What Are Our Choices? "Maintain and Sustain" or "Grow and Consume"?

puzzlesphere
I've been thinking a lot recently about the nature of any "troubles" humanity may be facing, and I wanted to pose this one (three part) question for consideration.

What’s the long term purpose of humanity? Is it to maintain a balanced population in harmony with nature and the earth?... Or is it to grow our population, and by the very nature of growth consume?

edit on 5-9-2013 by puzzlesphere because: (no reason given)

Fascinating questions and ones I might have answered very differently before this past course in anthropology. It changed a lot in my world view to realize the day to day rat race and BS of most of the Western World is NOT most of the world's population for daily life.

We studied a number of tribes or societies past AND present that live in balance with what is around them. Mostly native tribes in the forests and jungles of the world and perhaps, some could suggest, it's that way merely because they don't have the means to do more destructive things.

However..I think those folks looked surprisingly content and happy for what my American eye called chaos and grinding poverty as a near epic level. To them...it was ..Why do we NEED more? No 'Why not??'.

So I think it's a real toss up and humanity in general can't be so easily classed. Humanity can be equally content maintaining station and position ....or growing to consume until we live on a BIG version of Mars with even water becoming scarce in physical existence...not just clean. It'll take centuries to get that bad, but we have it in us to do, sadly.

I agree! Wholeheartedly! And the thing is that we have grow in population to the point that theirs almost no turng back in respect to having an impact on our world and in our very nature to preserve and keep ourself alive means that we can't just change our ways now and let people suffer and die from that conservative change. So in affect we really have three choices, to continue the way we are until we can't and society will cruble as it has over and over in our history, people will die, wars, famine, disease etc runs strife until we reache a manageable population for the earth to maintain. We could change our ways and be more conservative wich would have a sim alar affet to a point or like your saying get our asses into gear and start the ball rolling on getting colonies established in our solar system!! This would elevate the population on the earth to a manageable number where we then could start making drastic changes in our consumption without the suffering and death of many people.
Can you imagine! A huge interplanetary ship coming into orbit around the earth to drop a payload of liquid methane, hydrogen & water along with pure metal ore etc for consumption only to load up hundreds of thousands of people, plants & food for the colonies on mars and the moons around the gas giants.
And Look at Jupiter! It's a literal chemical factories of gasses & liquids ready to be consumed in a chemical industry for the colonies needs! Their is soooo much out there for us! It's so exiting and I know its gonna happen its just asking when? And we should get going I think