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Trim the world population
I don't get this argument. How are we going to decide who is trimmed? Who does the trimming? How will they be trimmed? It's a non-starter. Sure we may have too many people but who would actively support killing people? especially when the people causing the most damage are the wealthiest that read sites like this
Don't just assume this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usdJgEwMinM
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I don't get this argument. How are we going to decide who is trimmed? Who does the trimming? How will they be trimmed? It's a non-starter. Sure we may have too many people but who would actively support killing people? especially when the people causing the most damage are the wealthiest that read sites like this
I think -- hope -- they meant trimming future growth via abstinence. Not killing people.
If anyone is interested in a fanciful take on reducing the world's population in order to save it, I can happily recommend Channel 4's two-season Utopia series [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJnN3WMwDsk
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We're exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. The alternatives are either less people on the planet, lower standard of living, or resources from off the planet.
The carrying capacity of the planet is technology dependent.
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by that logic, any satire should be rejected, a bit of a boring world.
I guess we need to figure out where satire ends and crazy conspiracy theories begin. The difference seems to be with how often repeated and fervent the claim is.
This apparently isn't a popular opinion, but: this world is precious. I would even go so far as to say miraculous . Until we wake up to this fact, we will continue to ennui ourselves and this world into oblivion. It's hard to prove (or even study), but I believe this is the root cause of all the other tragedies. It is not something we will merely engineer our way out of. We don't like religion (or in many cases, even…
I agree with you that the world is precious. I also agree with someone else in this comments section that quotes someone saying the world and the life within is precious regardless of what we can extract from it. However, this puzzles me: > Psychedelics seem like one promising avenue. Perhaps they will help give us the inspiration to fill in this tragic blindspot. Why? What do psychedelics have to do with anything? I…
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I would never use the phrase "ideal state", but rather "natural state". Though, even that is not quite accurate as humans are naturally-occurring too, but the things we do (and do to the planet) are not quite so "natural". While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than…
A beaver dams a river, flooding the shores and killing off the ecosystem. That’s natural. A group of humans do it and it’s unnatural?
Britain: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-bird-numbers-sp...
And also seabirds in Britain: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/20/seabird-...
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Returning to WWII isn't going to do anything useful, even if you do want to go down this intellectual rabbit-hole. I've actually looked into this before. Go look at how many people died in WWII. Was it a lot? In absolute numbers, sure. As a percentage of the human race? No, not really. It barely made a dent in the worldwide population. You can look at population graphs over time, and it barely registers, if at all. R…
> war just isn't a very good form of population control any more That's because war isn't a form of population control. It's a form of conflict resolution.
Trying to estimate the population of birds in North America between now and 50 years ago seems like it would have an error rate of at least 29%. Are the counting and estimation mechanism even anywhere close to similar?
You don't believe the number, so they could possibly be wrong, so it's not a cause for concern? That's a lot of jumps to make to get to the case where we don't have to worry. What techniques are they using to count and estimate the birds, and what objections do you take to their methods? Sadly I can't find out as the site is behind a paywall for me.
In this day of clickbait titles, studies that are not reproducible, and suspect motivation for studies, the idea that we can calculate the total number of birds with an error rate of less than 30%, including the fact that some data is 50 years old, doesn't pass my smell test.
I would prefer waiting for accurate data rather than panic over yet another headline that is not anchored in actual science and facts. For example, did they try to count the number of birds at the same time of the year both times? Do some birds have different multi-year migratory patterns leading to them being in different parts of the world? Did they try counting the birds twice using the same techniques but two different teams, and then compare the numbers?
There are too many ways this calculation could fail for me to be trust this data point.