We are living in a unique period of this planet’s lifetime. 4.6 billion years and this sliver of time we call the 21st century is actually very interesting. Time measured against the Earth’s entire history shows mankind as only having been around for about a second of time if the 4.6 billion years were played back as a two hour movie – and we’ve been around for a couple of million years no less. Looking at it that way, our place in it all seems inconsequential, so why are we, the humans living in the 21st century, interesting? Because we need to do something very unnatural, something never before attempted – reduce and maintain our population at a size the planet can support.
In the second half of the 20th century we pondered alien planets and how or if intelligent life on them ever survived long after reaching the point of nuclear power and so the ability to more or less annihilate the entire planet very quickly. There’s another challenge to be faced by any species intelligent enough to split atoms and that’s if they can overcome nature and suddenly stop growing their population. No life in the universe that we know of has ever before succeeded in doing so and yet here we are. To be sure, populations here have had this problem before such as when presented with an abundance of food or a loss or predators – but they continued to grow until they crashed in massive die offs as a result.
See, there’s a sharp bend in the road right here and now, the 21st century, and we are not yet even talking about starting to the turn the rudder. The 20th century was the start of the turn where we reached 2 billion in 1930AD and all they did was accelerate, faster than ever, straight ahead. Can we apply the brakes and turn the rudder? Can we turn it fast enough to not crash? Sorry for mixing my car and boat analogies – you’ll just have to try and keep up. 4.6 billion years into the experiment and here we are – about to show if an intelligent, apex species can stop doing what life does – breeding and growing – when it needs to do so. We can easily see that the rest of life on this planet does not possess that ability, when they grow too large for the system they live in (a lake for example) they die back in mass numbers from starvation, disease, etc. They suffer the bad stuff and so will we if we can’t manage ourselves.
As you can see I’m not an artist, dangit. The gold line is the road and the green one our population and the red is where we are now and don’t want to be for very much longer. On the next page we will see some of the early bad stuff we are dealing with already.
Have you ever felt as though there’s something of a secret under all of our noses? Something we all sense or even see and yet no one really mentions it? Well, there is. In fact, it’s downright spooky when you look at it head on. Think about all of the talking heads, the news, the movies based on natural disasters, the documentaries, the articles in magazines, the politics. . .think back on all of those smart people, leaders, scientists, university professors, all talking about climate change, fresh water availability, ozone, greenhouse gasses, acid rain, rising oceans and shrinking polar ice caps, deaths of rainforests and ocean reefs, world hunger, the current mass extinction event happening – on and on. And think of all the programs aimed to help these causes. So much time, money and energy spread across a myriad of problems and yet the root cause is not mentioned nor addressed – human overpopulation. Without fixing the root cause these programs are destined to fail eventually; though they may buy us some time. What even is sustainable agriculture when dealing with a finite amount of resources (the Earth) and a never ending growth for more needed?
Fun in the. . .Nope!
According to mec.ca, 1985 was the year that humanity’s demand for resources first exceeded its supply.
I think by now most of us know that overpopulation is the root cause to most all of the other problems – so why are we not talking about it? How is it that we are not already sick of hearing about it? I will tell you now that it is not because these smart people are stupid; there’s a simple, logical explanation for it which we will attempt to explain here. Our aim is to fix this silence and start the global discussion that needs to happen. We hope you can spend the next few minutes to consider this and, if you agree, to simply join us, for free, by registering your email with Rightsized. We can save the world very quickly and humanly if we stand together and open the discussion. We can create a utopia for the life on this planet including our descendants 200 years from now, we can be praised by them for righting the path we are on and we can do all of this without even doing anything – not hard work, not spending trillions of dollars – just by simply not breeding ourselves unaccountably. The other alternative will not likely see our descendants think very well of us. Prove me wrong.
If we could rightsize ourselves through humane means, simply stop over reproducing, simply allow two children per family for one example, we could reach 2 billion by around 2200AD quite easily (rough math here). Look at some of the problems of today which would be resolved else greatly lessened:
- World Hunger
- Disease transmission
- Shortage of medicine
- Poverty
- Unemployment
- Climate change
- Rising Oceans
- Pollution
- Availability of fresh water
- Extinction of species
- Cancer
- Ozone depletion
- Deforestation / rainforest / coral reefs
- Overcrowding
- Reduction in Mental illness and senseless violent crime
- City infrastructures needing to be expanded and updated
- Shark attacks on humans (no, really, it’s a fact – see the above picture) :o)
- Available corpses in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Prove me wrong. . .
If you care about any of these and especially if you contribute to fighting any these, you really need to consider joining us as those are all going to fail regardless of how well they are managed if our numbers continue to climb. This will be explained here shortly but surely you cannot expect to give money to a foundation and expect them to fit 8 pounds of sugar (and growing) into a 2 pound sack – the Earth is large but it’s still finite.
Say, why is 8 billion better than 1 billion? Have you ever asked yourself that? It’s not for fear of extinction – we’re likely safer from that at 1 billion. If we reach 100 billion and live on algae and plankton have we somehow won? And even, if so, what then – all we did was pass the buck to that century as they stare at how to expand to 200 billion. Science and technology, especially technology has seen surely its most productive half century ever here in the last 50-60 years. We went to the moon on transistors. Solid state technology, genetic farming, on and on and yet our specie’s population growth was more than it could easily keep up with during that time span. Will every half century or century see as steep a growth in tech forever forward? It likely will in population (until it crashes) if we cannot manage ourselves.
Stick with us just a little bit longer folks – this is easy stuff and we might even have some fun ahead – and, who knows, maybe save the world while we’re at it.