World population soars past 7.5 billion. No one notices. Hilarity ensues.

1) I think rushing would actually improve things, giving us a common goal and an excuse to rid ourselves of the liberal ideology plaguing our society and killing our earth.

2) I still don't see why you don't think it's testable. Hypothesis: A larger population, when exposed to a highly contagious and deadly disease, will have more survivors than a smaller population. This is certainly testable, and there's already been significant amounts of academic work done on it. I read Built on Bones earlier this year. It references plenty of work done on the effects of population density on disease. That's more of an anthropological perspective, but the hypothesis is very testable as well. I don't see why you say it's not. I'm not worried about our ability to fight disease as much as I am our ability to survive it. Our ability to fight disease is dependent on our technology, not our population. We have abused antibiotics. That sucks. A larger population is still more likely to survive a disease outbreak. To get to the point where we could significantly reduce the occurrence of disease outbreaks, we'd have to abandon urban life almost entirely. I don't get the impression you've read up much on this. I've given you a place to start.

3) There are alternative to oil. Nuclear power is one. Once we have permanent space stations, huge solar sails will be able to provide large amounts of energy. We don't need to find oil in the cosmos.

4) Increasing the amount of humans will increase our ability to solve problems. It will make solutions slightly more difficult to implement in some ways, but more humans working towards the same goals will increase productivity. Why do you think there was such a technological explosion in Europe hundreds of years ago that continues to this day? More people, different political philosophy, better social organization, more education. We can improve again.

Actually we can easily model a large portion of our visible universe far into the future let alone a hundred years. That is why we can predict when Sol will eventually die, how Andromeda will slam in to the Milky Way, and the hypothetical heat death of the universe.

Yes, but we don't know what our technological capabilities will look like then. We know what the universe will look like, we think, but we don't know exactly how we'll be able to interact with it.

Man does not stand alone. You are not even you. You are 2/3 bacteria. You did not create them. Earth did.

Right. Thank you, earth. Now we can control and modify bacteria in a lab. We can make spacecraft that allow us to survive in space for long periods of time. Earth gave birth to us, but it won't necessarily remain necessary for our survival in the future. It will if we turn inward, but my argument is that we should not.

Good for you? I want to live, too. Do like me and go into the mountains and live however the hell you want. I also think we should collectively do all we can to secure the future of humanity. The best option is getting populations in as many different places as possible. Just like humans are much more resilient now that we take up the whole earth than we were confined to a small area in east Africa, we will be even more resilient when we spread out throughout the solar system, the cluster, and possibly even further.

/r/collapse Thread Parent