Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
Curious, by what metrics was this supported? I think it's really hard to say what number of people the Earth can support, and there is evidence that we may be approaching that limit already. The rapid growth of the human species occurred in a very short time window. It took 2 million years to get a global population of 1 billion humans, and only 200 years for that to go from 1 billion to 8 billion. Another way to look at it is, there are estimated to have been 100 billion humans to have ever existed, and nearly 10% of all the humans that have ever lived are alive today. I'm a millennial and roughly 3-4% of all humans that have ever lived, over the 2 million year history of humans, were born after me.
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It was so long ago, so I don't remember really..It was from an environmental book and highlighted by our instructor. I mean, it could only be a hypothesis that she quoted, but it was genuine and taken from a hardcover science book.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chris08876
Get rid of the economic system. That's the only way. There is food, and physical resources on this finite planet. But we really aren't using the planet to its full potential and we base our everyday lives and functions on this false fabrication called a bartering/economic system. And we limit our species potential by this inherent limitation called money/financing when the only real limit to our potential is the ability for people to work and the processing power of their brains. But we have to tag a piece of compensation to the equation and further have this culture of materialism and barter and self-individuality fueled by selfishness to limit humans.
The Earth can support many more people, but would be increasingly strained if everyone for example lived the life of say the average American family.
Now, if we resume the current model, its fine and dandy for a certain % of the global population, but the rest, will suffer. Its up to the world to decide if it will accept this. Really, collectively, for the greater good of Earth and all its inhabitants... countries and this idea of country individuality will have to go away. There are no countries... there is just Earth, its resources, and its organisms.
This idea of countries is also yet another limitation towards the species, and causes suffering when we factor in the total population.
One can only wonder how far the species would become if we didn't set self restrictions on ourselves.
We still very much operate like a group of apes on the macro scale. The tribal mentality.
But that's why Earth also has checks and balances. Earth is very good at annihilating redundancies and punishing errors. Disturb the natural patterns of weather and temperature... sure... but Earth will wipe out a few million via the climate or via some drought or famine. Nature is not to be messed with. Pathogens, yet another check and balance.
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I agree with this whole heartily.. I can only imagine a utopian world supporting many more people to draw talent from, and where we cleaned up our act on every level and got rid of our borders and agreed on a global system that worked to benefit everyone..You are correct though..We, by nature, operate tribally and not en masse, so my vision would never work. We aren't bees.