The earth is finite...

I think we are losing track of very fundamental, basic understandings of life. Much of it is being buried and confused by our ignorance and excitement over lies fed to us as truth and logical conclusions (not so logical).

The world is not as it seems. I think we all can agree on this.

peace

 

I've never done LSD and I know this, lol.

 

This viewpoint is far too simple for the current situation on earth. I do agree on your first three points:

1) Clean food and water
2) A clean warm place to live with toilet facilites.
3) Someone to hold and talk to. (Ie: Love)

BUT at this point in time we need larger overarching structure to insure these things. This isn't the day of Native Americans anymore where all humans could just build a teepee and spend all their waking hours struggling to get enough food to live.

Think about this for a moment.

The surface area of the land on earth is roughly 149 million km^2

If we were to estimate that each individual human needed a 20m x 20m area of space in order to live. Well we divide 149 million km by 20m to get 7,450,000,000. Which is 7.4 billion, there are 7.4 billion 20m x 20m square spaces on the entire earth, that means the earth could theoretically support 7.4 billion people if we were all equally spread out on the earth's surface and all of the earths surface was inhabitable. Which all the earths surface is not inhabitable, a significant percentage is not inhabitable, so estimating the earth can support 7.4 billion by this calculation is a RADICAL overestimate. But anyways.

Right now the earths population is 6.8 billion and growing.

Think about that, we have 6.8 billion people, and a RADICAL overestimate of the amount of people who can fit on the earths surface is 7.4 billion

We are already at the point in time when there are so many people on earth that we have to pack ourselves into cities in order to not completely overtrake the entire earth's surface. If we all lived like Native Americans with a little rural farm patch, and a stick or mud hut, I mean absolutely literally the entire earths surface would be covered with mud huts. You could not walk 100 m any direction without encountering another little mud hut. Not to mention with this many people being a hunter or gatherer is absolutely impossible, with the amount of people on earth right now, we can only produce enough food through advanced agricultural means.

This viewpoint of all we need is a simple dwelling, a food source and a companion is not adequate for humanity at this point in time.

We need skyscrapers, we need to be able to pack 500 residents on a 100m x 100m square. In order to do this we need cities, we need city planners, we need engineers, architects, we need people studying and advancing technology, we need the monetary system to support this. We need some central entity to enforce and maintain this structure and it's consistency so we don't have one skyscraper falling into another skyscraper.

Then not to mention being able to get clean water and food with this many people would be impossible without a greater overarching infrastructure.

The updated list of human needs at this point of time is:

1) Clean food and water
2) A clean warm place to live with toilet facilites.
3) Someone to hold and talk to. (Ie: Love)
4) Greater organizational scheme that ensures consistency of technological advancement so that everyone can get their base needs.

If we don't have #4 we don't have any means to grow, earth would already be at capacity without #4. We would need to call it quits on reproduction.

So this leaves us with 3 options.

1) Get everyone to stop fucking and making babies.
2) Start a mass war to kill 4 billion people
3) Get technology in order so the earth can safely support more people, and ideally get us into space so we can start offloading people from earth into space

So I imagine you can guess that option #1 is an absolute impossibility. Option #2 is what the governments would probably most like to do.

So if going the route of absolute impossibility is not good for you, or going the route of mass war is not good for you. The only option we have is to continue to roll technological advancement and the development of cities and political structures.


I see there being two groups of cranky old men in this world

Group 1
Those who live in the world of 50 years ago, fantasizing about how everything is really the same as it was 50, or even 200 years ago. And all we need to do is pay attention to how things once WERE in order to understand the exact current situation right now. They live in this sort of delusional fantasy of once was because they no longer have enough cognitive capacity to fully learn and encapsulate their brain around what is really occurring this exact moment. And since they can't fully understand the full scope of why we can't live in 'once was', they feel like all of humanity is being victimized because we aren't maintaining a perpetual state of 'once was'.

I SUSPECT VOICE OF TRUTH IS PART OF THIS GROUP​

Group 2
People who are actually paying attention to everything that is happening and all the variables that go into this current situation. That realize the current generation is going to have to deal with and solve an even more difficult problem than the last generation faced, and that aside from mass death or stopping reproduction, focusing everything to technological advancement is the only option.

 

To survive long into the future population as a whole needs to decrease.
I really don't see us in the star trek age with 6 billion people as a population. Equipment designed to push us into this age would be too expensive of a project for our current population.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if we use up our resources beforehand and we can't even design and build these machines that'll help us build other worlds.

 

good post rygoody

the biological drive of any species is to reproduce - to pass its DNA along to the next generation. so to do this indefinitely by escaping the planet IS our ultimate goal as a biological species. squirrels and giraffes would want to do this too if they were smart enough to think about it. i'm not saying we are the best or most important species in the universe or in the world, but we probably are the smartest on earth..even though we do a lot of stupid shit.

of course there are monetary issues since we have major problems on earth, so i can sympathize when someone mentions that.

so maybe it's fair to say that we probably have a few million years before the planet goes bust, so maybe we should fix stuff on earth for the next couple hundred years, and then after technology has increased exponentially for all that time, then we can focus on getting off this planet.

really interesting thread to read