How do we reconcile medical research with excessive population growth?

[ScottySatan]

Most biologists work in medicine and the justification in their grant applications is saving lives.

All biologists and most people will tell you that you need to have a balance between life and death in a population or really bad **** starts to happen.

A population biologist can show how excessive population booms can result in a crash that brings the population level back down to way below that max population threshold before it begins to recover again, if ever.

Do we all just ignore the problem and let someone else decide what to do later because "what if that research saves your mom"?

Do we scoop up the healthy but hungry 120 year-olds protesting in the streets into soylent green trucks?

 

[Iti oj]

We don't have a population problem but resource management problem.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Human beings are never very good at reconciling local, short-term benefits with global, long-term detriments. Who will ever make the decision to put species-wide needs over individual needs?

 

[ScottySatan]

We don't have a population problem but resource management problem.

I don't feel that way when I'm in a city with a population of 10 million+, or watch a video of a tokyo train pusher, but you're right, for a little while longer.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

We don't have a population problem but resource management problem.

Exactly!

 

[Revoltingest]

Human beings are never very good at reconciling local, short-term benefits with global, long-term detriments. Who will ever make the decision to put species-wide needs over individual needs?

Make me Dictator For Life, & watch what happens.
- Population control
- More Kurt Vonnegut statues
- Paper money looking more like bacon
- A better national anthem ("America, F*** Yeah" or "This Land Is Our Land"?)
- The Oval Office renamed "Sector 7G".

 

[Estro Felino]

thank you for starting a new thread about overpopulation.

People don't realize that it is not a matter of room. We already live in a nightmarish world where resources will become more and more difficult to get.

Honestly...I give up. It's like talking to a brick wall. They don't want to listen.

Births are supposed to equate deaths. but people won't understand that.

 

[Bunyip]

More technologicaly advanced nations with better healthcare, education and so on have far lower birth rates than less developed nations.

So our scientific advancement has definitely reduced the birth rate and hence population growth.

 

[Iti oj]

I don't feel that way when I'm in a city with a population of 10 million+, or watch a video of a tokyo train pusher, but you're right, for a little while longer.

We could easily feed,house provide medicine and energy for all humanity but greed and industry get in the way, it even prevents technological growth that would bring this about.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Do we all just ignore the problem and let someone else decide what to do later because "what if that research saves your mom"?

More to the point of your concern, what if the research saves the next Norman Borlaug?

 

[Revoltingest]

We could easily feed,house provide medicine and energy for all humanity but greed and industry get in the way, it even prevents technological growth that would bring this about.

Ahem...that "greed & industry" is what fuels the exploding population.
If we returned to that wonderful agrarian & altruistic pre-secular
time known as the Dark Ages, things would settle down.

 

[Iti oj]

Ahem...that "greed & industry" is what fuels the exploding population.
If we returned to that wonderful agrarian & altruistic pre-secular
time known as the Dark Ages, things would settle down.

Thats rhetoric, not fact.

 

[Revoltingest]

More to the point of your concern, what if the research saves the next Norman Borlaug?

Life extending advanced technology doesn't discriminate between friend & foe.

 

[Iti oj]

Green tech like solar panels could be installed every where. Water is a good example, we have a shortage of clean fresh water, yet we talk about privatizing water. We can turn sea water into drinking watet , but its to expensive, so people die from lack of clean water.

 

[Estro Felino]

Ahem...that "greed & industry" is what fuels the exploding population.
If we returned to that wonderful agrarian & altruistic pre-secular
time known as the Dark Ages, things would settle down.

well...in the past people used to make children because agriculture was not mechanized and arms were necessary to increase the production.

now that agriculture is completely automatized, what are people for?
People make babies just because they think they are supposed to. actually nobody forces them to do them.

 

[Revoltingest]

well...in the past people used to make children because agriculture was not mechanized and arms were necessary to increase the production.

now that agriculture is completely automatized, what are people for?
People make babies just because they think they are supposed to. actually nobody forces them to do them.

Also, a high percentage of kids died young, so it made sense to be prolific breeders.

 

[ScottySatan]

We could easily feed,house provide medicine and energy for all humanity but greed and industry get in the way, it even prevents technological growth that would bring this about.

We are growing exponentially. The human population over time graph is damn near a straight vertical line. While the habitable volume of the earth is at a crawl.

 

[Iti oj]

We are growing exponentially. The human population over time graph is damn near a straight vertical line. While the habitable volume of the earth is at a crawl.

That's crap, and you have ignored every point I have made. I read some where the worlds population could fit in Texas, with yards and room to spare.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

That's crap, and you have ignored every point I have made. I read some where the worlds population could fit in Texas, with yards and room to spare.

You realize it takes more than the area it takes to simply fit humans into to actually sustain them, right?

You also realize that it takes massive amounts of petroleum to produce and transport the food required to sustain the population, and that without it, the world population never would have gotten anywhere close to where it is right now, right?

 

[Iti oj]

You realize it takes more than the area it takes to simply fit humans into to actually sustain them, right?

You also realize that it takes massive amounts of petroleum to produce and transport the food required to sustain the population, and that without it, the world population never would have gotten anywhere close to where it is right now, right?

read my other posts I have already covered many of those topics. And no we don't need petroleum any more, we refuse to move past it.