Bay 12 Games Forum

Seriously? You seriously think we will run out of food in generations? We have enough that we could survive a doubling in population. Which no one thinks is going to happen anyway. All over the world growth rates are falling, soon enough we will top off and start to decline.

Food's just one resource, not all of them, and the problem as I understand it is a lot of the stuff we're doing to be able to support a doubling of the population right now is very, very much unsustainable.

But yeah, I've heard estimates (or what degree of respectability I can't remember) of it hitting 10-12 billion before it starts leveling off. I've also seen numbers hit 20 billion or more too, though both of those were a few years back. We're already feeling the resource strain -- from inability or unwillingness to see it moved in such a way to reduce suffering -- with our current population. Every extra bit just strains it further, increasing the overall suffering of our people.

It also increases the rate that what we have that can't support a doubling of the population -- the other, even more finite than food and farming-related resources -- are consumed. The population we have now isn't sustainable, from what I've seen and read. A larger population is just going to make it burn faster.

And yes. People are starving and dying. But that does not mean there is not enough food for them, it simply means they do not have access to it. Seriously. I bet, for instance, if you moved my whole neighborhood out to a low functioning desert or some other place that is no good for growing crops you could feed like a thousand people with the farm land you would free up.

Maybe. Take it from someone in a farming community, even if not directly involved with the farming. Just because an area's green doesn't mean it's arable and able to be used for large-scale, or even smaller scale, farming.

The issues keeping people from getting food are land allotment, not having up to date technology, and shitty politics. The fact is there is not going to be a mass starvation the world over for a longer amount of time I can even think of.

And a larger population is just going to make the issue worse.  Land is as much a resource as any other, can be consumed just as readily, and (from what I understand, with said understanding being admit-ably incomplete!), is generally not a resource that is renewable in short time spans. More people means a higher demand on that land, which consumes it faster and often renders it unusable for longer periods.

There's also no guarantee (that I've seen, anyway; I'd absolutely love to see solid evidence to the contrary) that getting up to date technology to a sufficient amount of the world's population is even possible. A lot of the stuff that places like the US use to output massive crop surpluses take an industry base that many areas would have trouble supporting.

And as you say, shitty politics. We've fairly conclusively seen that the folks that are capable of producing the food are either unwilling or unable to move it where it needs to be to keep people from dying. If it's bad now, how much worse will it get when the population is half again or more larger?

I will admit openly, though, that when I say few generations I'm talking the more toward the upper end of that, two-three hundred years. Even I don't think there's going to be genuinely major impacts in my lifetime, or even in the generation after mine (Though we're already feeling it and the next batches are going to feel it even harder). That's the lower end of the distance you have to be considering when you're talking species wide survival, generally, because a lot of the immediate impact stuff we do (50-100 years) won't bear its fruit until then.

Which means, yeah, most people can't be arsed to give a shit. Too far into the future to matter to them. Which, as I've been saying, is probably going to be what kills us. We're doing crap that's going to be having impact hundreds of years down the line and not giving a shit about it. It's not exactly surprising that signs are pointing to that biting us in the ass.

Overpopulation is a third world problem.  In the West, population growth would be negative were it not for immigration, and in some places is negative even with immigration.

Thats stupid, you are telling me that we have to cut down on people even though there are families that are capable to handle themselves. We aren't the poor countries, the united states alone produces x10 more food than their own population consumes. you tell me thats not enough?

Yeah, the problem with both those outlooks?

The world has finite resources. I really can't emphasis that g'damn enough. 7 billion people on the planet is not a 'third world problem' it's a 'going to fucking kill all of us' problem. Sticking our heads beneath the sand in our fenced community doesn't help anything.

That's the issue. The whole freaking bloody thing. Resources == finite. Growth =/= infinite. Global situation == not-freaking-ignorable. The belief that those three are somehow untrue is going to kill our species if it doesn't change, or something more direct (i.e. boom) doesn't intervene. But as things are, and seem to be going, it won't change, so we're screwed. Species level death by stupidity.

