Holding short of the Full Catastrophe

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by hypewaders, Jul 16, 2010.

?

Are you fixed yet?

Poll closed Aug 15, 2010.
  1. Yes! :)

    1 vote(s)
    16.7%
  2. No. :/

    4 vote(s)
    66.7%
  3. Other %)~

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  4. This poll and thread are unscientific and not worth my esteemed time.

    1 vote(s)
    16.7%
  1. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    Procreation, I mean. I think it vastly over-rated.

    I much enjoy borrowing children, but not long enough to be much reminded that they are selfish little people.
     
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  3. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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  5. superstring01 Moderator

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  7. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    And quite expensive - why the gay, at any income level, generally have more money to spend.

    None the less, If you have a rational basis for belief that human race would better off if your genes were passed down to later generations, then there is sort of a moral obligation to bear this extra expense. I have four grand childern of pre-collages age. All are doing school work in some subjects one or two grades advanced. With four, my genes are sent two generations into the future.
    Their Norwegian mother's genes, also with rational basis for being desirable, are of course also preserved for two generations into the future.
     
  8. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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  9. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    Well, it's just this enormous thing I inherited, weighing on my conscience. But there are lots of big egos all around.
     
  10. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Children should be allowed to be a little selfish I think, there will be enough disappointments later on in life. I like other peoples children too and surprisingly most children like me. But yes, its a relief to send them home with their parents. I've been told time and again that children make life worth living and I won't deny the occasional second thought but on the whole, its not something I've contemplated seriously. There are enough people in the world [and my family]
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Perhaps you could compensate (assuming your genes were more desirable than average) by paying some idiots to get tubes tied or vasectomies?

    I.e. do your part for the future gene pool as well as slow the population growth. IMHO, people are an out of control cancer on the biosphere.

    AS you like to fly, perhaps you could give free parachute jumping rides to idiots who "unfortunately" did not pack their chutes correctly?
     
  12. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    I know I've had more fun with m choices, but if I could start all over and become a geneticist I would. And my life's goal would be the introduction of an epidemic virus rendering 50-75% (or some acceptable probability) of humanity sterile. As for idiots and airplanes, I have strict rules about the perpetual separation of the two.
     
  13. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    In the developed west, the right level of average fertility to keep the population stable is 2.1 children per couple. I do not think there is a single country in the first world with an average fertility that high. The United States is about the highest at 2.05. The US has a growing population due to immigration. Without immigration, numbers would be steadily falling.

    In many other nations, fertility is getting less and less, and in places like Japan and Italy is getting close to 1.

    In other words, guys, it is utterly ridiculous in the extreme to feel guilty about having kids, or to call for people to have fewer. We are not replacing deaths as it is.

    Of course, if you are African, things are different. Fertility in some of the world's poorest nations can be over 7. If that concerns you, agitate for contraceptive aid to be sent to those places. The main reason fertility is so high in those countries is simply lack of access to effective contraception.
     
  14. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    Maybe we starve them in repressed resentment for having more sex.

    I would welcome a reduction (peacefully over generations) of human planetary loading to just a billion or so. I imagine that the planet feels the very same way (and may become assertive). The quality of life for a billion humans with heightening technology and a planet in balance would be tremendous. Just in the near future, with warfare obsolete, there might come a likely baby boom, following an unprecedented global peace dividend.

    Many backward people are afraid of world government sorting itself out overtly; they prefer to remain insulated- but times ahead are going to open up that curtain by the levers of power. And hopefully, they aren't making babies in there.

    Stop! Effing breeders.
     
    Last edited: Jul 18, 2010
  15. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I AGREE. At least 40 years ago, I advocated that food aid to over populated lands be laced with birthcontrol chemicals, assuming that one with even gross over doses were not seriously injurous does exist. I came to this POV after what was then to me a shocking converstaion with an Indian lady / student at Cornell.

    She was angry at US food aid - said it was only increasing the total suffering. Those who could not find way to earn their food should die in that generation and not a couple of generations later 10 die of starvation instead, etc. The more I thought about what she said, the more sense it made.

    A forever expanding population will ultimate have many more starving to death. Perhaps relatively soon dozens of millions will starve to death as there is a new resistant wheat rust spreading out of Africa and the mid East now.
     
  16. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    Billy

    The problem with that logic is that it is contrary to the facts. Since this is a science forum, it seems to me that we should pay attention to credible empirical evidence, and not operate according to outmoded political correctness.

    The population is growing, but at a reducing rate, and the United Nations predicts stabilisation at 9 billion by 2040. (www.un.org/popin) Over the past 40 year period you mentioned, hunger has been getting less. Not only are malnourished people falling in number as a percentage, but are falling in absolute numbers also.

    This is due in no small part to improvements in science and technology, and especially in agriculture. Once, India could not grow enough food to feed its own people. Today it exports food.

    Where there is hunger and poverty, it is, inevitably, due to political corruption. Not overpopulation.
     
  17. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    But if you consider human destruction of habitat, extinctions, and climate change it is obvious that humans are overpopulating. I do agree that the present distribution of food is corrupt. But beyond that, we humans would be far more prosperous, and our planet far more sustainably bountiful if human population were reduced by half or more (birth control would be the sensible, ethical, and most acceptable method). Unbridled population growth is hampering the potential or our species; we're becoming overgrown and it is stunting our development.
     
    Last edited: Jul 19, 2010
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The two are not mutually exclusive.

    The effects of overpopulation will be mediated through politics - whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

    And these politics will kick in long before the food, water, sewage disposal capabilities, free time and space, educational resources to join the technological class, or whatever is running short, actually runs short. The powerful and informed will seldom fail to provide for themselves in the face of a visible future.

