Therumancer said:
Overpopulation is a very great concern and I reckon it's something we should be more concerned about than a hypothetical World War 3, though the idea that 9 tenths of the human race should be exterminated in a global conflict
for the apparent betterment of humanity is one of the most crazy things I've read in a long time. Aside from the idea of wiping out the majority of the human race (which would probably also include the majority of our best thinkers and workers whose talents would be needed to stabilize the world after such a catastrophe) a conflict that disastrous, that can actually result in that number of fatalities will irreversibly scar the entire planet, even if WMD's aren't used, and it would drag on for a very,
very long time. We aren't gonna be building some great space exploring utopia if there's practically no materials left to build it with, not enough people to do it, no places where people can be educated on how to do it, not enough habitable areas and food sources left for reasonably sized populations to exist anymore and create it, etc. If you'd envision the world after something like that it'd be like a dead, grim stone age with the odd peace of modern technology no one can really do anything with lying around.
Yeah, we need to do something about overpopulation before it gets too severe, but it's not that great a concern that a war with the express purpose of wiping out most of humanity would make any kind of sense whatsoever. And those kind of space endeavors should only be undertaken if the profit is most definitely worth the insane investments that kind of thing would require.
Wars happen. Conflict, whether its among one individual and another or groups of some kind is a part of human nature and occurs for a ton of reasons. But the state of world now, the fact that as many have already said, warring with someone nowadays will hurt your country more than benefiting it in just about every possible outcome, means that a World War just won't happen, at least not as long as the current state of the world exists. Between
world powers things like ideological or theological concerns just don't exist as a reason for great conflicts anymore (and even then these kinds of things rarely were an actual
reason for wars, more of a motivator or justification) and many of these kind of ideas still left are dying with the older generations and being replaced by those of the younger ones who are overall much less concerned with whatever archaic, unreasonable ideals or prejudices their forebears may have had a long time ago. In short, nobody wants to go on a holy or nationalist crusade anymore. I'm not trying to say that newer generations are inherently smarter or better or anything, but on the whole people question more than they used to. They won't support a lot of hardship for little gain, and you can forgot ridiculous claims that WW3 will be started by some single tyrannical dictator with some kind of evil, genocidal agenda because
noone will allow that kind of person to become a world leader in the first place, and even if they did noone would want to follow them.
Of course, all this applies to how things are
now. Only last century Hitler, a dictator with an evil, genocidal agenda, came to power and effectively created the most destructive conflict of all time, but a number of things were going on and a number of factors existed which allowed him to become powerful enough to create it, things and factors which thankfully don't exist right now...