As for it 'not being enough'... millions die of starvation and malnutrition, yearly, right now. No. It's not enough.

hey there are families that can handle it, i say anything over 5 is beyond retarded

World has a finite number of resources. I can't really articulate how short sighted the view you're expressing is, but basically, our species does not need more people. We need considerably less. Constantly having more is going to kill us, full stop. It doesn't mean that we have to go killing off our population, but if we don't curtail the growth somehow -- which means that folks have to internalize that large families == bad -- our species is going to die.

Overpopulation sometimes leads to the numbers in the area in question dying back. It's also liable to cause complete extinction for the species in the geographical area in question. Our geographical area is 'earth,' and we're overpopulating at an insane rate. Obvious likelyhood is obvious. We could use a g'damn rubber and not breed once we've got one or two kids, or, a few generations from now, we run headfirst into an extinction even of our own cause.

Problem being that the majority of our species either can't or won't think on that timescale. Thus, again, death by stupidity. About the only chance we have is science pulling something incredible out of its ass, which'll push the issue further down the line.

Fiery nuclear apocalypse is a helluva' lot more appealing than mass starvation. Much faster, if nothing else.

We are not over populated yet, nor are we really close to what our sure to be too low knowledge of the carrying capacity of earth is.

We're close enough that if we don't slow shit down soon, it's not going to be stoppable. We also are horrifically overpopulated in certain areas, which causes a helluva' lot more suffering than is even remotely necessary.

Huh, that's new? There was enough media coverage and numbers presented that Bush basically stole Florida back when it happened that even I noticed it. I guess it didn't get out of the state very much?

Wait, 21st? I'm definitely missing something. Thought the hullabaloo was about 12/12/12, not 21/12/12 (or 12/21/12, depending). Or is that something dealing with the mayan nonsense instead of the numerology nonsense?

And dudes, seriously, I wasn't saying these four people understood me completely.  They understood one or two parts of me, each.

I imagine that for most of you, "understands my body language" isn't a concern, because most people match that.  For me, it is very, very important and rare.

Meant what I said and said what I meant. There's precisely one person in my life I've been able to actually relax around enough for my non-public mannerisms (my public ones are usually misinterpreted, thankfully, which is intended and getting better as the years pass) to even even partially come through and even with them it was pretty constrained. A couple attempts to family, but only that one had any degree of 'click' whatsoever. Several that were safer to be around, but no one I could even approach relaxed with.

It's a terrifyingly enticing thing, even connection on that level. Folks I can speak to without an underlying level of fear is something that has only happened once, and even then only partially. In the words of the mortal bard, "Fuckdamn bigots and straight to hell with this shithole of a geopolitical area."

Nah, hammering it a bit hard, all of us, I guess. The thing you really should be taking away from it is that, mostly, we're trying to point out that poorly regulated use of drugs, especially ones that aren't chemically addictive, is very much a symptom of a poor situation, not the cause.

E: Plus some confirmation bias irritation from Gryph, I think. It can be annoying when you're generalizing from small scale specific examples to a wider group, when the wider group doesn't display the characteristics of the smaller one you observe. Doesn't help that the statistics are against what you're expressing. Your response is very natural, just of a particular sort some of us have been trained to immediately distrust (and often point out, to prevent people from making the mistakes that come along with it.).

Further edit, once it percolated a bit in the brain:

Also, when did I imply cigarettes and alcohol are good? I'm expressing my distaste for pot and drugs in general, thankfuly none of my friends have serious problems with smoking and alcohol.

Take what I wrote as a snarkier-than-necessary (with my apologizes) presentation of the sort of position you'd have to hold in order to avoid hypocrisy. If you're going to be disdainful of marijuana, then you logically must hold equal or greater disdain for substances that are as bad or worse than it (Alcohol and tobacco both fall in the latter category, with psychological addictions largely falling in the former.). Not having personal encounters with people that were influenced badly by them is not sufficient for not extending the approbation to such substances (without slipping into hypocrisy, that is.), unfortunately.

I don't care if there are people who can handle it, or whatever. Don't care; not gonna care. I've only seen the ones who can't--a lot of them. They tend to end up screwing me over.[/rant]

Obligatory "bright side" comment! It could have been worse.

They could have been drunk.