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Overpopulation, how will it affect us?


Asper Sarnoff

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As I'm sure all of you know, the worlds population can be demonstrated by an exponentional curve. Just a hundred years ago or so, the world was home to about a billion people. But trough rising health standards, medical advancements and other achievements that contribute to greater standards of living, the worlds population just crossed the 7 billion mark a couple weeks ago, and many scientists predict the growth will keep increasing. If it keeps going at this rate, we'll hit 10 billion by 2050.

This cause many to raise the question: "Can the earths resources support such a large population at the standards of living we in the western world have come to accept?"

Will we see famine and drought on untold scales in the future? Will the impact of increasingly large areas for cultivating of food completely destroy parts of the ecosystem or lead to nature disasters such as floods? Will we some grim day in the far future be forced to conduct a desperate systematic extermination of part of the planets population to ensure the survival of the rest?

There's also a lot of support for the theories that the population growth will slow down worldwide, as it's been doing for a long time in countries with high standards of living. Technological advances within cultivating and artificial growth of food among other fields will also help combat some of the problems.

What is your opinion on this problem? How will it affect us, and how will we solve it?

3...2...1... Debate!

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The first and formost of options is to leave the bloody planet. Start ferrying people off to the moon or mars or something.

The 2nd of which is to actually use the parts of the world that lack human settlement, such as the ocean's surface, or the deserts of the world.

THe systomatic Slaughter is an idiotic idea only the brashly stooped would actualy ever think of as a solution. If anything, disease and famine will break our and thin the herd and stuff will go back to normal.

Or we could send peopel off the planet and avoid needless death.

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The first and formost of options is to leave the bloody planet. Start ferrying people off to the moon or mars or something.

The 2nd of which is to actually use the parts of the world that lack human settlement, such as the ocean's surface, or the deserts of the world.

THe systomatic Slaughter is an idiotic idea only the brashly stooped would actualy ever think of as a solution. If anything, disease and famine will break our and thin the herd and stuff will go back to normal.

Or we could send peopel off the planet and avoid needless death.

And how will ferrying people to the moon or mars help us from growing beyind the capacity of our resources? There's no breathable atmosphere, no drinkable water, readily available food or soil suited for cultivating in any of those places. Terraforming is so many thousand years beyond our current technology that it's not an option.

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And how will ferrying people to the moon or mars help us from growing beyind the capacity of our resources?

[by just throwing money at a problem and proceeding to ignore it, you know, like the current US government! :trollface:]

In all seriousness, I believe we need to take a look back at our ethics in order to grasp population control. Abortion is viewed as taboo by some, but may become mandatory in certain cases due to a severe lack of resources. The same goes for euthanasia; we have no problem doing it to control the population of animals, what makes it different for people? If I may, I might paraphrase an ideal of Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince; Machiavelli articulated what a leader does to stay in power may not always be ethically appropriate. The solution as to how the human population stays in check may also violate several ethics and morals, but it needs to be done.

[Huh, for some reason, after I underlined "The Prince", everything after it underlined as well O_o]

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Because im putting ideqas out there. Anything is better than "Oh well; cant do nothing START THE ANARCHY!"

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If people adopted more often, the population boom might slow down a bit. People don't really need to give birth to have children.

**Also, there's actually a show that I watch that had an episode about dealing with overpopulation in this alternate dimension. They had something called "The Lottery," where you could withdraw as much money as you wanted. The more you took out, the higher your chances of winning the Lottery were. Winners of said Lottery become celebrities and get VIP treatment for a week. Then, when their time is it, they euthanize themselves. It's supposed to be painless and even gives them a feeling of bliss as they go. However, there were undertones of brainwashing the population into accepting all this and if you changed your mind about dying they would kill you slowly and painfully to discourage others from rebelling.

**Please note I am not saying this is the way things should go, just throwing out a scenario for people to think about.

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Let's be realistic, we ain't going nowhere anytime soon, so no moon or mars colonies for at least a century or two. I believe planned parenthood is the key, specially on third world countries in where the birthrate goes boom a lot. People living in extremely poverty tend to have more kids, mostly because they don't have the "key" methods to avoid that, not saying this is product of ignorance, but it's more like a "I can't afford it", which is ironic really. Countries like China, who face a lot of overpopulation have moved into the "one child per household" thing, which is really a nice way to help the cause (even though it can be considered something strict).

