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originally posted by: TheBadCabbie
Overpopulation arguments never consider everything that contributes to the problem that I've ever seen. There have always been glaring holes in the arguments in my experience. One thing that has always stood out to me was that many of the 'population problems' that we are seen as having stem from a misallocation of resources. They actually have little to do with population, and a lot to do with the inefficient use of resources.
Innovation is rarely taken into account in these arguments. What about everybody living underground? Building our houses down into the ground instead of on top of it. What about living at sea, and farming the sea? What about colonizing the planets? What about using endothermic(heat absorbing) processes for power generation and locomotion instead of exothermic(heat producing) processes? I could go on and on.
The planet can support many times the present population just fine. If you change the infrastructure, the pollution problems can actually go away pretty quickly.
The problem is that overpopulation believers believe in their point of view passionately. They actually believe it is an existential crisis. They think that they're doing the right thing when they advocate for population stabilization or reduction.
You have to break through that brainwashing and programming if you want to shift the paradigm away from this subconscious guilt at being alive today that gives so many a hopeless outlook on our planetary state of affairs. Many average or somewhat learned people accept this as truth, even though it is not.
originally posted by: Axios
originally posted by: FlyInTheOintment
a reply to: Axios
Obviously I used the 99% tto 1% figuratively, I know they would need to retain a slave class to drive their economy. It's likely that once the consolidation of power & resources is sufficient, they will transition to using a form of currency separate from that which the slave class uses - programmable money, which you must possess in order to purchase luxury items. The slave class will be issued with UBI, which is little better than food vouchers, being permitted only for low level spending. Further wealth accumulation may be accomplished by trading in slaves, for land, resources, etc.
Still does not make sense. If you create a slave class you still don’t need wealth, cause you know, you don’t pay slaves… wealth would still irrelevant in this scenario.
Mass depopulation for the accumulation of wealth doesn’t make sense.
What you should say is that they want to depopulate the planet because the elites have discovered the key to immortality and want the planet for themselves without the risk of the pleb masses ruining the scenery or attempting an uprising to take their immortality technology.
Or, maybe vaccines aren’t killing a huge amount of people.,.
originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
How many doublings would it take before that becomes false, though?
Efficiency isn't unlimited. If you car's engine is 25% efficient (which is the average efficiency of a combustion automobile engine), that means that at perfect efficiency you could go 4 times as far on a gallon/litre of fuel than you do now.
4 times. Not 40. Not 400. Not 4000. So if the population doubles twice, we would need fully 100% efficient engines in order for people to enjoy the same quality of travel.
If the population doubles three times, then even 100% efficiency wouldn't be enough.
Stopping population growth is the only way to make it all work. We don't have to shrink it, because there is some reserve resources still left, but we have to stop growing it.