From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 11:59:35 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 03:22:00PM -0400, gts wrote:
>
>> I would rather see 6 billion healthy educated prosperous
>> humans on Earth than 50 billion impoverished humans
>> scrambling desperately for their share of limited resources
>
> Not that one again. You are worrying about an obsolete
> disaster. The idea of a "population bomb" was very popular in
> the middle 20th century, based on... <snip>
I think I am thinking of something slightly different than what you think,
Anders. Perhaps I should have written my sentence differently. Probably we
are not in real disagreement here.
Let me try it this way: I would like to see 6 billion (or, for that matter,
any number of billions) of "healthy, educated, prosperous" humans on Earth,
with no significant percentage of them "impoverished" and "scrambling
desperately for resources." Anything less is a disaster that could have been
avoided but for the massive expansion of the human population, a population
explosion made possible by agriculture.
And we are already living in the disaster of which I speak. A large fraction
of humans are scrambling desperately for resources. A large fraction are
unhealthy. A large fraction are
uneducated. I am not, as you think, merely predicting some disaster of the
future based on some theory.
The disaster is enormous today with only ~6 billion of us on board the ship,
and may very well get worse, especially if population increases with no
significant change in strategy with respect to agriculture.
-gts
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