Soylent green.
Also, people are saying a lot of stupid things, and I heard it from you first.
Probably should broaden your social interactions then? Get out of your ivory academic towers and start hanging out with the commoners? Just took a poll, over on Reddit, asking what the ideal population of Earth would be.
There are whispers all throughout society, concerning the rich trying to kill us off and take all our resources. Hell, Americans all believe the reason their healthcare sucks as bad as it does, is because American billionaires want all their land and homes. Trying take all their possessions, kill them all off, and then go back to feudalism, where each billionaire gets a stretch of land to look after, and millionaires have to answer to them. Hence, why they're buying more and more land.
Bill Gates, alone, has 275,000 acres. And he keeps buying more.
The ideas are trending across multiple social networking sites.
“Get out of your ivory academic towers..”
What a fucking comment.
This is just one of the MANY polls showing up on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapBasedPolls/comments/1x63813/are_we_in_the_golden_age_of_america/
Which is indicative of late-stage capitalism. Add that with questions about what the ideal population size is, posts asking how the rich are going to kill us off, critiques about healthcare being their method of choice, why they're buying up land, and a few other talking points and you get a pretty clear picture of what's going on in peoples' heads. Why rich people purposefully act stupid in public, etc.
Your question in the post is about 4billion dead people. Since there are no 4billion living in the usa i conclude that they would be from all over earth. And then you link a poll where 517 people (or bots?) voted if the golden years of america (i assume they mean the usa) are over. How is your post and this poll related?
I mean, it's a sense among the commoners. School-aged kids, people about to exit the workforce. It's all over Reddit, Facebook, Instagram. Little questions here and there. If you haven't run into it, you're extremely isolated by something. Or, lack the ability to pick up on the most basic of social cues. Hell, I've seen it on Mastodon.
Maybe instead you should get out of Reddit, Facebook and Instagram a little. To see the real "commoners". Meet more people with blood pressure instead of tokens.
Travel around the world a little to realise how huge it is. You might realise there is no one group called "commoners". People living around you might see the world your way (maybe they should also leave Facebook and Instagram?) but that doesn't mean much.
It isn't just me, mate. I've got contacts from several states expressing the same things. Hell, some of the people I used to know from Europe are posting the same crap. And, I am a "commoner."
Get out of your ivory academic towers and start hanging out with the commoners?
I don't know if there's a right way to talk to people on the internet, but I know this isn't it.
Probably should broaden your social interactions then?
Why? When I want to see clowns, I go to the circus.
Americans all believe
No. That statement is a lie. I know exactly ONE American, and he doesn't believe that, and it's enough to disprove your statement. You didn't talk to ALL Americans, and no objective poll shows 100% support to any idea. You just tried to sell your own opinion as a common consensus.
People have a vastly different ecological footprints. Overrich people and some companies (especially oil companies) have the highest. You don't need to kill people to make the earth habitable for all humans. Instead we need to stop the rich from their greed and divide the recources better. There are enough recources on earth if they would be used wisely.
Where are we going to bury all those people when they die of natural causes?
And you would have to be pretty fucking dense to interpret someone saying, "the ideal human population level is 4 billion" to mean "let's kill people until we get down to that number."
I don't know how many people we should have, but there are some metrics we could look at and maybe say beyond a certain point managing these metrics becomes harder as we scale, or even impossible.
If we had kept our population low enough, we could have subsisted on a timber and whale blubber energy policy indefinitely. :P
edit: It's always a controversial opinion to say there are too many people, but there probably are, at least the way we are behaving in this world. Many of the problems we are fighting are symptoms of us trying to scale upwards as hard as we can so we can collectively use our credit cards and hand the debt off to multiple kids. It's a bad practice.
edit: TIMBER and whale blubber energy policy, fixed typo
It is not just the number of people? People in the west, especially USAmerica are using and wasting more resources than people in the global south, right?
Yea, but you couldn't implement my system in our current world anyway. Plus I don't know what the "number" is that keeps the metrics from needing to be regulated. Not even sure what all the metrics are.
The next planet we colonize though, we need to curb that shit. Don't breed past the level where people have to stop eating Grass Fed Beef because there won't be enough for everyone due to lack of pasture, for example. We'll call this the GFB metric. past this limit, only the rich eat grass fed beef, and the poor don't. screw that. our current world and mixed lifestyles are a result of many of these kinds of metrics being passed by.
The sea.
pretty good, returned as fertilizers for the higher latitudes, humans should limit habitat to only up to the subtropical areas. Give back space to nature. Unfeasible, but not a bad idea.
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