Excellent. Reminds me of the lecture describing that "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"
Thanks for sharing this! Albert Bartlett does a wonderful job explaining the consequences of sustained growth rates.
I find overpopulation to be one of the greatest concerns that we are not adequately dealing with. Albert's bacteria in a bottle analogy made me think of Elon Musk's attempt to bring human life to other planets.. will we not just be expanding our time of growth? Maybe we should start choosing a way to reach a population growth rate of 0% and see what countless problems are resolved.
I didn't understand why everyone was wittering on about sustainability until I read "Collapse" by Jarod Diamond. It illustrates how dangerous it is to ignore sustainability, and how rare it is in human societies.
It seems to me that we have a choice:
1. Figure out how to cut our population growth to 0%, and then educate everyone on the planet as why they should do this instead of breeding to the max. Our kids will be happier than us.
2. Breed to the max until everyone on earth (and maybe Mars) is only just hanging on by their fingernails, probably living extremely unpleasant lives of violent competition and constant starvation. Our kids will be less happy than us.
Sadly I think option 1 is unlikely due to the tragedy of the commons.
If you think overpopulation is a real problem, then you have no knowledge of statistics[1], which makes me doubt everything else you said. We'll probably have problem with underpopulation, not overpopulation.
I find overpopulation to be one of the greatest concerns that we are not adequately dealing with. Albert's bacteria in a bottle analogy made me think of Elon Musk's attempt to bring human life to other planets.. will we not just be expanding our time of growth? Maybe we should start choosing a way to reach a population growth rate of 0% and see what countless problems are resolved.