Ways to deal with overpopulation

[llubtoille]

Thing about overpopulation, is that it'll pretty much sort itself out,
If there's not enough food or w'eva to go around, then the poorest will die off,
The population then steadily shrinks to the point where sustainable resources can support it.
problem solved!

 

[TheIronRuler]

No, no, and again no.
As a secular Humanist, the notion of selective breeding in humans (for example, eugenics) is disgusting and the notion that some deserve to live more than others is plain wrong.

Erm, being a secular humanist doesn't necessarily exclude a positive view of eugenics.

Here's a quick reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Humanism

"Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism (often with a capital H to distinguish it from other forms of humanism), is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment. It specifically rejects religious dogma, supernaturalism, pseudoscience or superstition as the basis of morality and decision-making."

Eugenics doesn't fall into the category of religious dogma, supernaturalism, pseudoscience or superstition in itself.

Sure, plenty of religious nuts, supernaturalists, pseudoscientists and superstitious people have tried to justify their specific view citing scientifc basis in the eugenics movement.

But the basic premise of eugenics is based in biology.

Now you might choose to reject eugenics as well as these other non-humanist aspects, but there's no reason why one couldn't be a secular humanist AND possess a positive attitude towards eugenics.

You like to nitpick, don't you?
I was stating my views, and an important part of it is the equality between all men. Along with the things that you have highlighted, I do not support eugenics.
That post was rather useless... Have a good day.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Yes, how can we deal with these kinds of threads? Their stagnant stench is overpopulating the forums.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

I was watching the news a few days back and there was a quick report on world population. This year there will be approximately 7 billion people living on Earth. I did a little research on the projected population growth world wide and found the numbers to be quite disturbing. While I was researching I started pondering about the issue of population control and how society would rationalizes euthanizing humans or restrict certain people from reproducing and even going as far as genetically altering humans to restrict longevity. I'm curious to see everyone's thoughts on this controversial topic and please keep it civil.

The post above has the answer. Granted that there hasn't been a thread like this in a couple months, but they always turn out the same:

You get the people like me that know that this can't really be solved because it would mean controlling peoples lives, and that is wrong.

And the people that support the horrible idea of eugenics who think only the "smart" people should have kids.

Then the more radical of each side square off and start a flame war where people get suspended or banned.

Inb4 "Kill all the stupid people."

So true, though that is a little extreme. It usually turns into, "Don't let the stupid people breed!"

Similar to this, you just barely got your Inb4:

KILL THE CHAVS! Seriously, though, I believe in eugenics. You should have to prove you can handle a kid, because it seems to be those who can't who have 20+.

So, how will we determine what is the perfect way to handle kids. Nobody is perfect at handling kids.

The system wouldn't work unless a perfect idea of handling could be created, which it can't.

It would be an incredibly abused system, especially in today's political world.

You would have radical liberals trying to make it so that conservative couples don't get to raise kids because they would be filling the child's mind with those wrong conservative ideas.

And the same would happen with the radical conservatives.

As well as radical atheists calling for sanctions against religious people breeding and spreading false ideas of there being a god.

And the radical religious people calling the same against atheists and other religions against religions.

It just can't be done because there are way too many kinds of people with their own agendas that it would become a bureaucratic as well as social nightmare.

But it shouldn't be done anyway because it takes away freewill. You would have a perfectly nice couple that is refused clearance to have kids because they failed one or two small sections of a complex test. That is just plain wrong.

 

[emeraldrafael]

if you wanna stop overpopulation, just cut off aide to africa. Like, complete and total aide. the disease, standard of living, war, genocide, and nature itself will wipe a large portion of them off te face of the earth (there's even a joke comic about AIDS being population control in a political comic I saw once). And lets face it, western humanitarian efforts arent doing much good.

Oh I fully agree Im a bad person for thinking it, but then again, i never said it was a good idea by any stretch of the word.

 

[Tilted_Logic]

I haven't given overpopulation near enough thought to come up with any viable solutions. But I do not agree with selective breeding, I'd rather see the promotion of contraceptives.

I have pondered whether or not colonizing the Moon/Mars would make things better or worse, as we're still a race learning to handle the repercussions of our actions on Earth. I'd love to see people attempting to live elsewhere in the solar system, but I think that'll only be environmentally feasible once we've learned to balance and manage our impacts on the Earth.

1. Make euthanasia legal, and where it already is make it easier.

2. Pour money into space exploration.

3. Further promote contraception, especially in developing nations.

4. Retirement-age extreme sports holidays.

I think I love you.

