More than 6.7 billion humans inhabit planet Earth and if the population of the world continues to increase at its current rate the population of the world will exceed 13 billion in just 50 years time.
It does not take a genius to realise therefore that a point will soon be reached when the Earth will no longer have the resources or capacity to support this bourgeoning human populace.
Many in the Third World already lead sad lives of grinding poverty and borderline starvation and unless someone can devise new and miraculously more efficient methods of food production, the lives of large numbers in the Third World will become unsustainable and many millions will begin dying of malnutrition and other associated diseases.
Similarly, the natural resources of the world are becoming depleted and as they become ever more scarce, they will become increasingly expensive and eventually beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy people. Shortages of raw materials will prevent the standard of living of people living in the Third World from rising to match that currently enjoyed by the people of the Western nations, and the living standards of those in the West will diminish as the raw materials they need become increasingly scarce and expensive.
It is a bleak picture that I have painted of the future and you might ask, what can be done to alleviate the suffering of present day humanity and what can be done to prevent the demographic disaster that approaches us inexorably.
As we send food aid and medicine to alleviate the suffering of the poorest parts of the Third World, we find that the populations in those areas simply swell as more people survive and produce even more children, thereby aggravating the problem and accelerating the approach of impending disaster. The provision of food and medical aid to the Third world is therefore not a solution to the problems of mankind and is in fact counter-productive, merely exacerbating our problems.
Similarly, as we provide development aid for the developing parts of the Third World and they begin to industrialise, we find that they begin to consume increasing quantities of fossil fuels and raw materials, increasing pollution and further depleting the world’s finite resources more quickly than ever before. What is more, such increasing consumption of finite resources is in competition with our own established needs and this drives up commodity prices making us in the West poorer and increasingly less able to afford to provide further aid in future. The provision of development aid is therefore not a solution either, and is again clearly counter-productive.
The scale of the dilemma facing the people of the world is immense and one only has to read documents such as the ‘Living Planet Report’ by the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network to gauge the scale of the problem. More information on related issues can be obtained from www.footprintnetwork.org . Suffice to say however that some sources predict that it is too late to avert the impending ecological disaster that I have alluded to. Many believe that whatever we do, the population of the world will be double the capacity that our planet is able to properly sustain by 2050.
If we are to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe engulfing all mankind, we must at least halt the population growth that is taking place and if possible reverse it, and we must concentrate our planets limited resources upon solving the two technical problems that are the current constraints upon human expansion and advancement.
- The first technical problem is that of how to generate sufficient quantities of renewable energy from the world’s finite resources, such that current Western living standards can at least be maintained; and
- The second is how to make space travel a realistic proposition, such that our surplus populations can travel to other habitable planets, thereby relieving the pressure on resources, extending our range and the scope of human endeavour.
The dilemma that we face comes from the realisation that in order to ultimately reduce human suffering and to place our existence on a permanently sustainable footing, it will be necessary to harden our hearts somewhat and allow some human suffering to take its natural course.
Until the 19th and 20th Centuries, the population of the world could be broadly divided into two groups; the developed Western nations who were responsible for the overwhelming majority of all technological innovation; and the Third World, the expansion of whose populations was kept in check by Mother Nature. The Western nations composed c. 25% of the world’s population and had more than enough by way of resources to enable them to continue expanding and driving forward our technology and the frontiers to our knowledge and had this status quo remained, humanity would probably not now be in the predicament that we are.
History shows however that humanitarians of all sorts, consumed by the notion of a single human destiny, and obsessed by the misguided desire to assert universal human equality, began to argue for the provision of Western education, and the distribution of food aid, medical aid and developmental aid to the peoples of the Third World, with the conceited aim of making them just like us in the West. As a consequence, the 20th Century was a period during which, not only was the current uncontrollable expansion of Third World populations initiated, but the desire of Third World populations to acquire Western technology and our living standards was awakened.
This movement by humanitarian groups was therefore the catalyst for the creation of our current problems; in that without any benefit in terms of an appreciable increase in our capacity to feed and provide for such great numbers, the least creative three-quarters of the world’s population has roughly quadrupled in number and begun to demand living standards and therefore levels of resource consumption that are approximately four times higher per capita than they would have been otherwise. With a Third World population four times as large and with the desire for a fourfold increase in per capita resource consumption, this equates to potentially a sixteen-fold increase in Third World resource consumption during a period of a little over 100 years. No wonder energy and commodity prices are going through the roof! No wonder that the Earth’s finite resources are beginning to run out! Furthermore, no wonder that a significant proportion of the world’s population is on the verge of starvation!
The first step therefore is for the West to stop supporting the Third World with food aid and medical aid and let Mother Nature bring the population growth in that part of the World back under control. This sounds cruel and humanitarians will complain that we in the West will be turning our backs on human suffering, but this is not so – we will be accepting a level of human suffering today in order to avert a massively greater level of human suffering that will inevitably occur worldwide otherwise.
The resources thus saved by not ‘feeding the problem’, can then be diverted into the development of interplanetary travel and into the research and development of new renewable energy sources.
Hopefully, it will not be too long before we have other planets to explore and our surplus populations will have the immense resources of the Universe to provide for their ever-growing needs.
Let it be understood that there is no alternative to this two-step solution, if we cling to the outmoded notions of the 19th and 20th Century humanitarians then the World’s non-renewable resources will be exhausted before any new renewable sources can be found and interplanetary travel will then become impossible. We will become trapped on this planet with no alternative but to either increasing thinly spread the diminishing resources that remain, or to fight a war of extermination in which opposing groups attempt to reduce resource consumption and competition through the genocide of others.
So let us harden our hearts and do what is necessary for the survival of mankind.
Cosmotheism Now! 