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Pure propaganda and manipulation. Guess it goes with the medium. If the worry is "not enough young people", what is the logical continuation? When we produce l

Pure propaganda and manipulation. Guess it goes with the medium. If the worry is "not enough young people", what is the logical continuation? When we produce lots of young people now, and those become old, we need even more young people, and so on? So population growth is the only way forward? Not even mentioning that today fewer people are needed to take care of other people than in former times. For example one farmer can produce food for many, many more people than one hundred years ago. It's obvious that population can not grow indefinitely. Just think of the surface of the earth. There is a limited number of square meters. Eventually you would have so many people that there would be one person per square meter. Maybe we could even live like that. We could live in skyscrapers, or even in little boxes Matrix style and spend our days in spacious virtual reality. But the question is: do we want to live like that? We have to also think how we want to live, and how that can be made possible. In the same vein, I guess the world obviously can not be overpopulated. If if were overpopulated, people would start dying until it would not be overpopulated anymore. That's presumably what is already happening in some regions of the world anyway, and has always happened. In "Collapse" Jared Diamonds describes a tribe living on a small isolated island. When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. It's not a new problem. But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place.

shoo 11y ago
re: the anecdote that was shared from Diamond's "Collapse" > When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. This was an example of a society which had developed bottom-up knowledge and management of population levels. As well as cases of "virtual suicide", as described, there were also traditions dictating which siblings were allowed to have children, and which were not. From memory, they also developed appropriate agricultural practices to not damage their limited available productive land. In my opinion, this society developed a successful reaction to the limits of their environment, although some aspects of it might seem very confronting or perhaps even unethical to us in other societies. On a personal note, in a strange way I found it was peaceful to read "Collapse", to learn that there have been many civilisations that have collapsed in the past -- civilisations that were in some sense more successful (by lasting for a longer period) than the civilisation I am part of. Similarly there is a sense of peace in learning more about the non-human parts of natural history. It's not all about us.
onnoonno 11y ago
> But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place. Exactly. It can also be argued that not reproducing is probably the most 'green' thing one can do.

shoo 11y ago

re: the anecdote that was shared from Diamond's "Collapse" > When they get overpopulated, some members simply had to get into a canoe and paddle away, to die on the sea alone. This was an example of a society which had developed bottom-up knowledge and management of population levels. As well as cases of "virtual suicide", as described, there were also traditions dictating which siblings were allowed to have children, and which were not. From memory, they also developed appropriate agricultural practices to not damage their limited available productive land. In my opinion, this society developed a successful reaction to the limits of their environment, although some aspects of it might seem very confronting or perhaps even unethical to us in other societies. On a personal note, in a strange way I found it was peaceful to read "Collapse", to learn that there have been many civilisations that have collapsed in the past -- civilisations that were in some sense more successful (by lasting for a longer period) than the civilisation I am part of. Similarly there is a sense of peace in learning more about the non-human parts of natural history. It's not all about us.

onnoonno 11y ago

> But again the question is, how do we want this to play out. We can let people be born and then starve to death, or we can not let them be born in the first place. Exactly. It can also be argued that not reproducing is probably the most 'green' thing one can do.