DescentBB

It was suggested by a leading expert in the UK that to reduce the UK's Eco-impact and Carbon foot print, the population should be reduced by 50%.

As it is, and isn't mentioned in the article, Britain is already experiancing a population fall off. Not does this guy take into account what reducing Britain to 30 million would do to their economy .. and everyone else's. Britain was near 30 million around the year 1850 ...when their pollution was at it's worst. lol.

brilliant.

No, I'm not saying that would happen again. technology has changed. (duh) It's just an instesting factoid.

Oh, article HERE

(almost forgot) There are a number of other posting of this topic; a couple that take a practicle look at the idea.

Negative Population Growth is a membership organization in the United States, founded in 1972. NPG believes the optimal population for the United States is 150 to 200 million and that the optimal world population is two to three billion. Negative Population Growth, who advocate various actions by the US Government and individual citizens to eventually reverse the country's population growth. When discussing the controversial idea of population control, one must consider the effects of overpopulation on our economy, resources, and environment. They also want federal and local governments to institute aggressive family planning education.

Source
http://www.npg.org/winningessays.html

Well I woke up this morning
On the wrong side of the bed
And how I got to thinkin'
About all those things you said
About ordinary people
And how they make you sick
And if callin' names kicks back on you
Then I hope this does the trick

'Cause I'm a sick of your complainin'
About how many bills
And I'm sick of all your bitchin'
Bout your poodles and your pills
And I just can't see no humour
About your way of life
And I think I can do more for you
With this here fork and knife

[Chorus:]
Eat the Rich: there's only one thing they're good for
Eat the Rich: take one bite now - come back for more
Eat the Rich: I gotta get this off my chest
Eat the Rich: take one bite now, spit out the rest

-Aerosmith

The good and wise Prof. Erlichman wrote a book called the Population Bomb and by his predictions \"in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death\", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation.\"
Never happened.

What may be scary is a Tom Clancy scenario where a group of nut cakes devise a pathogen to kill off 90% of the worlds population, comes to life.

woodchip wrote:...
What may be scary is a Tom Clancy scenario where a group of nut cakes devise a pathogen to kill off 90% of the worlds population, comes to life.

Hugo Drax tried that already but Dr. Holly Goodhead and some guy named Bond, James Bond, stopped him...

Clancy is more believable

Why the hell would someone give so many toys to a Brittish person?

You've seen Sean of the Dead, it took 5 Brittish people to operate a rifle.

SilverFJ wrote:Why the hell would someone give so many toys to a Brittish person?

You've seen Sean of the Dead, it took 5 Brittish people to operate a rifle.

(also, it's Shaun of the Dead)

I have always had mixed issues on this - I don't want the government to put restrictions, but on the other hand, I dislike how fast the population of everywhere has grown. This is why I think space colonization would be an extremely wonderful thing (then again, I'm nuts about space, an ocean-nut might prefer to have underwater cities or something)...

Dakatsu wrote:I dislike how fast the population of everywhere has grown.

The population of "everywhere" hasn't grown that fast. Some places are growing fast because they're going through a particular development phase that should be over in 20-50 years; other places already went through it and stabilized or have slightly declined.

The overpopulation nuts want you to think population will just keep growing, out of control, until we destroy the planet with too many humans. Suffice it to say, they don't understand the math or the biology they're talking about.

In nature, the only time you have a population actually grow totally out of control is if it does it in a single breeding season -- like the deer near the grand canyon a season after the wolf population got ganked. The deer basically tripled in population, destroyed their own food sources, and then died off in droves. If you stay away from that sort of scenario, the worst you get are minor population declines; populations tend to settle within a few percent of the "carrying capacity" of the environment within 3-4 generations. You can see it locally with humans too; the only reason Earth's population keeps rising is that carrying capacity in much of the third world has come up to near-first-world levels.

This is why I think space colonization would be an extremely wonderful thing

Burning millions of pounds of fossil fuels to put a single person into space is a GREAT way to solve pollution and large carbon footprints

.... hydrogen is a \"fossil fuel\"?

Nope. Neither is ammonium perchlorate composite, solid rocket fuel. The byproducts of burning it are toxic.

The question is, what is the supportable population of the Earth with it's limited resources? With limited resources, that population number changes up or down depending on what level of lifestyle everybody on the planet wants. That's the rub.

tunnelcat wrote:Nope. Neither is ammonium perchlorate composite, solid rocket fuel.

I still think in terms of the Saturn V, which burned about 5 million pounds of a kerosene variant in its first stage.

Even though we've moved away from that, remember the HTPB or PBAN components (the "fuel" part of APCP) eventually trace back to fossil fuel. And even with hydrogen, you have to expend a lot of energy to make the stuff -- which often traces back to fossil fuels.

So my overall point still stands, though the rather glib statement of it is problematic. You don't reduce pollution or carbon footprints by sending people to space.

The question is, what is the supportable population of the Earth with it's limited resources?

When I first studied this stuff I made a rough estimate of 8-12 billion as the initial steady state the earth's population would reach; increased standards of living may reduce carrying capacity over time. US and UN "experts" have since given similar estimates.

I’m sure this planet can sustain huge amounts of people…until something goes wrong, like the depletion of resources, or economic collapse…that’s when the big cull begins.

Call me a nut if you want.

We have seen it time and time again on a smaller scale, it’s only a matter of time before it happens on a global scale.