The World Has Hit 7 Billion in Population

.. Well, censuses would be a pain if we had underground people.

But anyway, 7bn people? Not too shabby, humanity. Not too shabby.

Let's just hope we can sustain this rather weird Malthusian curve (Yes, USAF. I've devalued my sentence by using your field of study ) we have. Especially in regards to natural resources.

It's not really a question of whether or not we have the resources (assuming we're not completely stupid and are capable of recognizing that renewables are the future), but rather if we have the space and governing ability.

I severely doubt we have the last one...

True. Red tape shall be the doom of humanity, not the bomb.

Well, there'd be a lot of self-interest in this kind of human expansion.

On the idea of colonizing other planets to save our own, I happened to write a speech about it for public speaking:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13188669310A18016600&page=1#1

If it comes to coldly exploiting the young even more in order to maintain the elderly (the fuck da youth option) or to callously ignore the elderly in favor of the young (the starve the old option) I'm all for starving the elderly.

I don't think the current generation of Baby Boomers deserves my being exploited forever to feed them. They're just too large a generation for the current youth to maintain.

edited 17th Oct '11 10:54:54 AM by SavageHeathen

Alright Savage, we get it, you don't give a shit about anybody over 35, now please stop assuming binary choices that won't actually come to pass, realistically, and contribute something constructive.

Your speech is made of awesome!

We must act to ensure that we are able to not have to ask "what mouths to feed."

I also suggest we need to also learn to increase the distribution of food and maybe develop GM foods if needed be. This will be important for colonisation of the Mars for we must manage ourselves on this world if we going to survive outside the cradel of mind that Earth be.

edited 17th Oct '11 10:50:50 AM by Ailedhoo

We have more than enough food, but not the money to sustain that output.

Basically, the people who need the food are too poor to afford it, and the system by which we try to subsidize it is broken, not to mention that they'd be better off growing their own food. The whole concept of "the First World makes food for the Third World" is an entirely unworkable idea, if the goal is for the Third World to not suck.

You also have to consider how good the land is. A lot of third-world countries are in not so hospitable regions. It's not just a matter of whether people will have room.

And resources are actually an issue. We're depleting some essentials.

Agriculture could be made more efficient. A lot more efficient.

I think I already posted it somewhere here, but look for example at this awesome automated farming system:

Compared to traditional farming, this is incredibly efficient. Of course, the initial cost is high, which is the reason why for the moment this sort of thing is mostly just for research purposes; but still, this sort of thing could theoretically allow us to create a lot of food with a relatively limited amount of space and energy.

edited 17th Oct '11 11:10:34 AM by Carciofus

On the topic of myths, the "small farmer being saved by subsidies" is also a myth. Speaking with both anecdotal knowledge from knowing several small farmers and evidence backed data, subsidies by and large are not going to or significantly helping small farmers.

Hell, even the idea of the "small farmer" is mostly mythological, small farmers are so relatively rare as to be a tiny, tiny fraction of farming in the US. It's a convenient puppet big farming trots out for every opportune argument.

That food you have right now? Unless it came from a roadside stand (which is rare relative to grocery stores, nor does it traffic any significant volume), it came from a large farming corporation.

However, we could make any resource you care to name from the atomic level up. It's just that we don't have the techniques to do so in any large quantities, or in any manner that is remotely cost efficient.

It's also quite likely that we will find alternatives, as we have in the past when a particular resource was no longer viable for other reasons (pollution, mainly).

edited 17th Oct '11 11:16:03 AM by deathjavu

@ Heathen

Er, dude, you're not going to be "exploited" forever, unless the old people have figured out how to live forever and I haven't heard about it.

@ Rest of thread

I admit I'm firmly in the camp of, the best way to deal with overpopulation is simply to produce less people and let things eventually even out. Seems a lot easier to figure out than all this terraforming stuff, especially since we have no idea what greening the desert or other possibilities would have on our current weather system.

edited 17th Oct '11 12:11:50 PM by Jeysie

Yeah, let's have current-day youth sacrifice its own prosperity for the sake of an older generation that purposely keeps it down. To add insult to injury, this is the very same older generation responsible for stuff like the War on Drugs, supply-side economics and enormous college debt that doesn't go away with bankruptcy. Unfortunately, they're likely to live for longer than any generation before them.