 

[Jinx_Dragon]

One of the reasons I am pissed at the whole de-escalation of space exploration is the fact we need to get off this rock if we are going to survive. Hell, we need to get out of this system in the next few million years and while I know that is a long time, we could kill all of ourselves in the mean time of we are not careful. Who knows what natural disaster might come across us as well, ending us all.

As for what we do with the problem in the mean time... restrictive breeding. No, not selective breeding as that is giving others the right to decide who is 'pure' and who is not. Restrictive breeding simply means that a person is only allowed to reproduce twice. I would prefer limiting it to one myself, would cut the problem down greatly, but I will be willing to allow a replacement for each parent.

Never going to see it happen though so I don't put it high on my list of policies. Getting back into space would be far more beneficial to us all instead of restrictive breeding.

 

[Jinx_Dragon]

It's time for floating cities people.

As much as an engineering nightmare that would be, it is a good idea. It would free up a great deal of our land for more useful purposes. It does raise questions what would happen to the sea levels, over cooling and other effects it would have floating large cities out there.

Caption:
food Mistinp

Mist imps are for eats, like babies!

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I don't agree. There is still plenty of space to go around, same with resources. The only area that might be in serious jeopardy soon is areas of Asia. My long term solution for overpopulation is colonization of other planets. Time to stop keeping all our eggs in one basket!

 

[JustOrdinary]

Hey guys, has anyone else realized that cannibalism would solve both overpopulation AND the hunger crises?

Just thought I'd throw that in there. Food for thought, etc.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

It's time for floating cities people.

As much as an engineering nightmare that would be, it is a good idea. It would free up a great deal of our land for more useful purposes. It does raise questions what would happen to the sea levels, over cooling and other effects it would have floating large cities out there.

Caption:
food Mistinp

Mist imps are for eats, like babies!

It worked in The Jetsons.

 

[JaceArveduin]

Simple solution: Start WWIII

Having a huge war where everyone is getting kill drops the population real fast.

 

[TheIronRuler]

A solution?
Colonize Mars.

The colonization and transforming of Mars sounds like an unrealistic. Humans have not even sent a maned spacecraft to Mars but the U.S. is planing to conduct a maned mission to Mars in 2030 I believe

It was a joke, there really is no solution.
I just didn't want to be pessimistic about it, but know that I think about it we're all going to die.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

But anyway. There's still more than enough food and space to go around, so I don't see what the problem is.

There really is enough to go around. Mismanagement of what we have is a bigger problem than depletion (i.e. petty dictators abuse power and thus food/money is squandered, or corporations deliberately make life awful for developing countries in order to get cheap wage slaves). There are still many parts of the world which are not heavily populated, and no, not just the barren wastelands.

Besides which, we have an aging population in many developed countries. This means not enough children are being born to meet the number that grow old and die. True, China is hugely populated in places, but much of the Western "modern" world is having trouble maintaining their population.

 

[Bucky01]

watch the last episode of the first series of the old tv show called sliders.

basically there are infinite money machines around the place where you can retrieve as much money as you like, and every time you retrieve money form here you go into "the lottery" the more money you take the higher the chance of winning (has multiple winners), if you win the lottery you are given anything you desire for the next day or so, then you are euthanized to keep the global population down. entering the lottery is optional, and with this solution people who are euthanized are honored for their sacrifice for the stability of the world as opposed to people killing each other in wars for food and water.

 

[Slowpool]

Zombie plague.

 

[JambalayaBob]

It's not really 7 billion. It's only about 7,000,000,000 people (i.e. seven thousand million). I still don't understand why Americans use the short scale...

But anyway. There's still more than enough food and space to go around, so I don't see what the problem is.

It's not like it's just the US that uses short scale, there are a lot of countries that use both, and it's up and away more based on language and dialect than on nationality. I'm pretty sure there's not a primarily English speaking country that doesn't use short scale.

 

[GraveeKing]

The only reason there's a problem with overpopulation is many of those people are not sufficiently putting back what they take from the economy. e.g. A lot of people in modern country's - America and Britain etc, have people given money because they're unable to find jobs.
So in short what we really need to do is get rid of those kind of people and keep only the useful ones, that way the population can continue to grow but still be self-sufficient!

