Sdaji: Sadly, I tend to agree. And you're right I am wearing clothes.
So, the question remains, should each of us do our bit and TRY to make the situation a little better for the next generation? Should we continue as we please, since it doesn't matter? Is doing "my bit" actually mean that I shouldn't produce a next generation? They are all pretty serious questions, with pretty serious answers.
Haha! That first line threw me for a moment! :lol: I'm tempted to quote it in my signature! :lol:
I'm fairly sure we're heading for a severe event which will probably involve widespread war brought about by a global food crisis. The rest of the details are difficult to predict. It might actually be better if we get there sooner rather than later, as we might have more resources left to deal with the aftermath. Quite likely, if we bring the world to crisis point with a smaller population (which would be done through the increased consumption of resources per person, meaning that when crunch time came, there would be fewer people to be sustained on the lowered resource usage regime resulting from the crisis) we'll be better off. Almost certainly, we will be better off one way or another depending on whether we run out of land or oil first, but I don't know which is the be better option. As an individual, it is extremely difficult to know which is the best way to aim at this point, as you have to work it out in the context of the rest of the population doing what they will inevitably do, and naturally, that makes any one individual's efforts meaningless. It is possible that the best course of action at the moment would be to bring about a massive environmental and/or economic disaster to bring the severity of the situation to peoples' minds, but unless you wiped out a decent percentage of the world's population (say, at least half a billion people or so), I doubt the remaining population would take much action... perhaps they'd buy their petrol from a different outlet or eat a bit more pork rather than beef or something. To be honest, it's probably best just to enjoy what we have for the next 20-40 years, and when the ship hits the sand we can deal with it at the time, which might simply involve being incinerated by a nuke, or it might mean fighting in the civil war and eating your neighbours if they happen to be in a different faction! Or, just maybe, we'll come up with some technology which will save the day. Cold fusion allowing the partial evacuation of our planet and colonisation of Mars? I can't see that happening in time! Of course, I may have it entirely wrong, but when our population is expanding like wildfire and our planet's ability to produce food is declining... it's not difficult to put two and two together and see disaster on the horizon. If you have mice in a room with a massive bag of food, they'd go crazy, breed like mice, build up a thriving colony, and it's not until right before they all starve to death that they have any idea there is anything wrong. Heh, mice are stupid, huh? But if you want to avoid having children, you just allow the planet to be inherited by the ill-informed or selfish people who want to have more children. If one mouse decided not to reproduce, it's not like they are averting disaster, they're just going to remove their own line from the situation and let the other mice have children to see the future through.
Of course, the analogy isn't perfect, and our ability to use the planet to produce food won't suddenly stop, we'll just hit the point where demand exceeds supply, then war which will further reduce supply. Supply won't go to zero though, so there will be survivors, and avoiding having children will mean someone else's line will inherit the planet.
Hehe, it's so funny, it sounds quite insane to be talking about such severe problems decades in advance. It just sounds so unrealistic and crazy while things are still so rosey!
Actually, it could potentially come a lot sooner. If climate change stops the monsoon one year, the Asian food bowl will fail, and we could see a billion or so people without food... the cascade of problems is pretty disturbing to think about.
Then again, maybe I'm miscalculating and have it all wrong
I certainly don't have any solid answers about the best way to go about things, it's just too complex a system, and one person just can't have any real impact unless they invent cold fusion or something. Even if we all put in a massive effort and reduced our consumption by a whopping 10-30%, we wouldn't delay the inevitable by much. We'd just be a slightly smaller (but still very large) part of the problem. You can't live, breathe, eat, wear clothes etc without consuming resources.
