Elephant in the Room

What no one ever talks about is population growth. That’s the real issue we are facing. Instead of placing all our hopes on technology saving us from ourselves why not do the sensible thing and begin to reduce the human population. After all the really big problems facing us are due to too many human beings living on this planet. Already we need chemical fertilizers to produce enough food to feed us. There isn’t enough arable land to support the billions of people living now, not to mention what the population may be in decades to come. Yet, it is never mentioned as something we need to address. China did have their one child policy for several years with the unintended consequence that only boy children were saved, one way or the other. Of course, a shrinking population scares the pants off of any capitalist economics gurus, it doesn’t appear to work without unlimited new consumers.

Of course I am suggesting that this is a voluntary endeavor. If people were educated to understand how having more and more children strains the resources of the planet perhaps they would think twice about having more than two children per couple. Some might choose not to have any children at all or just one child. I suspect that the result would be a turning point for civilization. Never before have human beings voluntarily chosen to restrict their own personal desire for the good of civilization as a whole. I would not want this to be mandated since I hope that we are intelligent enough a species, and have enough self-control to manage it without outside enforcement.

I used to dream that space travel would provide a means of mass exodus from the earth, leaving plenty of habitat for the rest of the species on the planet. But it doesn’t appear to be happening fast enough to save the earth and possibly us with it.

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