"The Big Problem"

for our english class, we had to write a personal response to the question, "what is the american dream?" and while i was doing some research on this topic i found some other quite interesting articles.

The biggest crisis facing the planet today is so big and so surrounded by delicate issues that most people will not face it. Simply put there are at least 200,000 more people alive today than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be at least another 200,000 more... ...These are net figures, I am not talking about births I am talking about the average daily surplus of births over deaths. To put it into perspective there are more extra people alive each new day than died in both atomic bomb attacks on Japan...

If everybody you know, everybody you could identify by name or face died today the world population would still go up. Nobody knows 200,000 people.

Imagine the world’s population decides to walk past your window, a column of people marching three abreast, for ever, you would never see the end of the columns, the queue waiting to pass you would never get shorter. Hitler couldn’t feed the gas chambers fast enough, the world population is currently growing at around 79,000,000 per year, the equivilent of a country the size of Germany, EXTRA, each year. That is the problem. If your head and stomach are not reeling at the thoughts then you do not understand the problem.

20,000 people died in an earthquake in India, the losses were made up before the West heard the news. People lose their faith in God over much smaller numbers of deaths. 98 die in a football stadium and a city mourns for years, 0.03% of the daily increase. There can be more than 98 extra people born while you butter your toast. It would not have even caused a blip in the hourly trend. A jumbo jet load every three minutes, a jumbo jet load EXTRA. Remember, I am not [t]alking about births happening more than one per second, I am talking about the average surplus of births over deaths.

Every hour, on the hour, the message should go out;

'The top news story yet again today is that, despite all the calamities I am about to describe to you, the population has gone up again...'

Saving a starving child today means having more children in thirty years time trying to live off the same or eroded resources. Saying that makes me seem like a heartless bastard. In many public meetings if I said that from the platform I would be shouted down, and maybe beaten up too. But I am not wrong, call me whatever you want, I am telling it like it is. There is a classic charity tag line that goes something like give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you help feed him for a lifetime. This is incredibly patronizing, as if starving people are surrounded by food they are too stupid to catch. The reality is that if you teach that man how to fish in two generations time there will be a lot more starving people in that same village and no fish. That is human nature. Man will breed and eat all the food available.

[!!!???]The world will pass the seven billion total some time between 2011 and 2015 CE. The idea that AIDS will check this growth is fanciful, there are around seven month's worth of people with HIV infection at present [/!!!???]. [<-- can you believe this guy...]

The population problem is the biggest problem in the world today.

It is the biggest problem because it makes every other problem worse and harder to solve. It will not be solved by ignoring it. There can be no technological fix that can provide ever growing resources for a population to grow at geometric rates. It cannot be solved by conventional democratic politics. Something radical must be done to get the world to wake up and face reality.

the problem of overpopulation. these portions of the article stuck out in my mind the most. this guy is harsh, but the scariest thing is that hes completely right. and guess what he suggests as the answer?

If we do not want to face mass starvation on a scale never before seen or have a war that will be in every sense the third world war, we have to stop the population from growing the way it is. Madly. Uncontrolled and in all the wrong places. The only fair way is two’s your lot. A universal limit of two children per woman, or two children per person if you prefer. It must be universal, no exceptions, especially on religious grounds. It is the Muslim and Catholic communities who are the most dangerous because they believe they have a duty to breed. Let one woman be an exception and she breeds more exceptions.

....sounds familiar huh (almost?)