Forum: Story Recommendations

Oceania is even better.

Thanks.

Ageing rock stars eg the Strolling Bones, are proving to be prolific breeders well into their dotages.

AJ

With frozen eggs/embryos and womb transplants there's no reason why women couldn't give birth well beyond the traditional menopause.

The question is, with an overpopulated planet and so many children compared to so few potential adopters, how can such scientific advances be considered ethical?

AJ

how can such scientific advances be considered ethical?

In the story (getting back to the story), the unethical scientists were covertly sterilizing the males and making babies in the lab from DNA.

The question is, with an overpopulated planet and so many children compared to so few potential adopters, how can such scientific advances be considered ethical?

Knowing what we know now, I wouldn't call earth over populated. Each person born bring more abundance to the planet. The world is way more abundant now than what it was in the 80s for example.

Check out this site for more info. https://www.humanprogress.org/

The population expansion in the world is slowing down considerably. By 2040 (2050 on the outside) the whole world's population will start shrinking. China cancelled its one child policy and now trying to figure out how to get women to have more kids so that they don't have to import people.

In the near future the biggest problem is going to be population collapse. A lot of the world works on the premise of ever more people. The west is already in turmoil because of low birth rates (below replacements) and are doing their best to import people to prop up their populations.

So you bet that these advances are ethical. The world is going to need them desperately soon. Great advances in artificial wombs are now being achieved and soon we'll have to deal with the ethical question of creating more people in artificial wombs and having to manage to raise them.

The pessimists get heard more because people seem to believe them more than optimists, but so far it's optimists who've been right. The release of the book 'The population bomb' in the 60s triggered a lot of bad policies (like sterilizing people and the one child policy of china) among many things and if you observe the world today, it's way way better than 50 years ago. Extreme poverty has almost been eliminated from the whole planet. Only 8% of people are living at that level now despite the world having more than doubled in populations since the 60s when 40% of people lived in extreme poverty.

Charles Koch needs to invest more money in his website because it takes an eternity to load.

As befits a right-wing propaganda site, it's long on rhetoric but short on facts. Its stock answer is that no problems matter because human ingenuity will sort them out, ignoring the fact that it would only take one extinction-level event to wipe out the human race.

Here in the 'other west', we're being flooded by unwanted migrants, we're concreting over our countryside and arable land for housing, we're being 'encouraged' to limit our energy and water usage, and we're urged to go veggie because of the environmental cost of red meat animals.

Even the outbreaks of gang violence seems related to population density. There's a reason why the happiest places to live have low population densities - New Zealand and Canada regularly appear at the top of the leaderboard.

AJ

You're talking about economics.

Not just economics. Who's going to take care of all those old people? In the west currently (including the US and Canada) birth rates are at below replacement level. In Canada it's 1.6 and dropping. If Canada doesn't import people (via migration) then the population will be declining as of now.

Thanks to modern technology and medicine, people live longer than ever and the kicker is, that while they live longer than ever, they never live and die like before, now it's a very protracted and prolonged decline that uses many many resources. Why did old governments set the retirement age at 65? Because few people lived that long 50 years ago.

By the time my kids are established adults in about 30 years, people over 65 will be the majority. There won't be enough people to take care of the elderly. We're going to definitely need robots.

Everyone else here is talking about the planet- which has finite resources.

Traditional economics relies on growth, growth that increases year after year. In nature the only things that do that are cancers, plagues, and pandemics. All things that result in a catastrophic collapse.

I love nihilistic and pessimistic people.

I'm not aware of a single thing yet that we had to stop doing because we ran out of something on earth (except helium) and we couldn't find an alternative (resource or method). For every thing the market manages to find a solution. Market economics provide the incentives and human ingenuity finds the way. When something becomes scarce enough, its price rises enough to give people enough incentive to find an alternative resource or way to do things.

Nihilists don't think in this way. They think that (for example) we're running out of copper. Humans will extract every last copper ounce from earth and sell it at $1 per kilo like a long time ago, and when we can't find anymore, we'll just throw our hands in the airs and sigh and say 'We're done, no more copper' and give up.

It doesn't work that way.

Copper is getting rarer. Its price is going up quite a bit, people are conserving it for the most important things and starting to find and reuse what we've used and discarded; and many of the things we used copper for previously we're now using other material after we've done our research.

