Overpopulation

[Violet]

Then why are our reservoirs drying out?

Inefficiency.

Yes rainful replenishes reservoirs, but we take too much from reservoirs. Plus a warmer climate reduces rainfall.

So make the water in the atmosphere your new reservoir.

Your source of meat and milk disappears.

And that is a good thing, according to the China Study. Wheee: science for you.

Highly expensive as it takes a lot of energy, plus it won't be enough.

Expensive means nothing to a syndicate, and it means little when there are trillions scrounged up by multinationals. It could cost several trillion dollars a year... and still not impact the world's treasury significantly.

That's a step in the right direction but doesn't solve the problem.

It does, since unwasted water is... unwasted.

Never suggested that.

No, but depending on where they sweat (ie: coal mine) it might not get back to the 'system' for so many years it doesn't even matter. Water is 'wasted' in such a case. On the other hand... next to no water is 'wasted' on the space station

Many countries have already engaged in recycling waste. A good step.

Are these the same ones also polluting salmon-spawning rivers? Pet peeve

One requires a lot of resources, advance technology and time. They both are impractical and hugely expensive.

Neither are impractical. The first requires not so many more resources than surface land as to be unfeasible (and has many benefits associated, such as reduced intensity of the sun, no adverse weather, and controlled water application). Expenses are irrelevant in a world determined to adapt.

You're only delaying the problem. That tactic has already been used. It's still in use. We need a solution not a delay.

Has it? There are 600,000 people in alaska. There is 1 person per square MILE of territory there. There's a HELL of a lot more space.

Space won't matter, water is the first to run out. Farms do however take huge amounts of space and a lot of water.

3/4ths of this planet (or some shitty fraction) is covered in water. 40 years to find a way to drink it with the current technological explosion? Yeah... I am so not fucking worried.

Converting sea water is hugely expensive and only delays the problem. It doesn't solve it.

Expenses... do not... matter. FFS. It delays the problem to the point where we can drink OCEANS of water. We are then using THE OTHER 97% OF THIS PLANET'S WATER. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distr...n_on_Earth Problem... fucking... solved.

Many colostral bodies contain much water. Don't know how to collect it yet. But even if we did, it would cost trillions.

Then lets spend trillions. Is 'colostral' some english word? I have no idea what the fuck you're on about.

We can convert salt water to fresh, but it's extremely expensive. It also doesn't solve the problem. Also doomsayers as you call them, not all are wrong. Religious wackos, I'd ignore and laugh at any day. They assert without evidence. Naturalists on the other hand, tend to have first hand experience with decades of research with the backing of scientists. Some warnings must be heeded.

It's currently expensive. It might not be expensive in 40 years. There might be other methods developed in those 40 years.

What is the problem if it isn't that we don't have enough water and space? We have enough water. We have enough space. What the fuck is the problem?

Maybe not every doomsayer is wrong... but it certainly isn't because of anything more than unadulterated LUCK. I don't care if they have the fucking encyclopedia britanica as evidence for their predictions: DIVINATION IS NOT A SCIENCE. And every one of them that pretends otherwise is a crackpot.

How can we adapt without water? Try this, go a whole week without water and let me know how well you adapted to it. Starving Africans go through it all the time. They don't live for very long.

'Without water'... you use that like there is no more water. There's always ((roughly?) the same amount of) water. The problem is not none of it... it's not enough of it. As with not having enough food to eat 15 meals a day: you can adapt to not having a lot of something.

I wish you were right. But our reservoirs say different.

I am right, since you can't run out of water. You can fail to find enough to use it as you used to, but you can never run out (on a global scale).

Like I said, life depends on water. Without it, it dies.

Not all life depends on water, but that's besides the point. We cannot have no water. Unless you have a way to strip our atmosphere and oceans... and then frankly we've got other problems.

Doesn't have to for us. But being blind to the ever growing problem will be our undoing.

Won't be. Will not be. I say 'our problem' is inefficiencies and flawed systems... overpopulation is a fantasy for a world as is in a future unmodified by a billion more people's efforts. I call bullshit on it.

Then we are forced to repeat our mistakes.

We aren't forced to do that any more than we are forced to beat our heads against a brick wall. Is someone holding a gun at your head or something?

No, that's a bad thing. Planet warms up, ice caps melt, ocean rises, less land, less space...you get the picture.

Oceans rise... barely? There's all the space on the ocean floor, and that's not going away any time soon.

I don't get the picture. I see that as only a good thing. It's the violent weather coming with it that concerns me.

Somethings we cannot adapt to. We have our limitations.