Most of the earth is covered in water anyways, and we already have the technology to create landmasses in where water prevails. Japan has already began to do so. Even though that's playing a little bit with nature, it's a way to fix things. Also, the sky is the limit. We can manage to make huge cities on the skies, ala discoverychannel. Finally, yeah, resources are limited, and the only way to have enough for everyone is to have a better use of our consumables. In order for the whole world to live like the casual American, we would need 2 to 3 worlds to sustain us. Funny enough, that was researched a couple years ago, today, it would be worse.

I truly believe we need to fix our crappy capitalism system before worrying about overpopulation. Most people are not stupid, and Europeans know this, which is why most couples decide to stay childless over there, it's becoming a trend, however, it's not the solution, since it will only create issues later on as the continent will be overpopulated by eldery.

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well i think we hit the population limit back in the 50s or somthing but if we did things smarter we could accommodate more people. Such as eating more plants or riding buses more often and using less plastics...ect

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well i think we hit the population limit back in the 50s or somthing but if we did things smarter we could accommodate more people. Such as eating more plants or riding buses more often and using less plastics...ect

So . . . Vegetarian-esque diet + More Public Transportation + Reducing uses of some materials = Overpopulation fix?

I'm sorry, but that just sounds silly

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Stop humping!

This means cities will have to grow. Actually, some friends and myself started this little debate not long ago. In order to not impact the enviroment, growing underground or even undersea doesn't sound unlikely. We already have a lot of underground facilities, so I think it's time to expand minds and build an underground metropolises.

As for food and energy, we can try to make underground crops, trying to match the conditions on the surface, and we still have time to try to find that perfect renewable energy and using more alternative methods combined with those we already use now.

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So . . . Vegetarian-esque diet + More Public Transportation + Reducing uses of some materials = Overpopulation fix?

I'm sorry, but that just sounds silly

no but vegetarian diets are more efficient, meaning for every pound of meat you consume it took about ten pounds of plant to get that one pound of meat, but we can't go directly to vegetarian only, public transport saves gas very important resource, reducing of materials saves materials, these and other steps such as conserving water can allow greater population, if we continue to live the way most of us do we won't be able to support a population of 10 billion
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no but vegetarian diets are more efficient, meaning for every pound of meat you consume it took about ten pounds of plant to get that one pound of meat, but we can't go directly to vegetarian only, public transport saves gas very important resource, reducing of materials saves materials, these and other steps such as conserving water can allow greater population, if we continue to live the way most of us do we won't be able to support a population of 10 billion

That doesn't solve space-concerns; in fact it raises more problems than it fixes! Do you think people will willingly switch to vegetarian-only diets? That, coupled with the space needed to grow crops, makes this thought impractical at best. Public transit may save fuel and compact people into a single vehicle, but this does little to help stop overcrowding as a whole; those people still need a place to live! Conserving water isn't a major concern either; water can be purified from nearly every source nowadays.

Those proposals still completely ignore overpopulation though; the problem is that there are/will be too many people to support; changing transportation and eating habits won't have much of an effect on that.

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Besides which, switching the entire world to a vegetarian diet (however you intend to do that aside) wouldn't really change anything. Livestock would still be around. Depending on the form of vegetarianism you're talking about, eggs and dairy products are still perfectly acceptable. You'd still have livestock, which means you'd still need grazing pastures, and there would still be factory farms. Their focus would simply change from producing meat to producing eggs/dairy products.

Now, if you want to switch the world to a vegan diet (however you intend to do that aside), then there's no problem of livestock. On the other hand, your requirements for arable land increase dramatically, as do the associated problems with agriculture, like fertilizer runoff. And I should note as well that if you cut meat, eggs, and dairy out of your diet, although it's still possible to get all the nutrients you need in the right amounts, it gets more difficult.

So yeah, worldwide vegetarianism/veganism creates as many problems as it solves.

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Some people, like myself, would be very unhealthy on a vegetarian diet, so that's really a bad idea.

Better quality of life in more poverty-stricken countries, as well as access to planned parenthood, will help. Also eradicating the stigma that childless people are somehow "unsuccessful", and promoting adoption.

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actually, i never proposed an entirely vegetarian diet, i am saying the average person eats much more meat then they need and that if we reduced the amount of live stock we ate we would a dramatically higher amount of agricultural food as well of more land to grow these foods. after all if the population goes up that will cause a need for access food. And right now we aren't eating smartly enough to support a population of ten billion

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actually, i never proposed an entirely vegetarian diet, i am saying the average person eats much more meat then they need and that if we reduced the amount of live stock we ate we would a dramatically higher amount of agricultural food as well of more land to grow these foods. after all if the population goes up that will cause a need for access food. And right now we aren't eating smartly enough to support a population of ten billion

You wouldn't be solving something because the space you would remove the livestock terrains would be used for the agricultural activities you'd say. In the end, no free space.

