09-18-2009, 10:58 PM
Quote:No, I regard mass starvation as an inherent evil. My ideal population for this planet is somewhere around 100 million - but if we had to get there by starving 6.4 billion, I'd say, to quote Ms. Palin, "thanks but no thanks."
There is good reason to suppose that the population of the earth will more or less stabilize in the next few decades thanks to demographic and social change.
-Jester
The problem with debating Malthus is you're debating a moot point. Even assuming the food supply to be infinite (which it's not, regardless of technological advances), the human population is around two full orders of magnitude greater than what the Earth has resources to support, at the least. Natural resources are by definition finite. Pretty soon, perhaps even before any of us die of old age, we're going to hit a point where we need to dig/drill/cut some raw material or other, and there won't be anything there to harvest.
That's not even to mention the fact that humans generate more pollution in any given year than nature can come close to compensating for.
Wiping out the vast majority of the population by whatever means may not be a very palatable option, but in the long term it's the only effective one.