I'm going to say 'false' on that entire statement. Some billions of years in the future... the only things we might not be able to do are defy logic and break math. 40 years in the future? I see no reason we can't adapt to a higher population and a warmer more turbulent climate.

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Also... ever heard of levvies? They keep whole countries from going under already, and a whole state

[Ace Otana]

You lack an awful lot of education. Also your presupposition seems relentless. I'm going to have to leave you with this seemingly endless debate.

Also please note, I said 'Fresh' water. I never stated that the planets water both fresh and not would run out. You've twisted many of my words, which means you're not listening or couldn't counter my points.

So I'll let the planets reservoirs do the talking.

[Violet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

Tired of responding to you, Mr. Malthus. You were wrong then, you've been wrong every time so far, you'll be wrong this time.

Salt water is fresh water when purified.

[Justtristo]

A lot of Australia is either desert or at most semi-desert, if you were to over-impose a map of Australia over the Sahara desert, that would show you how much habitable land there is in Australia.

'Habitable' ≠ 'inhabitable'. You can build on desert as easily as fertile plains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai#Geography nice little jewel of the desert.

Anyway, that's not the point: we get more than half our food from overseas... and water probably not dissimilar. There is no reason you can't build a city anywhere (as long as you've figured out how to build there), since there's always a way or six to make it work

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The continental USA is very different to Australia, imagine if 80% of the continental USA was as dry as say the deserts of Arizona and Nevada, with a lot of the remainder being like the semi-arid high plains. That would leave narrow strips of land both west of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains and East of the Appalachian Mountains Mountains being not Arid or Semi-Arid and containing the vast majority of the population.

[Anomalocaris]

There are reason you can't built anywhere on earth even if we can keep humans alive on the moon. Depending on where you build, it cost a different amount of economical output, as well as a different amount of non-renewable resource, to just keep the inhabitants of the city alive.

In one extreme, you can build somewhere where it cost more economic output to keep the city alive then the city produces. In this case, the city is a blackhole and the rest of the world would richer if it were nuked.

Somewhat less extreme, the city still produces more than it consumes to keep itself alive. But the margin is small and if the inhabitants were to move elsewhere, they can produce the same amount while consuming less. In this case, the city might stay alive, but it doesn't pay to encourage it to live.

In the case of world wide population this example also applies. As every economist knows the marginal cost of any commodity increases with demand because small total demand can always be met by productions from the easiest mines and the most fertile fields. BUT the availability of easy mines and fertile fields are limited, Progressively larger demands must be met at by progressively more difficult mines and less productive fields. So as the population grows, it will gradually cost more and more to keep the next newborn fed. It is true at the cost of million dollars per meal, we can probably manufacture food out of rocks. But, there reaches a point of population where, as each additional person continues to produce one additional person's worth of output, it would take more than one person's output to provide him with sustenance.

So, we had better not reach the population where we need to make million dollar meals out of rocks to keep each additional person fed before we reach such a point of efficiency that each additional person can afford three million dollar meals per day.

The issue is not whether giant underground caverns and hydroponics can technically keep one alive. The issue is will the world's population reached and surpassed the point where incremental mouths takes more to feed than incremental hands can produce. This is called in economics the Malsuthian trap.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

Tired of responding to you, Mr. Malthus. You were wrong then, you've been wrong every time so far, you'll be wrong this time.

Salt water is fresh water when purified.

Malthus has been right every time. The most recent dramatic example of an apparent violation of Malthusian trap occurred right before the Irish potato famine, when the introduction of new agricultural techniques - growing potatoes - seem to far outstrip even the storied Irish fecundity. The violation of Malthusian trap continued blithfully until the trap slammed shut with the potato famine.

The analogy bewteen the genetically homogenous Irish potatoes and the vast fields of genetic homogeneity that characterize the modern which seem to outstrip world population growth is even more apt then you might think.

We can cite the entire 1550 - 1911 period in Chinese history as an even closer parallel to modern apparent violation of Malthusian trap facilitated by massive advance in agricultural technology and massive growth of farming into hitherto Non-arable regions, followed by the trap shutting diseasterosly, if you like. In fact the trap closed so resoundingly that the Chinese clearly enunciated the concept of the Malthusian trap years before Malthus.

[Ace Otana]

Tired of responding to you, Mr. Malthus. You were wrong then, you've been wrong every time so far, you'll be wrong this time.

He was right time and time again. People who have produced resilient seeds and plants had done so to aid food production for an ever growing population. They state that all they've done is delay the problem, give us some breathing space. We've used that breathing space to ignore the problem. Most of us would rather pretend it's not there, but you'll face it sooner or later. One day when you turn the tap, no water will come out. Some countries already have that problem, we're next.

