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[Tellemurius]

Gods. Damned. Contraception.

Not having more than two children to a couple, with possibly incentives for those that just have one.

Not breeding like idiots doesn't take culling. It takes two brain cells to rub together and maybe, just maybe, overpower yer g'damn reproductive organs long enough to not screw over your species.

That would be th'ruddy start. If we can at least try to slow down the problem long enough to figure out how to get more of us to actually think beyond the immediate generation and stop screwing us all over, we'd be a lot more likely to not hit a critical mass situation where there's no damn thing we can do. Science might push the deadline back further, but it'd take a g'damn miracle to actually allow the infinite growth, infinite consumption paradigm our species is trying to run itself on to not end in tragedy.

I honestly don't think it'll happen, but at least trying, here and there, in little bits, to help work toward something more functional, is part of what keeps me going from day to day.

you got too many forces against that especially my religion the catholics. Now first thing i was taught at my youth was family management, they want you to make kids but not to make them suffer, reason why they do participate in some contraception programs but without some resentment. It still comes back to choice.

[Frumple]

... which turns it back around to racial death by stupidity. Or, if you'd prefer, suicidal shortsightedness. Being fair, I wouldn't except longterm thinking to be promoted by an eschatological (apocalypse-centered) theology, but that doesn't change the fact that that's going to get our species killed if something else doesn't beat the unsustainable systems to it.

Hell, I'm not saying force people to do it, I'm saying find a way to get folks to do so willingly. If religious and/or cultural upbringing is blinding people to the repercussions of their actions, well, that's something we've got to find a way to work around. I also am saying that they're probably not bloody going to, and it's going to kill us. Probably not in my lifetime, no, but in a very, very short period as history and (even more so) geology measures things.

I'll share the dirty secret. I'd like to see our species last more than a day on the metaphorical geological calender. From what I remember, we haven't even hit a minute, yet.

[Tellemurius]

200,000 years for us compared to 4.5 billion just for earth

[Criptfeind]

There will be issues. There will be starvation. There will be a lot of shit.

To none of that will overpopulation be anything but a aggravating factor.

Not to mention your crys of doom of the human race are very very unrealistic.

[G-Flex]

you got too many forces against that especially my religion the catholics. Now first thing i was taught at my youth was family management, they want you to make kids but not to make them suffer, reason why they do participate in some contraception programs but without some resentment. It still comes back to choice.

The catholic church is okay with contraception? Since when? The only thing I can think of is their "natural family planning" or "rhythm method" or whatever they're calling it these days, and they don't even consider that contraception (for some reason).

[Criptfeind]

Modern Catholics are okay with it, like they are will pretty much everything. Obviously more traditional ones are not.

No idea which is more prevalent.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

My Senior class' slogan this year was "The World Ends With Us" and we used the Mayan calendar as a logo. I even have a t-shirt with that and all 500 of the class' names listed on it.


Also, some of you are misunderstanding how population growth works yet again. Overpopulation, as Criptfiend said, is not a thing that modernized countries have to worry about. Indeed, it is not something anyone outside of Africa has to worry about because the only countries that could realistically overshoot their carrying capacity, or already have, are in Africa.

Cultural attitudes towards families naturally shift from wanting large numbers of children to wanting small numbers of children or even to not wanting children at all as nations shift from agrarian to industrialized economies. This is well documented, and may well be an inevitable consequence of industrialization. Nutjob movements like Quiverfull are more of a drop in the ocean than an actual threat to societal views on numbers of children.

The number of living humans is not going to reach 20 billion any time soon. We would have to have large and established off-world societies for that to be even remotely possible. 10 billion at global ZPG (zero population growth) is the moderate estimate, 12 billion is the liberal estimate, 8 billion the conservative estimate. This is of course ruling out any multibillion strong human die-offs in the next 50 years, but that's not very likely.

Populations naturally even out. Freaking out about it and trying to mess with it through extreme policies doesn't solve anything. China tried that with the One-Child Policy. India tried to a lesser degree with their disaster of a sterilization campaign. Now there are 100 million fewer women in Asia than there actually should be and the region's population pyramid has gone lopsided. That's not going to make the population even out any quicker, and if anything it will increase the time it takes by making the region unstable. Marriage is very culturally important in India and China, but now there is literally a shortage of available women. Nothing good can come of that setup.

TL;DR: We're going to be fine, so calm down already.

Modern Catholics are okay with it, like they are will pretty much everything. Obviously more traditional ones are not.

No idea which is more prevalent.

There was that thing the Pope did where he told everyone that condoms cause HIV. He's taken a less....insane stance about condoms in the past two years, but he's still the Pope either way.

