this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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You make a fine point as well. Overpopulation. There's only so much surface area on our degrading blue-green marble of a planet.
Back in the 1700s there wasn't anywhere near 8 billion people on the planet. Yet people were living just fine. Not perfectly, but is anyone except the richest of the rich living just fine now?
But these days, the politicians want people to believe there's a shortage of people, even trying to restrict women's rights, and also arrange wars to kill people.
https://scottmanning.com/content/year-by-year-world-population-estimates/
Edits - Apologies for numerous edits, I just want to make my thoughts clear.
I'm sorry, are you saying women's rights were better in the 1700s or wars didn't happen? Or that people had less problems? Or that the ruling class shared power?
I don't mean to offend, but this is an insanely naive view of the world.
No, I'm just saying there's way too many damn people for this little tiny planet these days, and if you let the politicians talk their rhetoric and shit, they'd just as soon try to convince you that we need more people.
They want more women birthing children, just to have more people to milk of every bit of tax money they can, and either work them into their graves or send them to war.
We're all pawns in a huge game. The more people there are, the more energy we consume, regardless of the source of that energy. That's just science.
If there was only 1/8 as many people on the planet, there still wouldn't be any shortage of people, and we'd probably only be consuming about 1/20th of the energy, because we wouldn't be gridlocked in traffic and competing so much for the finite resources on the planet.
Yes that last part is a bit of speculation, but still, isn't 8 billion people a bit too many for Earth? There ain't any more land to conquer/explore, unless you dare try living on Antarctica...
You know who thought like you? Thomas Malthus. 2 centuries ago.
2 centuries ago we didn't have millions of cars on the roads burning gasoline stuck at red lights in gridlocked traffic. Try again.
And yet 2 centuries ago some people were already thinking, exactly like you, that there was too many humans for the earth to sustain them. You can see how wrong he was. The fact that you refuse to learn from past mistakes is quite telling though.
2 centuries ago there weren't anywhere near 8 billion people. Earth ain't got any bigger since then. At what point would you consider the world overpopulated? 10 billion? 15? 20?
I don't see that he was wrong at all, he was just calling it out earlier than anyone was ready to listen.
You might as well warn about the sun eating the earth and turning it into hell. It's not too soon, only 5 billion years left.