And I don't thik we can pull an "average" on how a person eats if you really want to take the whole world into account

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You wouldn't be solving something because the space you would remove the livestock terrains would be used for the agricultural activities you'd say. In the end, no free space.

And I don't thik we can pull an "average" on how a person eats if you really want to take the whole world into account

not true in fact half of our ( the usa) agricultural produce feeds animals and its only ten percent of what we feed them actually becomes food for us, so if we feed a cow 10 pounds of grain it only will produce about a pound of meat. So 100% crops 50% human consumption, then 10% of the crops we feed animals actually return as food. That means if we produce a million pounds (example) of grain feed 50% of it to animals we get 100 thousand pounds of food in return :/ which totals about 600 thousand pounds of food. but lets say we cut back our meat consumption by 50% have 750 thousand in crops and 25,000 pounds of meat which adds up to 775,000 pounds of food which is a large increase over the mostly livestock diet. and guess what? WE ACTUALLY SAVED SPACE, we grew no more crops but we used less live stock, which means less farms which means more space. However, meat is never going to completely leave the american diet, but we really should consume less.

yes but i wasn't considering the world i was talking about america. however america, if they did this ^ could produce massive amounts of access food or in the situation of population increase support the entire population with a stable source of food which is impossible at this point.

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If you want to eliminate livestock even partially, you're talking about a vegan diet. But then you have to account for the increases necessary in arable land and the agriculture sector, in order to replace meat and keep up with demand for food, because you cannot simply grow more food on the same amount of land and feed more people. And that's to say nothing of the problems that come with agriculture, like soil depletion and fertilizer runoff--problems that will get worse because there is increased agricultural activity to meet increased demand for non-animal-product foods. Enforced veganism doesn't actually solve the problem of overpopulation or even the symptoms, it just shuffles some things around and creates or exacerbates a different set of problems.

The problem of overpopulation is not that people eat meat. That's a red herring. The problem is that there are more people on Earth than the planet's resources as a whole can support. Whether or not we've reached Earth's carrying capacity is an open question, but most of the ideas I've seen proposed in this thread assume that the way to deal with overpopulation requires some form of equitable distribution of resources. And which political ideology is it that tries to equitably distribute resources...?

History shows us, however, that the best way to reduce a population that doesn't involve killing lots of people or flagrantly violating people's rights on a mind-bogglingly-massive scale is raising the standard of living. The wealthiest countries on Earth aren't facing problems of overpopulation; indeed, some places, like Japan and Western Europe, are actually facing population declines and aging populations because the birth rates have dropped.

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If you want to eliminate livestock even partially, you're talking about a vegan diet. But then you have to account for the increases necessary in arable land and the agriculture sector, in order to replace meat and keep up with demand for food, because you cannot simply grow more food on the same amount of land and feed more people. And that's to say nothing of the problems that come with agriculture, like soil depletion and fertilizer runoff--problems that will get worse because there is increased agricultural activity to meet increased demand for non-animal-product foods. Enforced veganism doesn't actually solve the problem of overpopulation or even the symptoms, it just shuffles some things around and creates or exacerbates a different set of problems.

i said i don't want to eliminate meat entirely like six times now....

but in consuming less meat we actually save land! Live stalk consume 50% of our produce and yet they pound for pound they only return a tenth of the amount of food the consume. So we actually end up with more food with out growing more crops but just by raising less live stalk ^ read my post. Like i said there would be no increase in agriculture we wouldn't need to grow more as we would have more then necessary if we just reduced our live stalk. And you say food has nothing to do with population increase? last time i checked more mouths means more demand for food. At the current moment the world would never be able to support ten million people. there isn't enough food. so we need to eat more intelligently. A more agricultural diet would create access food which in turn could support larger populations. besides animals are more harmful to the environment in great numbers as they are now then plants. Cows alone are responsible for large amounts of green house gasses.

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I don't know enough about the science of it to say either way.

However, it definitely is a solution that doesn't try to reduce the population so much as it tries to make the planet accommodate a larger population. Yeah, you could build cities underground or grow crops underwater or something, but sooner or later you'll still run out of space. Projects like that have to go hand-in-hand with an effort to reduce the human population to a more manageable level, or at least keep it from getting any bigger.

