Why build a bigger future for slaves of strands of DNA when you can try to build a future of happier people here on the planet that is just right for us?
Americans are richer, more powerful and more numerous than the majority of people on this planet. But they are not happier with their lives. They earn more, spend more, consume more and boast more but they are not significantly happier in their skins than the generation fifty years before or people in countries with significantly more modest lifestyles. The more-and-more society is not a happier society and there is no reason to expect things to change in the future. Let's stop driving ourselves somewhere we need not go in the name of an imperative that doesn't exist and in pursuit of something we can never realistically expect to catch.