Ms. Siv

Aha, now I understand your misunderstanding.
Overcrowding almost always results in starvation and diseases ... and a few more plague epedemics will ensure lots more deaths. Its already happening. The overall increase in life expectancy you see is only overall.
A majority of the Indian population is poor and illiterate. And they're the ones that have the maximum children. Starvation and diseases are already a common feature in most such areas. So, in a sense, its already happening. And its not something you can insulate yourself against. Diseases spread, often even to other countries.

Overpopulation is an obstacle to almost any reform. It has to be curbed ASAP. China was smart enough to do so, but we're still doing nothing about it.

- Sivakami.

Beelzebub

Echidna- Optimism is a great feeling and generally a good outlook. However, it can blind you. Consider, you are in a car travelling 80 miles an hour with no brakes and you're heading towards a brick wall. You will be perfectly healthy up until you hit the wall. You seem to only want to take action after you hit. No, overpopulation hasn't caused us insurmountable problems, yet. It's the "yet" thats the rub.

Polly Flinders

Rhea and Sivakami: Do you believe that nobody ever starved or died of disease back in the good old days before overpopulation? They did, by the millions, mostly newborns or children under the age of one year old. That's why the population stayed low. Today we have the technology to support a much larger population. Both of you seem to feel that population reduction would automatically solve all problems. I think that we need better technology to cure the remaining diseases and solve the remaining problems. And space travel. It intrigues me that all the environmentalists ignore that completely. A positive solution is staring you right in the face. Why not go for it?

echidna

What wall ? Show me an objective indicator that with a world population of 9 billion that there is a problem ahead. Because so far all the indicators I have, show that things aren’t just fine, they’re actually getting better.

Maybe less so for ourselves in western developed luxury, but certainly the case for the rest of the world (Africa excluded unfortunately).

We wouldn’t have climbed down from the trees for fear of the future if doomsdayers ruled.

Maybe rampant consumerism is easier to see in other people than it is in ourselves ?

[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]</p>

echidna

Again, Sivakami, India’s income and litteracy rates are also dramatically on the increase. That starvation and disease still occurs is hardly surprising since it’s been with mankind since the year dot.

Yes, maybe you can argue that rampant population growth hinders development (although there are economists who would debate that.

But that’s a far cry from saying things are in complete desperation, and we are heading for doom. Maybe we’re not headed to better times as quickly as we’d like, but I don’t see that we’re headed in the wrong direction.

The problems associated with overcrowded cities which you describe, are the product of the painful process of urbanisation. Again, historically this appears to be a necessary part of development, and something which every western nation has already been through.

The transition from a rural-based subsistence economy to an industrial urban economy is hardly going to be easy, but developing nations such as India are achieving this at impressive speed already, and without needing to threaten violence on prospective mothers.

Ms. Siv

Who's claiming that life expectancy is worse now ? In fact the problem of population explosion is influenced by the increasing life expectancy.
But increasing technology cannot support the exploding population. We dont have the infrastructure or the technology for supporting 1.5 Billion people. And given that, its stupid to not curb population .
And population explosion will definitely bring things more into control for better implementation of any reforms. Who said anything about solving all problems. It will just provide a better environment for implementing the solutions.

- Sivakami.

Ms. Siv

Given the advances in health-care and medicine, so much of starvation and diseases should not still be prevalent. The decrease of starvation and diseases is not in proportion to the advances in technology, agriculture and health-care. So whats hindering it ? Population explosion .

But why should we purposely delay progress and development when we can hasten it ?!

Impressive speed ? Have you seen our economic indicators relative to other countries ? Are we in the top 2, top 5, top 10 ?! Have you checked our poverty and literacy rates ? Where are we ? Top 2 ? Top 5 ? Top 10 ?
We're doing pathetically and its silly to try and ignore that fact.
And who is threatening violence on prospective mothers ?!!!!!

- Sivakami.

[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: Sivakami S ]</p>

Beelzebub

I'm all for technology, but I really think both easy space travel and other planets capable of sustaining life to be far in the future. Even if it happened tommorrow, I don't believe it will help our pop. problems. After all, the people we ship to new planets will want to have their own children. Also, what good evidence do you have that can predict that the pop. will stop increasing at 9 billion?

echidna

elwoodblues

"Consider, you are in a car travelling 80 miles an hour with no brakes and you're heading towards a brick wall. You will be perfectly healthy up until you hit the wall. You seem to only want to take action after you hit. No, overpopulation hasn't caused us insurmountable problems, yet. It's the "yet" thats the rub."

What's the brick wall?

Fresh water? Just a matter of energy, really. And we're working pretty hard to make solar power efficient, to make wave-power do-able, to make all sorts of energy forms cleaner, more efficient, and cheaper. Fresh water is just a matter of applied energy. We're really GOOD at that, and we're getting better.

Arable land? We're just starting to manipulate genes. One of the first things we'll start to see is tailored plants, especially food-bearing plants. How about wheat that's ten times more resistant to salt? Or corn that can grow in 20 degrees cooler climates? Or sugarcane with 250% yield? What's considered unarable today will be considered the equivalent of prime Nebraska plains tomorrow.

See, if you want to say there's a brick wall in front of us, you've got to acknowledge that we're really GOOD at moving that wall farther and farther ahead, even faster than the car we're in is travelling. Brick by brick we move it, faster and faster, with materials science, with biology, with physics.

However, the future will always be 'up'. Having all our eggs in one basket is too, too dangerous. One big rock, one bad hit of cosmic rays, one bad bug... and we're gone. We've got to get off of this rock, ASAP. And we're not going to do that by slowing down.

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: elwoodblues ]</p>