There's a lot of ways to do that, but most of them are, you know, evil, which is why I brought up standard of living.

AJC, if you're not saying we should get rid of livestock, then where do these savings in land come from? If you aren't getting rid of livestock, you have to do something with them. You say the land we use to grow livestock feed can be turned towards feeding us; but if you're not getting rid of the livestock, well, you have to feed them something. What are you going to do with them? And why would we keep them around anyways? If we turned their pastures into agricultural land for human use, then we're keeping livestock around for no benefit.

But you pulled all those numbers out of nowhere anyways, so I have no reason to abide by them, and thus I am unconvinced that getting rid of livestock means we can grow more food anyways. Certainly not enough to keep up with this "ten billion people" figure you seem fixed on. And you still haven't addressed the problems of soil depletion, erosion, fertilizer runoff, and all the other negative environmental consequences of agriculture.

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Just shooting in this to help make Ajc's theory a bit more clear to understand.

Lindemann (1942) put forth ten percent law for the transfer of energy from one trophic level to the next.

According to the law, during the transfer of organic food from one trophic level to the next, only about ten percent of the organic matter is stored as flesh. The remaining is lost during transfer or broken down in respiration.

Plants utilise sun energy for primary production and can store only 10% of the utilised energy as net production available for the herbivores. When the plants are consumed by animal, about 10% of the energy in the food is fixed into animal flesh which is available for next trophic level (carnivores). When a carnivore consumes that animal, only about 10% of energy is fixed in its flesh for the higher level.

So at each transfer 80 - 90% of potential energy is dissipated as heat (second law of thermodynamics) where only 10 - 20% of energy is available to the next trophic level.

progressive-energy-loss.jpeg

In this example, it'll take 100 kg of plant material to make 1 kg of lion.

In short, the less stages the energy have to go trough the food chain before it reaches us, the less energy is required to make a sufficent quantity of it in the first place.

Pity really. Few things I love as much as a good beef.

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I don't know enough about the science of it to say either way.

However, it definitely is a solution that doesn't try to reduce the population so much as it tries to make the planet accommodate a larger population. Yeah, you could build cities underground or grow crops underwater or something, but sooner or later you'll still run out of space. Projects like that have to go hand-in-hand with an effort to reduce the human population to a more manageable level, or at least keep it from getting any bigger.

There's a lot of ways to do that, but most of them are, you know, evil, which is why I brought up standard of living.

AJC, if you're not saying we should get rid of livestock, then where do these savings in land come from? If you aren't getting rid of livestock, you have to do something with them. You say the land we use to grow livestock feed can be turned towards feeding us; but if you're not getting rid of the livestock, well, you have to feed them something. What are you going to do with them? And why would we keep them around anyways? If we turned their pastures into agricultural land for human use, then we're keeping livestock around for no benefit.

But you pulled all those numbers out of nowhere anyways, so I have no reason to abide by them, and thus I am unconvinced that getting rid of livestock means we can grow more food anyways. Certainly not enough to keep up with this "ten billion people" figure you seem fixed on. And you still haven't addressed the problems of soil depletion, erosion, fertilizer runoff, and all the other negative environmental consequences of agriculture.

50% of our agricultural product is fed to humans, then 50% is fed to live stock, If we cut the amount of live stock we consume by half meaning, we have half the amount of farm animals now, we would have significantly more food. AND that with out adding any more farms. the only change really would be less livestock and less meat at meal times. Sure i'd probably be batter to have some sort of population control, but at the rate the population is growing......changes in how we bring up a family or how many kids we can have would be more dramatic and harder to enforce then changes in how we eat.

AH, asper i forgot that some might not know about energy transfer, hope it makes more since now. thx for that anyway:)

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Okay. At this point, having done some more reading on this, I should point out that your assertion that livestock are taking away our arable land is false. Not all of the land used for pastures for livestock is actually useful for anything else, and in factory farming, they don't necessarily use farmland for grazing anyways, or is being allowed to lie fallow so the nutrients can be replenished (and, fun fact, livestock help replenish said nutrients). Yes, food has to go to them anyways, but getting rid of them doesn't mean you've necessarily got more agricultural land to work with. Nor does it mean that that land is going to keep up with the increased demand for food anyways.

But even if we go with these numbers you've pulled out of nowhere (and it'd be nice to see some kind of source for your claim that humans consume only 50% of our agricultural product), what you're saying still makes no sense, unless you really are just arguing for the elimination of livestock. Because the effect of reducing food available to livestock is to eliminate them, whether you mean to or not.

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