[G-Flex]

Modern Catholics are okay with it, like they are will pretty much everything. Obviously more traditional ones are not.

No idea which is more prevalent.

It doesn't matter which is more prevalent because that's not how catholicism operates. The entire basis of the Catholic Church is that there is an overarching authority that, in many ways, you must obey. You really don't get another option with them. If you're a Catholic who thinks that using condoms or the pill is okay, then you're essentially a heretic at odds with the church itself, in addition to the sin you're (supposedly) already committing.

I agree that a lot of Catholics, especially modern Catholics, have very lax ideas about Church doctrine, but there's a huge element of doublethink involved for the aforementioned reasons: They disagree with the Church, but on things the Church explicitly does not allow you to disagree on. At all. Disagreeing with that sort of dogma is tantamount to disagreeing with God himself, and those people effectively are not Catholic except through group affiliation.

[scriver]

Really? Thats the main one?

"Main" as in easiest to see.

[kaijyuu]

re: overpopulation


My understanding is we're overpopulated already, at least if we want everyone to have the wealth of western societies. It's not food... it's energy consumption. Yeah yeah, there's plenty of room for improvement in efficiency and switching to renewable resources, but if we're talking about today and not 50 years from now, we don't have enough energy to go around.

[Il Palazzo]

I rarely look at news any more, just makes me depressed.
I play more video games instead.

Yaay for video games!
Wait.. when are electrical devices going to temporarily screw up for a few days/weeks? 

They might not ever. Solar flares may disrupt electronics in orbit, but on the ground we have a magnetic field, the ENTIRE ATMOSPHERE, and the built in protection found in many electronic devices.

The next solar maximum is supposed to be one of the weakest on record, but even if it wasn't there's not guarantee that anything on the ground would be affected.

I've already said the next solar maximus was going to be one of the weakest yet >_>

Probably lost somewhere in this mess. Anyways, they're both unrelated, mostly. Btw, Earth's magnetic field protects us from a lot of cosmic radiation, the atmosphere does absolutely nothing except get polluted nowadays and HONESTLY, what protection are you talking about?

Actually, the atmosphere in combination with the magnetic field protects against most wavelengths of light. That's a big reason for telescopes in space; they can detect things like X-rays that simply can't penetrate to the ground. Plus of course the space rubble that would hit the ground if it didn't burn up first.

Yes, particles from the sun are different, but a several-mile-thick layer of mass provides better protection than nothing at all.

I was under the impression that many devices were capable of resisting some amount of damage. Maybe it's just plugged-in things.

The overarching message that I can see here, which appears to be: "solar weather can't affect us because atmosphere & magnetic field, dawg" is simply not correct. It can, and had in the past, fry the electric grid, among other effects.
http://solar.physics.montana.edu/press/WashPost/Horizon/196l-031099-idx.html
http://www.solarstorms.org/Sblackout.html

I'm far from subscribing to the apocalyptic movement, but complete denial of the effects of the space weather on land-based infrastructure is not the right way of educating people in rational discussion.

[Jelle]

So that mayan calender ends at 2012. I'd be more dumbfounded if, somehow, the mayan calender never ended.

The specific date may have some meaning, or may not. I've not heard of any convcing arguments that prooves without doubt that it does hold a meaning.
Still given the lack of evidence (I know of) I'll not make any asumptions and wait and see.

If you have to do something though you might as well mock those who think the world will end. Either you're right and you can rub it in their face, or you're wrong but none will live to point it out. 

[MrWiggles]

The mayan calendar doesn't probably end in 2012. There no real way to convert the mayan calendar to modern sense of time, or the gorgorian calendar. It ends, that defiantly known. 

[Jelle]

Shoot, then what is all this fuss about then? I admit to never really reading into this stuff, but I was positive everyone was convinced of the end of the world because of the mayan calender or some such.

[MrWiggles]

Shoot, then what is all this fuss about then? I admit to never really reading into this stuff, but I was positive everyone was convinced of the end of the world because of the mayan calender or some such.

An acid trip during the 70s, plus it being popularized over the years, is what causing all the fuss.

God damn, I hate the 70s. I think that's my least favorite decade. So much inane, false information, stupidity can trace its modern resurgence to it. Pyramid power? 70s. Crystals Power? 70s. Bigfoot? 70s. Ghosts? 70s. Atlantis? 70s. Roswell? 70s. Psychics? 70s. New Ageism? 70s. Faith Healing? 70s. UFOs? 70s.  Dowsing? 70s.

And a lot of these things, existed earlier to the 70s, but their modern resurgence, is from the 70s.