this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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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.
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.