Salt water is fresh water when purified.

That doesn't solve the problem. You fail to understand anything I've said previously.
The problem is our numbers.
The planet is finite and so is it's resources. There is a limit to our numbers, if we exceed it, people will die of thirst and starvation. But if we control it, we avoid that outcome.
I learnt all this back in high school. We had simulations demonstrating the effects of over breeding. Starvation or disease was always the out come. Consuming more than the environment could produce. It's basic knowledge for fuck sake. Don't they teach science over there?

[The Grand Nudger]

Again Ace, I (and Sae) understand that resources are finite, that only so many people can be crammed on this rock. When we have dealt with the glaring inefficiencies of many of our systems we can talk about that number. If that number relies on us continuing to fuck it up, with full knowledge that we're fucking it up, in what way is that a problem with earths carrying capacity? Sounds like a human problem (and not one of overpopulation). Is it honestly so difficult to understand that I'd rather fix problems we know about before I start telling people who can have children, and how many they can have?

There is a vast portion of this earth called the third world, which is usually the third world because it lacks any sort of development whatsoever. Do you honestly feel that we've run out of space and resources to do what we need to do when large tracts of this rock are essentially still stuck in the iron age (and when some systems in the 1st world appear to be stuck in the iron age as well)?

We may have new numbers on this, but last I checked, humans represented .33% of earths total biomass. Does that lend itself well to the idea that there are too many of us as is?
(just looked it up, our farm animals and crops amount to another 3.7%, making the grand total of our actions and existence (by biomass) 4%)

[Ace Otana]

Again Ace, I (and Sae) understand that resources are finite, that only so many people can be crammed on this rock. When we have dealt with the glaring inefficiencies of many of our systems we can talk about that number. If that number relies on us continuing to fuck it up, with full knowledge that we're fucking it up, in what way is that a problem with earths carrying capacity? Sounds like a human problem (and not one of overpopulation). Is it honestly so difficult to understand that I'd rather fix problems we know about before I start telling people who can have children, and how many they can have?

Our environment can only produce so much. We've already started to exceed our limitations. Telling people how many they can have won't work. We need to instil a sense of understanding. That by not having kids, you'd be doing yourself and everyone else a favour. It's one less demand for space, food and water.

There is a vast portion of this earth called the third world, which is usually the third world because it lacks any sort of development whatsoever.

Fresh water shortages are global. It will hit hotter and less advanced countries first and hardest.

Do you honestly feel that we've run out of space and resources to do what we need to do when large tracts of this rock are essentially still stuck in the iron age (and when some systems in the 1st world appear to be stuck in the iron age as well)?

Yes. Not ran out, but running short.

We may have new numbers on this, but last I checked, humans represented .33% of earths total biomass. Does that lend itself well to the idea that there are too many of us as is?
(just looked it up, our farm animals and crops amount to another 3.7%, making the grand total of our actions and existence (by biomass) 4%)

And we consume more resources than any other species of animal on this planet. We're producing huge amounts of Co2, our towns and cities radiate huge amounts of thermal energy. We've destroyed huge forests, and built on greenbelts and ruined habitats for our own benefit. When does it become wrong? We don't just use fresh water to hydrate ourselves, we use it for food production, factory production, gardening and turning deserts into green fields for more food production.

I feel very sadden that no one cares or understands, personally I don't think we can prevent water shortages. Can't make a difference because no one is listening. Perhaps we deserve what's coming.

[The Grand Nudger]

Okay, let me try this again.

We use more water than we need to, not by a little, by a lot. Waste.

We use more space than we need to, not by a little, by a lot. Waste.

Yes, it will hit hotter and less advanced countries first, because they are less advanced.......doesn't that sound like a problem we can solve to you?

Running artificially short..see above.

It never becomes wrong when a human life is in the balance Ace. Maybe your argument is better phrased as "We cant save the koalas and ourselves at the same time". So fucking what? Plants love the CO2, maybe we should look at sequestering or utilizing all that waste thermal?

[kılıç_mehmet]

I put this in politics seen as I couldn't really think of anywhere else.

A guy who I usually watch for his comedy videos did a video on a certain subject which is often very controversial. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RESFiUU_q...ure=relmfu

What do you guys think about overpopulation? Is it a problem (I certainly think so)? How should we deal with it?

Well, let's examine the statistics, should we?
However, we do not have them. If someone could bring me the statistics, I could graph them and see what really is going on.