    It is true that the recent food price spike, with world wide boosts in malnutrition and riots in dozens of countries, was caused by financial speculation on the major grain exchanges;

    it is also true that such vulnerability is partly a consequence of the inability of the large populations involved to feed themselves well without access to the products of high tech agricultural advances those grain exchanges handle;

    and in turn true that politics resides centrally in the development, as well as the employment , of these "advances", and that simple overpopulation does not corrupt them of its own;

    and in turn true that the effects of emerging rigid class structure, hoarding and war, and other political consequences of even a small political misstep under the pressure of population growth amid even temporarily limited resources, are rightly laid - at least partly - to that population growth.

    For example: if the Gaza Strip had 130,000 people living in it, the water and land distribution problem that is central to the ugly events there would be solved.
     
  19. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    I'm okay with the ones I have now, but I wouldn't mind another three or so.
     
  20. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    The thesis that population growth leads to a reduction in human welfare is unproven.

    In fact, the famous (sadly now dead) economist, Professor Julian Simon claims pretty much the opposite. Human growth, both technologically and economically, depends on having lots of highly trained and brilliant people to push the envelope.

    So where do all these brilliant people come from? In simplistic terms, the more people there are, the more brilliant scientists etc can come forward. Sure this includes the need for excellent education and excellent incentives, but the population must also be there.

    If only 1 in a million is truly brilliant, then today's world of 7 billion will have 7,000 truly brilliant people to push human progress, while the world of 1900 AD, with only 1 billion, would have only 1,000 truly brilliant people.

    If we look at recent history, we could draw a nice little graph showing that average human welfare has been increasing along with global population. This is simplistic, and unproven also, but a correlation between global population and average human welfare actually exists.
     
  21. Pronatalist Registered Senior Member

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    750
    title: A sparsely populated world, is a quaint out-dated evil eugenics fad of the past. Get over it.

    No, it is not obvious that humans are "overpopulating." What is obvious, is that we have some development issues, and corrupt economies/governments.

    According to the Utilitarian Principle, which says often the best thing to do is that which most benefits the most people, population growth is counted towards this goal. I am not alone to notice this, for I came across some website that admitted it implies population growth, so more people could be around to benefit from whatever.

    Reducing population by half, is immoral and absurd, so why even consider it? There's no moral nor practical ways by which to enforce such tyranny. Which half of the people do you want to eliminate? The half you are in, or the half I am in? Perhaps China wouldn't object if we eliminate all their people, to make more room for our people? It's an absurd counterproductive discussion, that has a way of quickly breaking down into a shouting match, at the stupid U.N. "population" conferences, as people find out they are to be harmed, that country is against country, and abortions would be promoted. Who's to blame? The population-burgeoning "third world" countries, actually in need of more capitalism and less marxist dictators, or do we blame the "over-consuming" Western countries? Neither. Not only is this New World Order dictatorship thinking evil, leaving no place for refugees to flee when it is surely quickly found to be corrupt, but it doesn't make any sense to try to make a sparsely populated globalist utopia. The people are finding out that they have to oppose it, because there won't be any place for them and their sometimes many children in it. Even if man could build some fanciful globalist utopia, isn't it very likely that it would have to be highly populous, to have any chance at all?

    Either we curb our birthrates, or we find more places for more families to live, somebody said. Isn't it obvious, that most sensible people prefer the latter? "There's places all around to put more people," they say. True, but doesn't that then imply, that most people would much rather populate their lands and the world, denser and denser, than unnaturally restrict their birthrates, and especially for some faraway corrupt politicians to tell them how many children they may have?

    So that's what I have long advocated. Large families worldwide, so that far more people may experience life, and let the planet naturally populate denser and denser, urbanizing to whatever extent needed. If people either can't, or won't curb their birthrates, which I obviously believe in neither birth control nor population "control" of humans, then the only real natural penalty, is a world not so sparsely populated as it once was. I see no need to pile on any additional penalty, and why not use the already population-growth-naturally-accelerated-technology-growth, to mitigate the minor "growing pains" of a human-filling world, without actually making any effort to limit actual numbers.

    In the past, Abraham and Lot's growing tribes spread farther apart, so as to go on growing, as told in Genesis. But on a spherical planet, there's but only so far we can spread out, before we run into ourselves again? But people forget, there's not just 1, but 3 perceptional dimensions we can spread into still. Outwards, Inwards, and Upwards. I advocate all 3, but especially Outwards, as God never commanded people to live on top of one another. But cities can also infill underutilized land with high-density housing, and people can be stacked into highrises. If or as they so choose. Sure, live in the middle of nowhere, if a few people want spacious countryside, or live in the teeming megacities. I'm not so much concerned as to where people may choose to live, as with that more and more people, everybody's progeny, be welcome to live somewhere. What ever happened to the rights of individuals, personal responsibility, and people free to make their own choices, without some runaway taxation nanny state trying to mess up everything for us?
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2010
  22. visceral_instinct Monkey see, monkey denigrate Valued Senior Member

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    I really want to get fixed. Sadly it's not exactly free, and I earn shit.
     
  23. Pronatalist Registered Senior Member

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    title: I thought getting fixed, is what we do to creatures with no human rights? Slaves and pets.

    So why are you so gullible as to get damaged?

    There's always the more natural options, that billions in developing countries rely on, in the unlikely event that they don't want to be blessed with more children.

    The no sex or less sex options.

    What for do humans want to have sex for? It's so much time-consuming "hard work" for today's busy prudes, to copulate. (Yeah, right?) Either that, or these days, we have become more and more selfish, trying to divorce copulation from its natural purpose of reproduction.
     

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