Having to pay a much greater proportion of our wealth to sustain our older generation than they did is a humiliating sacrifice. An alternative is needed.

edited 17th Oct '11 12:18:59 PM by SavageHeathen

What happens when you get to be that age?

I don't think he cares, tropetown.

Uh, yeah, Savage, they also made sure your sorry ass didn't die before you were old enough to walk and talk and spout that shit, so stop complaining that you get to learn from their mistakes and those mistakes make them (who didn't have those same mistakes to learn from) "monsters."

Do you have any solution that doesn't involve us young folks having a reduced standard of living compared to the former generation in order to maintain theirs?

edited 17th Oct '11 12:29:39 PM by SavageHeathen

Answer the question. What happens when you get to be that age?

They spent one fifth of their life to make sure you got to have a standard of living. You don't get to complain that you get to do the same for them during the last fifth of their lives, since they already gave a fifth of their lives for you.

Calm down people.

Population is forcasted to begin declaining by 2060.

Meanwhile, we have enough resources to get by.

Meanwhile, I bet agricultural output will triple during that time period.

edited 17th Oct '11 12:38:44 PM by Baff

Shouldn't they at least have to share the efforts and sacrifices of fixing the population problem?

I mean, if we have to have lower wages because a high proportion of them go to pay for their pensions, their pensions should be proportionally lower, too. We shouldn't be handing them pensions that are larger than our wages, for starters.

edited 17th Oct '11 12:39:06 PM by SavageHeathen

They already worked for some stupidly large proportion of their lives. The whole point of retirement is so that they get some small chunk of it to actually do interesting things. You could justify the raising of the retirement age, I suppose, in relation to longer life expectancies.

Since when are (tax-funded) pensions larger than wages... well, I suppose wages are generally very shitty in the US, but seriously, I think my grandparents get 400$ each a month, maybe. I can't recall the last time they told me what it was. That's not exactly a massive number, now...

If we were talking about making pensions and retirement funding in general radically better while keeping the current economic system as it is then yes, your complaints would be valid, but the assumption is that everything is going to be fixed, in which case you go from reasonable to bloodthirsty and selfish.

@Savage: The simple answer is, the people in charge are not stupid enough to fuck themselves over, since they're getting closer and closer to retirement age. When later generations find themselves in a similar position, they'll obviously do the same thing.

edited 17th Oct '11 12:50:20 PM by tropetown

Oh, I wasn't talking about the US specifically, more about the world in general. An US-like level of pensions we can reasonably maintain. And we can always import a metric shit-ton of immigrants to cook the books when it comes to demographics.

Euros have a larger problem: Euro youth is going to be fucked. Pensioners there typically receive relatively large pensions (like 60-70% of their average income when they worked, IIRC). With the rapidly aging population in Europe and the stagnating wages for young folks, they would get crippling taxes and much lower earnings than the previous generation.

It's theoretically possible that Euro workers of the generation that's young more won't make more than pensioners. They might even end up making less. Since the old generation is larger, the political process could turn into a (worse) gerontocracy.

edited 17th Oct '11 12:54:19 PM by SavageHeathen

@Heathen

The thing is though, the old outnumbering the young will be temporary. Once the old people from the boomer generation die off (without us helping it along, thanks), the ratios will be back down to being much more even again because the size of the generations outside of that will be more evenly matched.

Basically reducing population growth just means getting past that one period of time where the old will outnumber the new smaller group of young. Once you get past that, they won't be "exploiting" you.

Yeah, it sucks that you and I got stuck being in the transitional generation that's gotta deal with it, but life isn't always fair.

edited 17th Oct '11 1:26:33 PM by Jeysie