Hmm, that intrigued me. A simple graph of the world's population LOOKS like it would be exponentially growing if you went back to ~1995 when that song was being worked on. See here:Not too shabby, considering years ago Bad Religion released "Ten in 2010", based on the notion we'd have 10 billion by 2010. Not sure what the source of that projection was.
COVID-19 was suppose to help out in cutting back the population but we have great science now to make sure it doesn't happen. The more the merrier !
And short-term government decisions, Natsios argued, exacerbated that disaster. In 1995, the regime "triaged" the entire northeast region of the country—in essence, blocking food shipments to that portion of the population in order to ensure subsistence food supplies for the capital Pyongyang, whose support was critical to the government. "No food deliveries were made to that region for 2 ½ years," said Natsios.
"All famines take place in a political context," Natsios said. "And there has been no known famine in a democracy. In a democracy, people take action long before that point. Famines take place under centralized governments precisely because information can be hidden."
We waste a horrifying amount of food every dayIt's AMAZING how much mis-information we grew up with about things like overpopulation! Want to support 29 billion people? No problem. 58 billion people? No big deal:
Lawrence Solomon: Can Earth handle 29 billion people? Easy
Lawrence Solomon: Natural resources don’t limit our population’s ability to grow ever largerfinancialpost.com
There's so much anxiety-driven fake news out there! For example, physically, the United States is 2% BIGGER than China, and yet China supports & sustains a population of 1.4 billion people, whereas America only has 330 million people. Some interesting facts:
* We currently produce enough food, today, right now, to feed 10 billion people, and we only have 8 billion people
* Those 8 billion people only inhabit about 10% of the planet & only about 14.6% of the world's land area has been modified by humans
* Worldwide, we lose about 25k to hunger every day (roughly 9 million people per year). Amartya Sen said no democracy, with a free press, has ever had major famines. I don't have concrete data to link, but it appears that in America, we lose roughly 100 people a year due to starvation, primarily due to anorexia.
Globally, there is no food shortage. We are not short on resources, not by a LONG shot. We have global shipping systems. We have wealth. We have foreign aid. The biggest issue simply boils down to the misuse of free agency within governments. For example, the 1995 famine in North Korea that killed an estimated 3 million people:
How Did the North Korean Famine Happen?
www.wilsoncenter.org
We collectively have MORE than enough resources, particularly food, and can grow that exponentially to scale to fit our needs with modern farming technology. We just don't know how to share very well. With 195 countries on earth right now, we can't control everyone or force them to distribute food aid properly within their borders.
It sounds an awful lot like you're just saying the problem is runaway capitalism.just because i hate happiness,
1. "we have food" is incredibly wrong. SUPER wrong.
The nutritional values of our foods have plummeted. Our food resources are infested with microplastics. White, limp battery chickens infested with diseases are killing us.
And, you know, i could stop here. Essentially 99% of our problems are due to overpopulation, many of which are evident, like pollution, some others not evident but still dramatic.
The more humans in the same space, the more we see other humans as competitors, the worse we become as individuals.
2. the human population is not evenly distributed.
That awesome post of incredible positivity that claims "we have a distribution problem" doesn't even consider that getting bales of wheat to africa is not the same as the cost of DRINKING WATER in new york city. The two subjects are as distant as they could be but somehow bundled together to try to paint a picture of a superhuman species flying to the stars.
3. civilizational collapse is *seriously* close.
Somehow in 20 years we've gone from being stable to Doomsday Preppers being sensible. This is indirectly linked to population growth, but directly linked to the geographical distribution of said humans. If you are ONE HUMAN but you are in downtown new york, the functions you can assign yourself are different than if you live in Montana.
Have a read about the Complexity Theory and the linked Bronze Age Collapse. You're born in a highly populated area where humans can no longer exist tied directly to the ground they occupy, e.g. farmers, you will need to integrate with a complex system to survive. The higher the complexity, the more fragile the system and the more cataclysmic the failure.
4. overpopulation breeds hostility.
Humans spontaneously compete for resources.
5. our systems are not designed to withstand overpopulation.
This is the most important one; although you'd think "my banana doesnt taste good" more often, there is no indication that ANY of the systems that we use to maintain complexity are capable of dealing with overpopulation.
An example is: the cost of housing.
We have houses. We have more houses than population, but the distribution of these houses is not linked to the demand for the same houses, it instead goes through a system which has no control measures to prevent someone from buying all the houses since "people will be forced to buy from me".
The systems worked before, but nobody thought "hey, this system we have devised today with 2.9B people obviously isn't gonna work once we hit overpopulation, we should implement some safeguards to make sure once we do, the system doesnt collapse".
Guys, as far as my science takes me, we are fucked. I cannot see a way out of the next 50 years, that doesnt involve being thrown back to the early iron age. Being as reasonable as i can be, the future is grim.
nyyyah, never mind that, let's instead have a laugh and watch some The Newsroom.
We waste a horrifying amount of food every day
An example is: the cost of housing.
We have houses. We have more houses than population, but the distribution of these houses is not linked to the demand for the same houses, it instead goes through a system which has no control measures to prevent someone from buying all the houses since "people will be forced to buy from me".
The systems worked before, but nobody thought "hey, this system we have devised today with 2.9B people obviously isn't gonna work once we hit overpopulation, we should implement some safeguards to make sure once we do, the system doesnt collapse".
The solution is simple, kill everyone.
obviously you take this as a joke, but it's more profound than that.
Obligatory "kill the poor" sketch.
Let's hypothesize that we get to the point where we need to kill all the people.
Hypothesis 1: we say "ok, let's kill everyone".
This is a behavioural change. You DECIDE to change your behaviour.
likewise, at one point someone said "hey, we need to scrap all the cars, start walking, reduce the population, stop using plastic, and completely rework our economic system" and that was, for all intents and purposes, a viable solution.
.. but we didn't do that? We didn't action a behavioural change that is substantially easier than, let's say, kill everyone. Why not?
Because humans do not change. Large populations cannot change. We have innately instinctive behavioural machines and we are hard-keyed to do specific things like MAKE BABIES, DEFEAT COMPETITORS, EAT EVERYTHING.
and that's just not gonna happen. It will always be hypothesis 2, "let's just keep doing what we are programmed to do" because as machines designed to do the thing we do, we would sooner die than stop doing the thing we do.
Oh, this is such bullshit, we've changed fucking drastically in a few thousand years.Because humans do not change. Large populations cannot change. We have innately instinctive behavioural machines and we are hard-keyed to do specific things like MAKE BABIES, DEFEAT COMPETITORS, EAT EVERYTHING.
and that's just not gonna happen. It will always be hypothesis 2, "let's just keep doing what we are programmed to do" because as machines designed to do the thing we do, we would sooner die than stop doing the thing we do.