We need Chlorine in the gene pool, get rid of the most lazy and useless like people who somehow manage to sit on a chair so long their skin gets stuck to it. The people who you hear do such stupid things but manage to survive it. Well maybe if they just put their hand in a microwave something tells me maybe they don't DESERVE to waste medical health-care! People who rely on the rest of the world to keep them happy at home, I know way too many people who I've seen around pubs who just sit back lounge off the unemployment benefits or handicapped funding because 'they can't get jobs'.
Not of course to say all of these people can get jobs and they're just lazy but there are plenty of people taking money from the taxpayers when they only have a slight limp in their leg! It's ridiculous! They can easily get a job but simply don't bother and it's the reason we can't afford overpopulation while idiots like that still exist.


Well I could ramble for ages but my point really is basically: Kill off everyone who is too stupid, too lazy and/or generally too useless to get a job and help the sufficiency for the rest of the population. If everyone does enough work to support at least themselves then we'll always have more room for population! Simple.

 

[JambalayaBob]

It's idiotic to try to limit the amount of kids people have. Just look at China, their population is "magically" still growing even though there are laws restricting the amount of children per person; prohibition NEVER works. The only way we're going to solve overpopulation is to spread ourselves among the stars, as people have mentioned here before. Don't give any bullshit about needing to "deal with our own problems down here first" either. Guess what? People aren't perfect, nothing is ever gonna be "ideal", so grow the fuck up and stop acting like world peace is practical.

The reality is, if we don't colonize space, we will die, end of story, bye bye humanity. Spreading ourselves as far as we can possibly reach will increase our odds immensely, and it will most certainly let ourselves spread our legacy at the very least. Plus, doesn't it feel amazing just to know that one day we will be able to look at the sky and know that there's someone looking back at us?

Also, speaking of overpopulation, this planet isn't really overpopulated yet. There are cities and countries that deal with overpopulation, but as a whole, we aren't taking up any more than 3% of the planet's land; not including the waters, just the land. We're nowhere near to the smog infested, gray and brown, overcrowded global metropolis that some of the more ***** ass tree huggers are whining about. We're definitely fucking ourselves over by destroying ecosystems in places, but it's just not that bad yet, especially with how resilient nature truly is. If you think about it, the huge ass rock that wiped out all the dinosaurs was a lot more devastating than anything humans have done so far. If the biosphere can recover from a worldwide cataclysm that absolutely decimated a sizable percentage of life on earth, then it can recover from our stupid shit.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

Someone made a good point about it's not the numbers, it's where they are.

I do think we need to educate the third world, but in doing so we'd need to supply them with medicines (which could be done dirt f'ing cheap, at cost price, as that supply wouldn't affect sales in Europe/US), as they're not going to stop pumping out eight kids until they can be fairly sure that one or two of them will make to the age of 2.

Education and some medical help would cut down on the problem there.

In my local area, you're looking at around £250,000 to £400,000 for a house. The cheap, small bedsit, sorry, studio flat. I live in was recently valued at around £180,000. That's over a quarter million bucks. The prices are being kept artificially high, the only way to get people housed is to flood the market with cheaper new properties, that would involve relaxing planning laws, and placing limits on sales of the new homes, so people don't just buy them for £100k then instantly slap em on the market for £300K.

The top 400 richest people have more than the 4 billion poorest, combined. That may explain why so many people are struggling. I realise some of these people are using their money to research and develop businesses etc. but damn, once you hit $50 million, how about not bitching about a 3% tax hike?

As for the above guy, as ever it's a minority who get the attention, most people on welfare are there because they need it, and many are working, it's just that minimum wage doesn't keep you in a home, fed, and covered medically, never mind give you enough spare to cover disasters like a freezer breaking. I agree, that if you can work, you should, however, with unemployment as it is, should we spend on hunting down and demonising the sick, or should we help recently unemployed people get back into work? I'd suggest the latter is easier and more viable longterm.

Sure, lets just wipe out the bottom 20% poorest of people in the world. Oh, all the stores are empty, no-one's cleaning the streets or working on utilities, my mansion's getting no water or electricity, all the gas stations are abandoned and where's my cleaning staff?

I swear if everyone under 50K a year just quit work for a week, the working classes may suddenly get some appreciation instead of being seen as a leech on the teat of the rich.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well, there's plenty of nukes just sitting there doing nothing but gathering dust.

So how about we dust a few off and let a computer controlled randomizer software decide where the impacts will be located? Seems fair to me.

I'd say target most populated cities, then blame it on terrorists and global warming.... makes everyone happy.