The next wanna be Hitler?? HA

MrNightly

This guy cracked me up... some said he made Hitler seem like a baby.. I just laughed.

http://video.msn.com/v/us/v.htm?g=f03f32e8-c63a-440d-a59d-636c868b97e1&t=c150&f=06/64&p

aaharvel

as terrible as his opinion sounds- scientifically it does makes sense up to a point. He's not very personable however. Could you imagine this guy out at your local bar?

Thanks for the link.

michael_w

Internet Explorer... bah.

Anyways, I thought they kept trying to make him look bad with 'quotes' and questions throughout most of it. It seemed like what his bare beliefs were a good thing but they've been tainted by ideas of dying people being a good thing. I think he just means we need to stop producing so many people so that we don't overpopulate the world and use up everything the earth has to offer.

That aside, it was still kind of funny

Frank Z

Can you say Crackpot? How about Bogger Eating Moron?

neomagus00

he's a strange dude, but he is an ecologist, so ya gotta cut him a little slack, socially... on the one hand, he's terrible at explaining what he believes, but if you think about it, he's more or less right, at the core of it...

he had two related but distinct points... point one was that the Earth as an ecosystem would be better off with less humans, which is undeniably true... point two is that the human race, as it exists socially and spatially today, is a biological bomb waiting to implode... as he began to say, epidemiologists have studied what would happen if a single small outbreak of a disease began somewhere in the world, and the results of these studies are horrific - imagine the black death, 2/3 of the world's population dead, in less than a year - maybe far less, depending on the disease... The Cobra Event, by the guy who wrote the hot zone (the name escapes me) treats this, in what is actually a very interesting and scary novel (and plausible, too - clinton had a team formed to analyse the feasibility of this book, and from what i understand, the results are classified).

people were mixing these two points up, and trying to say that he was saying that people should die, because there are too many of us...

MrNightly

The world is overpopulated?!? If you gave every single human an acre to live on, they would all fit in Texas! And if you put them shoulder to shoulder, they wouldn't even fill up Half of Florida?! How can we possible be overpopulated?

I do understand the spread of a epidemic disease, and it is plausible with our advanced (HA) methods of travel (12 Monkeys anyone?) But to think that we are overpopulated is simply crazy!

PolkThug

The guy giving the interview was a jackass, he either didn't understand the point, or just wanted to stir the pot.

aaharvel

MrNightly wrote:

The world is overpopulated?!? If you gave every single human an acre to live on, they would all fit in Texas! And if you put them shoulder to shoulder, they wouldn't even fill up Half of Florida?! How can we possible be overpopulated?

Wonderful. Now take the 70% of Earth that's covered in water out of your reasoning, and tell me if you really think that's true.

Not trying to argue with you, because you're not making any sense. Go do some research on the changes in overall population growth since the Industrial Revolution.

PolkThug

MrNightly wrote:

The world is overpopulated?!? If you gave every single human an acre to live on, they would all fit in Texas!

Let's look at just the USA. Let's say there are 280M people in USA (in 2000 we were at 281M).

Texas = 266,807 sq. miles
1 square mile = 640 acres
640 x 266,807 = 170,756,480 total acres in Texas
170,756,480/280,000,000 people = .609 acres per person

aaharvel

PolkThug wrote:

Let's look at just the USA. Let's say there are 280M people in USA (in 2000 we were at 281M).

Texas = 266,807 sq. miles
1 square mile = 640 acres
640 x 266,807 = 170,756,480 total acres in Texas
170,756,480/280,000,000 people = .609 acres per person

showoff

oh and you can add 9million to that population as of 2005. That are legal citizens.

Dennis Gardner

He's never been in the western half of Kansas, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, or either of the Dakotas. People die when marooned in these areas cause nobody comes acrossed them for years.:D

MrNightly

aaharvel wrote:

Wonderful. Now take the 70% of Earth that's covered in water out of your reasoning, and tell me if you really think that's true.

Not trying to argue with you, because you're not making any sense. Go do some research on the changes in overall population growth since the Industrial Revolution.

