h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After reading the conversations on this subject, I feel it my duty to remind those who will listen that killing is bad. Though I am happy to see people thinking in a wholistic manner, it discourages me to see them ignoring the individual.

Wholisticly its not quite that bad. You could fit the entire population of the Earth quite comfortably (with a 3 story house, small garden, office for every 50 adults, and school for every 210 children) into Texas. If you added taller apartment buildings, office buildings, and supplied for every other need, you would have to expand into a land the size of Japan. The Earth is alot bigger than Texas. There are wastelands larger than Texas all over the place that still have very firtle ground. Wars, famines, disease, these will all come with or without our help. Why take responsability for the deaths of billions, when we could consentrate harder on things like uinderground cities, cities in flight, cities in the water... If we find it to be not cost effective to do so, no problem, we might consider it more cost effective to let go of our preciouse rediculous luxuries such as clothes which are never worn, wine to become drunk every weekend, or other incredibly wasteful things.

In short, if you are worried about overcrowdedness, don't panic.

Lastly,
"Death is almost always a good thing, but murder is never good... no matter what the effects."
-Master Rahim Habiv Djamal

I agree that as far as the problem of where all the people will fit, were sorted. There is enough room on this planet for us all. But what about our food? We all need to eat so we all need to produce food, and as you say, there is a lot of "wasteland" on the planet that has fertile soil, but it is my opinion that these areas are wilderness, not wasteland, there is a difference. These wilderness areas are the last strongholds of nature in its truest form. The planet as a whole is interconnected, everything affects everything, from the smallest up to the largest. It is just as essential to have these wild areas left in tact as it is for us to eat. Without a ballanced ecosystem, we could just as easily become extinct as if we didn't have anything to eat. And when it comes down to it, was does it matter if we do become extinct. If we cause this planet to crash, we will die out as a species. There will be some species that do survive, these species will be free to carry on the evolution process just as before, maybe they will be better off without us.

I'd have to disagree on the 'not that bad' part of your argument, althought he rate is slowing we are still adding two billion people every twenty four years. roughly 80 million new humans a year. It takes a lot of biomass to maintain a population of that size, of which we use agricultural products and wild biomass. We need the biomass of roughly 200 species a day to support general human population growth. This is where adding two billion people every quarter century and eliminating 200 species every day collide.
Because it causes ecological breakdown, and as James Lovelock says, if you shut off the self-controlling aspects of an ecosytem then you have to have the distinction of very quickly and very comprehensively learning how it works to do something about it.