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 said people were living just fine, no they weren't and they were dying, a whole fucking lot and part of the reason why we're not dying so early now is because we have access to things that require energy to produce. Wanna go back to living like the plebe from the 1700s? Go on and move to one of the poorest third world countries and see how fine you are.
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.