Overpopulation
 

recentlty came across some articles that claim that the world is becoming overpopulated...while i may not agree with said study. the one plan that tickled my fancy was not a popular one.

I beleive absolutely everyone rendered infertile till their 21 birthday.

apon their 21 birthday you are required to take a test and background check is preformed on you. should you be deemed worthly then your fertility will by restored. otherwise you can it again in 1 years time at your own expense.

but their should also be a reward for staying infertil. like still being able to claim children on your taxes or makes taxes go up for those who choose to have children.

now punisment for restoring your fertility illegally. in order to insure no one breaks this law. make it it so if break the law. you and your ENTIRE family are rendered infertil upto your grandparents. but the equipement is destroyed permanantly this time.

yes i know it sounds a bit extreme at first but as the useable land and our resources are used up we must take outrageous step to insure our survival.

Actually, the global birth rate is going down.

It's incredibly arrogant to believe that we're going to sweep the planet clean. The reality is that between ourselves, war, disease, acts of god, and our imposing of limiting resources, we aren't going to swarm over the earth.

Not to mention omnivores tend not to follow the boom/bust cycles commonly experienced by exclusive carnivores and exclusive herbivores, so overpopulation wouldn't actually cause the destabilization of human kind, it would merely result in birth rates dropping to acceptable levels and death rates matching.

And if you were to think about what that means, exactly, it sounds like a pretty horrible scenario.

fact is the planet can not support 6 billion humans. More like 3 billion.

The reason so many people are homeless and starving is because there are too many humans. Since we are already over the limit things will just get worse even if we stay like this. People often think you can just keep growing plants on the same plot of land, but eventually you drain the nutrients.

Because of this and the growing conflicts caused by limited resources war, theft, murder, ect. will become more common. We wont swarm the planet, but most of the planet will seem like Hell.

Aero, I assume you're talking about the WWF's 'ecological footprint' nonsense. Now, momentarily disregarding that this is a group of people stupid enough to give themselves the same acronym as the World Wrestling Federation, they are under fire from multiple ecological specialists with less doomsday-ish predictions.

The problem with the ecological footprint theory is that it doesn't take into account humanity's ability to increase the production of resources in an area, or our ability to artificially renew resources.

In other words the ecological footprint assumes a world with no trade, no agricultural, and no re-planting of trees harvested for lumber.

Obviously it's rather flawed.

In reality, the 'population problem' is along the same lines as the 'obesity problem'.

Yeah, maybe there's too many people, but we can't really be certain because the people who get all the press skew the numbers horribly (in the case of population they don't take into account anything resembling technology--except that which can hurt the planet, in the case of obesity they constantly change their numbers to make more people overweight, and count all diseases which COULD be caused by obesity, instead all that ARE when calculating the cost).

ok, that concept aside there are other resources we have to considered. Lumber, land, water, energy.

Lumber: In first world countries we have laws to protect the forests. Basically these laws come down to this: You cut an area, you plant two trees for every one you cut down then go to a different area until that one grows back. Some sources (whom I find questionable myself), claim that we have more forest now than we ever did in North America.

Land: I'll start by quoting you This was a problem a half century to a century ago.

Now however, farmers know that and we also know what nutrients which plants drain and the rate at which land restores these nutrients, and, further, that some plants restore nutrients to the land.

That's why we do things called crop rotations. We'll plant corn on a plot of land one year, then plant that corn on another plot next year, while planting alfa alfa on the plot which had the corn. The alfa alfa restores the nitrogen which the corn drains away, and corn can safely be planted there again the next year, or in two years.

Similiar rotations happen with most every crop.

As for actual room... well, we're no where near reaching the point where that's a problem.

Water: Since when is there a shortage of this any place that water purification technology is available?

Energy: This is the actual stitch, here. We're far too dependent on coal and oil based energy, which are non-renewable resources. However, nuclear technologies have progressed a good deal (and are cleaner AND safer than coal and oil, these days, even though they still get a bum wrap from environmentalists). There's also more earth friendly alternatives like geothermal energy plants, wind plants, hydroelectric damns, and solar plants. Unfortunately the technology doesn't exist to harvest this energy to any great degree in most places.

Thankfully, however, scientists have recently found quantum particles which pop in and out of existence (devastomating the laws of thermodynamics at a quantum level), and are currently working on a way to 'mine the quantum field', allowing us an infinite source of sustainable energy. The downside, of course, is that if the reaction got out of hand we could wipe out the universe... but hey, at least we wouldn't have to worry about over population.

Everything I have read shows that the population arc will top off or reach it's peak at 9billion. then the world will slowly depopulate, to what level no one knows. right now, 1st world countries are experiencing arcs that will lead to negative rates of growth that could actually wipe out countries like Japan where they aren't having enough kids...

All starvation and homelessness on the planet is political in nature.
There is no overpopulation problem, there are other problems that lead us to think that there are to many of us here, while we are in fact not hurting the earth one iota by being here. (aside from greenhouse gasses and hasmat dumping) Krylo summed it up pretty well.