Population Solutions

Houston, we have a problem

There are too many humans on Earth.

Not everyone agrees with me. Please comment and share your own viewpoint.

Why is population a problem?

Limited space – the Earth only has so much room. Even if we think there is plenty of room now, if the population continues to expand, as it always has, we will have less and less room for each person.

Different people have different preferences. Some people love living in crowded cities. Others can’t wait to escape to nature and get away from the “hustle and bustle”. What happens when we can’t get away? Personally I live in a large home with a large yard because I don’t like being too close to my neighbors. Many people are stuck living in apartments. I haven’t heard any of them raving about the benefits of apartment life (but yes there are benefits).

Nutrition – Earth has limited resources so as the population grows it becomes more and more difficult to feed everyone. Note my usage of the term difficult not impossible. Technology may develop solutions we can’t imaging yet. See the “Eat ze bugs” memes! Maybe humans will take up cannibalism and eat each other? Who knows what the future will bring.

Pollution - We seem to be extremely poor at recycling. As our population grows, this is going to become more and more of a problem. Are we going to ship our garbage to outer space?

Humans have an evolutionary drive to explore which seems to exceed all other animals. Even animals will endure suffering to explore even when all their normal needs are met. They have no need to explore, yet they do anyway!

Where will we explore when we are all shoulder to shoulder with each other?

Solutions:

Education - teach people about the drawbacks of too large of a population, let that help influence their decisions about having children.

Education (nutrition) - If you are going to have a child, then get serious about getting healthy before conception so that the baby has the best opportunity to be healthy, intelligent and a boon to the population, not a burden.

Government - remove all tax benefits and incentives to having children. If you choose to have children, then it's up to you to afford them!

Pro-choice - let women have control over their own bodies.

Birth control - educate children about birth control and make it easily available (and at no cost) to them.

Research - current methods of birth control range from pretty toxic to downright poor. We might want to focus on creating healthier and more effective forms of birth control.

Funding - I'm not an advocate of "foreign aid" but if we are going to send money to other nations, let's not fund wars, let's help them with their population problems. Asia has the most serious population problem, we might want to focus there!

Debate and open discussion - Let's talk about the subject. If someone is pro "booming population" let's hear the justification for why this would be a good thing. What are their solutions for the lack of limited resources?

Colonization - Mars seems like it's always been the most hopeful planet, but perhaps one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Let's not abandon the idea of expanding to a new world.

Education (college courses) - Create some courses and encourage our young brilliant minds to discuss the issue and see if they can come up with some new solutions.

Why do I see population as a problem?

What hammered population home to me was moving from my childhood of the Philadelphia and New York area to the suburbs of Minneapolis / St. Paul. It was literally a breath of fresh air! A beautiful, modern city of moderate size with undeveloped suburbs. Fast forward forty years and I can't wait to get out of this obnoxious city!

As a child, my father took us camping and we walked the dirt Appalachian trail. In Minnesota, I was astonished to find paved trails! It seems that more and more of our back to nature experiences have been converted for modern convenience. I haven’t been back to the Appalachian trail in decades but I’m willing to guess much of it is now paved.

I’ve also observed some large families. A while ago, a large family was an advantage for running a farm (or ranch or whatever). But applied to city and suburban life, I see families that seem to devote most of their time to simply surviving (and producing more children).

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Why should we be discussing this?

Because if we the people don’t do something about growing population, we risk the tyrants running our world doing something we don’t like. Genocide? Viral bio-weapons? More wars?

If the tyrants don’t do something obnoxious, we risk mother nature stepping in and solving the problem in undesired ways. Mass starvation?

Climate change – Perhaps you believe in the global warming panic. Most of the methods of addressing global warming are expensive and impractical (some seem downright insane to me). We can see how tyrants address humanity’s issues like this and it’s not pretty! Tyrant solutions appear to be nothing more than wealth redistribution schemes (the wealthy get richer). If human activity is driving global warming then fewer humans is a fantastic solution to global warming. My own belief is that human impact on global warming is so difficult to measure that we can consider it almost insignificant compared to nature. The human population explosion isn’t so insignificant.

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