Ok, Ok. Fair enough, I was pulling numbers I heard from the mid 90's. I didn't actually do the research myself. But common. If all of America can fit into Texas, the world can fit into half the states. (DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT RAN THE NUMBERS, JUST THINKING OUT LOUD. READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK, and know that you have been warned ) And that is on Half an Acre or less. Lets just round up and say ALL of America. That doesn't include Canada, so roughly half of North America. You still have South America, Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia that have no one living in them except wild animals! Remember, we are talking if everyone was squished together.

How can this be overpopulated? Now, I am not talking the effects we have on the ecosystem, and all that stuff, just the strict thought that there are too many people on the planet. Fine, let them spread out and take ALL of NORTH America... half the hemisphere would be unpopulated?!? To my little brain, it doesn't make sense.

But then again, I do have a little brain.

MrNightly

Little brain again.. disregard

michael_w

It's not about what amount of space we have to live in, it's about resources and money.

Frank Z

I'm in for $3.62. Can I live?

PolkThug

Its about poo. Remember the Superdome??!!

Zen Dragon

OK. First point. I agree. Move most of the people to Texas.


The interviewer was badgering him, and he had poor communication skills. When he stated the earth could not sustain the population, what he should have said was the earth can not sustain the population and continue to produce the same amount of resources. We have reached a point where we consume more than we can reproduce with the same level of utilization. ie, we must now encroach further onto untapped resources next year to achieve similiar production. Ultimately we are netting a negative resource gain while destroying things like rainforsets which supply our oxygen.
If the gentlemen was well studied in ecology he would realize that the earth has it's own nasty ways of correcting such inbalances, and we are in fact due for a major event such as bird flu perhaps that will correct the population count.
His mistake is going on the air waves and trying to explain the situation. Mankind has shown an amazing ability to turn a blind eye to the ecological realities of overpoulation.

neomagus00

mrnightly - zen's got it... when the interviewer was pestering him about the term 'sustainable', that's because the ecologist was using it in the ecological sense, which means sustainable over an indefinite period... as technology and civilisation stands at this point, we are well over the carrying capacity of the earth... each person takes well over an acre of desert to sustain them... even the basics, such as, oh, i dunno, fresh water, shelter, and latrines, aren't present in a large enough quantity in any one place to put us all there... thus, cities and nations, spreading ourselves out until we find enough room... reference agent smith's ramblings in the matrix (scene where morpheus has been captured and injected with truth drugs)...

and like zen said, mother earth will correct the balance, she just works over a timescale longer than we can really comprehend... of course, we are (so they say) intelligent beings, so perhaps we can, with our incredible technology, find a way to artificially inflate the earth's carrying capacity... then we can continue to have children willy-nilly and not worry about it... but right now, that's not the case, and _it_ will happen eventually

mrbigbluelight

As the island became overpopulated, the natural resources started to dwindle.

The inhabitants solution ? Build bigger stone statues. Which required more trees (for moving the large stone structures). Which depleted the trees.

The inhabitants solution ? More confilcts over the dwindling trees.
Under the theory that god intervention would resolve all their problems. they built even larger statues to, I suppose, appease the gods.

Which led to ..... well, I suppose we could ask the ancestors who populate Easter Island now but, unfortunately, there ain't none.

If you have the opportunity, watch/rent/buy the PBS program.
As you watch the program, apply the situation on a macro level to our little planet.

Not very encouraging, I'm afraid.

As I've said before, the earth is filling up. As it does, the social niceties that exist when there is "elbow room" dwindle.

shack

Zen Dragon wrote:

OK. First point. I agree. Move most of the people to Texas.

If everybody moves to Texas, they're going to have to build more WalMarts.

Zen Dragon

shack wrote:

If everybody moves to Texas, they're going to have to build more WalMarts.

Well of course they'll have to build more Walmarts (In Texas) But they'll also have to close them everywhere else. It will concentrate the evil empire so it may be more readily dismantled. :cool: