What do we do when there are too many people on the planet?

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True, but it will never be the cost of a plane flight. More like a hundred thousand a trip.

There is another idea thats been bouncing around for a while that i think will be the future of going to space, and it will be the the most cost effective way of getting stuff up there. Its called a “space elevator”.

Apparently it could be finished by the year 2035!!!

You gotta love those space engineers…

 
Yes. Lots of things can happen under capitalism. Predicting the future is a fool’s game, as Paul Ehrlich showed when he strayed from entomology with dire predictions of imminent famine and social collapse. “Carrying capacity” is very difficult to calculate with something as big and complex as the Earth, and creatures as complicated as humans. Norman Borlaug probably saved hundreds of millions of lives with the Green Revolution, and while that certainly causes its own complications, I’m inclined to prefer it to the alternative.

Maybe there will be mass pandemics, social breakdown, nuclear war, the destruction of modern technology by EMPs, poles shifting, or what have you. Maybe not. But I’m happy to have brought my children into the world. I hope these children will help make it better; they’ve certainly made my life better.
 
IWantGod said:
True, but it will never be the cost of a plane flight. More like a hundred thousand a trip.

There is another idea thats been bouncing around for a while that i think will be the future of going to space, and it will be the the most cost effective way of getting stuff up there. Its called a “space elevator”.

Apparently it could be finished by the year 2035!!!

You gotta love those space engineers…
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Even with Musk doing rocketry on the cheap, this will almost certainly be a necessary step to getting humanity off the earth in a large and lasting way.

But I don’t think the tech is here yet.
 
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Yeah if there’s a way to get people cheaply out of the gravity well where they can then board an interstellar ship, we’re golden.
 
There’s not going to be too many people on the planet. Though no one outside of myself and Jordan Peterson seem to be talking about it, we are headed for a global demographic fall-off by the turn of the century.
 
We have the ability to try. The questions are more in safety and cost than in can we really do it.
 
What about boosting agricultural production through innovation?
 
Speaking of interstellar travel, there is already a working model of how they could achieve that.

 
jackfitz316 said:
What about boosting agricultural production through innovation?
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That should be done.

But answers of that type really only kick the can down the road.

“We’ll innovate our way out of this mess!” usually means “I don’t have a solution and I’m hoping for the best!”
 
Do you really believe God created an earth incapable of sustaining the very thing He created in His own image? There aren’t “too many” people. Our stewardship is what ought to be called into question.
 
I think God created a natural world and i think our planet can become over populated. I don’t think God ever guaranteed that the earth will sustain us forever more. That is not a teaching of the Catholic faith…
 
Grow more food. Did you know that while farming used to be one of the biggest jobs in the US, it’s now only done by like 3% of the population?

There’s really a lot more space on Earth than we sometimes think. We just haven’t developed in a lot of places for various reasons. But, if the earth is indeed getting warmer, it should show better places to grow more food, and the water from melted glaciers/previously too cold to grow lands should make more arid places more suitable for growing.
 
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Y’all, it’s going to be fine. The US, alone, already produces enough food to feed the entire world. Consider that. We just waste a good deal of it.

The world produces enough food to feed 10+ billion, and when the need arises, we ingenious little humans will find ways to feed even more. But we’re sinful, so we’ll also devise ways to keep it from others. That’s how a fallen world works.

Look, this garbage about the world overpopulating is nothing new. Back in the 1700’s a guy named Malthus said that earth had reached its limit. He thought that the one billion or so who existed were already too many. Well, more than 7 billion souls later, he’s wrong.

After WWII, more silly folks screamed doom and gloom. The movement started to grow until it finally hit its most popular point in the late 1960s with Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. He claimed that the world would plunge into war due to mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s. He was wrong, too. Google the “Simon-Ehrlich Wager” for an entertaining read.

This sort of fear-mongering about the population has a political bent, too. Incite enough concern, and you’ll provoke state action. There’s a reason limits on children and family size have been imposed almost exclusively by Communist countries.
 
IWantGod said:
I think God created a natural world and i think our planet can become over populated. I don’t think God ever guaranteed that the earth will sustain us forever more. That is not a teaching of the Catholic faith…
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It seems undeniable that a birth rate above the death rate on a finite planet will not last indefinitely.
 
Brittany said:
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Vonsalza:
This means some form of sterilization or BC. Just from a rational perspective.
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Sin is never rational. Ever. It is never allowable, and birth control is sin because it desecrates God’s intention for sex. Sin never changes. What is evil now will always be evil, no matter what the circumstances are. Like I said, and I will not recant, the ends do not justify the means.
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That is true, but it was not up to the Catholic Church to determine policy in China. In China they had a one family, one child policy which was enforced by the government. It is somewhat looser now, but still it illustrates the fact that it might be the government which sets the rules and the laws regardless of what the Catholic Church teaches. Already, the US government has legalized SS marriages, abortions, and contraception. And some of the health plans push women to take contraceptive medication after they have had one child. So with a country facing overpopulation, it is not impossible that the government will set strict laws limiting the family to one child.
 
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