Mobydisc said...
The biggest human impact on the Earth is the sheer number of humans. We need to develop non violent and non lethal ways to reduce the numbers of humans so that everyone here has a reasonable life that does not permanently degrade the natural environment.
Yep, simple numbers. Many people don't understand how exponential population growth can really screw things up so this is a fairly straightforward example:
How often does the population double? I've lost track... 50 years? It'll do. If it's not 50 then just plug in whatever the real number is in what follows.
Let's say as of
right now the planet is half full. That is, by whatever means, we've decided it can accomodate twice as many people we have now and no more. How long until it's full? Why, 50 years of course.
OK, let's say we're lucky and we find another planet that's exactly the same as Earth. It's got as much food and water and can accomodate just as many people as Earth can. So we can offload the excess population onto that. Problem solved, right? No.
Only another 50 years till that one is completely full. So in 100 years we'd have filled up two planets.
But things get even worse because we wouldn't have the luxury of 50 years to go searching for some other planet to populate. We'd only have a bit over 10 because in 50 years we'd have filled up
four planets.
And so on. And then remember that in the last 50 years we've managed to get a small number of people to the moon. We've yet to get even close to sending someone to the nearest (uninhabitable) planet. So forget all that guff.. we'd have 50 years on good ol' planet Earth and that's it.
Population growth is the single most important issue for human survival. If
we don't do something about it, it'll be done for us violently and lethally by way of famines, disease or some other form of disaster. This climate change stuff is really just tinkering about with a few of the symptoms.
, neither should we!
