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Originally Posted by Ugly Bastard
I like the spirit of this thread, but I think in general you guys are being over-dramatic. ....The Earth can sustain a human population of 20 billion or more without too much trouble.
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With todays rate of consumption? Source?
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Some of the major problems that humanity thinks they're facing, global warming in particular, are basically just the new religion of "educated" elite upper-middle class whites. We're not even sure if humanity has made the slightest contribution to this issue; it could very well just be a part of the natural cycle of Earth's heating and cooling. Climates change, species go extinct. This is a natural part of Earth's evolution.
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Fair enough, but I didn't even mention global warming in my OP. Just because something becomes trendy among rich people I don't think is a very good reason to entirely shrug it off as token upper-class melodrama. Global warming may very well be a part of Earths 'natural' evolution, but I can guarantee that widespread depletion of forests, massively overfishing, and polluting our oceans to the point where life on the bottom of the sea no longer has any oxygen in the water to survive on is not.
Honestly, this kind of thinking is the kind that is going to end up fucking ourselves. Everybody (myself included) downplays how fragile plant/animal/life really is, in an "oh it will all work out" sort of way from time to time almost in denial of the inevitable. The planet is obviously (according to scientists a long time from now) on its way out, but we're exponentially expiditing the process.
ID brought up some good points before about our only real options to be colonizing planets, but to be honest resource wise we simply can't do it, and for a REALLY long time. Our only options are either to die out or to sustain life on earth, and while I think the latter will probably eventually happen, i'd prefer for it not to be in a completely backwards "running up an escalator going down" kind of way.