this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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And yet, there's still the elephant in the room.
The literal 'Elephant's Foot' from the Chernobyl disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
It's bad enough that disaster even happened, but now the aftermath is now in a war torn country? Fuck, why can't we just all work together and figure a way to recycle the nuclear material that we refined in the first place, instead of Russia trying to blow it up?
Oh that's right, nuclear stuff is super dangerous. Like, potentially worldwide life ending dangerous. ~~Humans~~ Politicians are not responsible enough for any of these energy demands, whether it's coal, oil, nuclear, etc..
Shit, my own phone only uses a few milliwatts of energy a day, but the servers it connects to use megawatts. Has anyone ever considered just turning off the electricity, worldwide, for like a month, just to see what happens?
Just a hypothetical thought there, please don't take me too seriously. But for real, humans existed for over 100,000 years without electricity and they never had any of these extreme devastating problems...
A lot less humans existed for a lesser period of time without electricity.
We used to burn oil and other fuels for lamps, raw wood for heat, raw sewerage was everywhere if not released untreated into waterways. All of this was hugely polluting and detrimental to health. Please don't kid yourself that there were better times in the 1700s.
You make a fine point as well. Overpopulation. There's only so much surface area on our degrading blue-green marble of a planet.
Back in the 1700s there wasn't anywhere near 8 billion people on the planet. Yet people were living just fine. Not perfectly, but is anyone except the richest of the rich living just fine now?
But these days, the politicians want people to believe there's a shortage of people, even trying to restrict women's rights, and also arrange wars to kill people.
https://scottmanning.com/content/year-by-year-world-population-estimates/
Edits - Apologies for numerous edits, I just want to make my thoughts clear.
I'm sorry, are you saying women's rights were better in the 1700s or wars didn't happen? Or that people had less problems? Or that the ruling class shared power?
I don't mean to offend, but this is an insanely naive view of the world.
No, I'm just saying there's way too many damn people for this little tiny planet these days, and if you let the politicians talk their rhetoric and shit, they'd just as soon try to convince you that we need more people.
They want more women birthing children, just to have more people to milk of every bit of tax money they can, and either work them into their graves or send them to war.
We're all pawns in a huge game. The more people there are, the more energy we consume, regardless of the source of that energy. That's just science.
If there was only 1/8 as many people on the planet, there still wouldn't be any shortage of people, and we'd probably only be consuming about 1/20th of the energy, because we wouldn't be gridlocked in traffic and competing so much for the finite resources on the planet.
Yes that last part is a bit of speculation, but still, isn't 8 billion people a bit too many for Earth? There ain't any more land to conquer/explore, unless you dare try living on Antarctica...
I would argue that your perspective is a narrow one and you need to change what info you are consuming. My personal take (if you have any interest):
Most of the people on this world are not rich enough to be part of daily traffic jams. They are just trying to survive and enjoy life with what they have.
Current resource competition is driven by profit seeking and not bourne out of necessity (i.e. we're not "competing" in the traditional sense, where countries at war are doing so to feed their people etc... At least, not yet.)
There is definitely more space and resources available for more people, if we learn to better distribute what we have - the how of this, while keeping everyone happy, is the billion dollar question.
You can choose to live in the jungle by yourself if you want, no one is (hopefully) forcing you to take part in working etc.
If you can, you should go travel more. If you can't, go volunteer some of your time to your community. It tends to clear my "the world is going to shit" thoughts. Sure, there's problems everywhere, and we should fight for the ones we feel are important, but there is also a lot of great things happening.
You know who thought like you? Thomas Malthus. 2 centuries ago.
2 centuries ago we didn't have millions of cars on the roads burning gasoline stuck at red lights in gridlocked traffic. Try again.
And yet 2 centuries ago some people were already thinking, exactly like you, that there was too many humans for the earth to sustain them. You can see how wrong he was. The fact that you refuse to learn from past mistakes is quite telling though.
2 centuries ago there weren't anywhere near 8 billion people. Earth ain't got any bigger since then. At what point would you consider the world overpopulated? 10 billion? 15? 20?
I don't see that he was wrong at all, he was just calling it out earlier than anyone was ready to listen.
You might as well warn about the sun eating the earth and turning it into hell. It's not too soon, only 5 billion years left.
I presume since you're the one suggesting going back to the living conditions of the 1700s then you'd be fine if you were one of the slaves/serfs used to generated the quality of life for other people?
I was referring to modern day overpopulation and our excessive addiction to energy consumption, as opposed to past centuries where there were far fewer people (yet still quite a plenty), and far less energy consumption demands.
I dunno where you plucked the idea of slavery out of anything I said, you can fuck right off with that.
What does life expectancy have anything to do with energy consumption? I was talking about overpopulation. More people equals more energy consumption. That's just science.
We have a much better understanding of disease these days, so we can indeed keep our longer life expectancy, without acting like we somehow need even more people on the planet.
Once upon a time, the internal combustion engine didn't even exist. How did people get around? Either on foot or by horse. Or bicycle, if you wanna get fancy, without burning any more fuel than the calories you consume.
Once upon a time human generated electricity didn't exist. I mean sure it's nice and all, but people lived without it for hundreds of thousands of years.
And once upon a time gunpowder and shit didn't exist. Welp, that and other cats are out of the bag now ain't they?
I dunno, it just seems to me that overpopulation and the human addiction to energy is like 3/4 of the overall problem.
People living to old age means more people are alive at the same time, that's just math.
And people living on ventilators and suffering dementia or paralysis or other debilitating ailments is hardly anything worth calling any sort of quality of life. I'm 42 right now, and at the rate things are going, both with my own health plus the rate people are ruining the planet, I kinda hope I croak by age 60 or so.
The human body isn't meant to last forever, and if they ever think they gotta put me on a machine for any length of time, I'm gonna be like fuck that, time to check out.
We had entire cilizations collapse entirly mostly due to ecological disasters. Illnesses were wipeing out huge parts of the population in some cases. Wars also used to be much more common.
The technologies we have do make the world a better place. Not alwasys, but on average.
No nuclear accident has the ability to end life on earth. It is not a possibility.
And humans in the past would regularly suffer from famine and epidemic, and child death was crazy (as was mother death during birth).