When China blocked the export of rare earths in 2011 their price spiked high enough that people went really looking somewhere else and found it. Japan found enough rare earths at the bottom of the ocean to last over 800 years at current consumption levels.

Materials that don't evaporate into space like helium remain on earth and when there is enough need, people find a way to reuse whatever was consumed.

Did you know that today humans plant 10% less land than in the 60s despite the population expansion?

Do you know what the solution to global warming will eventually be? It's the opposite of what you think. It's more grazing animals. You can laugh. Go ahead, I know you will, but it's true.

Grazing animals in large herds help sequester a lot of carbon in the soil as grass roots. Look it up. You know what, I know you won't look it up. I've done it for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Watch the video.

@awnlee jawking

Do you really think that western governments would have a problem keeping unwanted migrants out if they didn't want them? They really really want those migrants and they only talk against it to save face with the portion of the population that is against it.

By the time my kids are established adults in about 30 years, people over 65 will be the majority.

Which will break social security.

And in order for grass to grow & absorb carbon, it needs water, and the right temperature. Higher temperatures above it's ideal zone, and it becomes stressed & it grows less. No water, it doesn't grow at all.

And the ability of grasses to absorb carbon are much less than that of trees.

I haven't seen the areas that he shows in his videos but I've seen where I grew up. While growing up, it was a known fact that you want to keep the animals from over-grazing and that under grazed lands quickly lost its vegetation and was left with nothing but cactuses. So people got sheep herds to graze their unplanted lands.

So my own personal experience with what he's talking about makes me believe him.

Can you point me to the articles that disproves his theory? I would like to read them if you can.

Can you point me to the articles that disproves his theory?

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2017-2-march-april/feature/allan-savory-says-more-cows-land-will-reverse-climate-change

The fact is grazing itself isn't the issue- Intense rotational grazing has been done successfully for years.

I read it. The article is a very lopsided opinion piece with no science and no proof of any kind.

Do you really think that western governments would have a problem keeping unwanted migrants out if they didn't want them?

Yes. We have the English Channel, which is better than your putative wall, but the population is still increasing between 250,000 and 500,000 a year, depending on which source you believe.

Unlimited immigration has been shown to benefit most countries except those with most developed economies (top 10% or so). For those it's a drag.

We had an economically illiterate left-wing government which encouraged unlimited immigration in the hope that immigrant tax receipts would fund a golden era of public services. The actual result was that their net welfare costs etc marginally outweighed tax receipts, and a large outflow of money the immigrants sent home to India, Pakistan, Poland, Romania etc was subsequently lost to the economy.

Together with the bank-created recession, public services and infrastructure are pretty much in a state of collapse, very far from a golden era :(

AJ

You're right - I got carried away.

Thanks for the reality check.

AJ

Unlimited immigration has been shown to benefit most countries except those with most developed economies (top 10% or so). For those it's a drag.

Unlimited immigration only benefits countries with a small or no social umbrella. Developed economies tend to have extensive social umbrellas for their citizens because they can afford it usually at the time of the creation of the umbrella.

Any country, big or small, that extends full, unlimited welfare to newly arrived low-skill immigrants, is asking for trouble if it has open borders.

Any country that doesn't want a flood of unproductive immigrants can simply instate rules that doesn't allow welfare to unauthorized immigrants. Any hungry invaders can be rounded up and give the choice between strict food allowance or going back to their countries. That cuts off any flood of unwanted immigrants. You don't have to repel them at the borders, just don't offer them free food and shelter. Those who work and become useful and productive will come and stay; and those who are looking for a free lunch like the majority of economic migrants flooding the west will stay put in their countries because the trek isn't easy.

Once a country has a welfare system, it can't allow unfettered access to its land to all comers. People go where they can survive the easiest.

Any country that doesn't want a flood of unproductive immigrants can simply instate rules that doesn't allow welfare to unauthorized immigrants. Any hungry invaders can be rounded up and give the choice between strict food allowance or going back to their countries.

We signed up to European Human Rights Laws. While good as an academic concept, implementing them in a way that's fair to everyone is problematical :(

AJ

Nothing can ever be fair to 'everyone'. There is always a winner and a loser.