Infamous last words: What a beautiful place to build a city!

Even though the wave of awareness of the consequences of uncontrolled population growth is gaining momentum, the population problem will never be addressed while the economy is the main priority. But it must be very seriously addressed if there is to be any real hope for a continued and useful future for humanity.

Some sources predict that the world population will level out at a balance with the limiting environmental conditions. From one such source, the population 100 years in the future is expected to be between 7 and 16 billion. We are currently using resources at a far beyond sustainable rate and this trend will not change while the only restriction on population growth is quality of life. From what I gather, a degenerating quality of life has never been known to restrain population growth until it all hits the fan. As quality of life degenerates, the priorities shift relentlessly closer to surviving just for the moment. If we do survive the next 100 years, all of our environmental concerns will be forgotten as we fight over whatever still remains of the very severely depleted environment which has for the last 100 years supported a society that has far exceeded its carrying capacity. With the predicted population growth, how could there possibly be anything left to support life above bare existence.

Clearly, a very serious problem faces us, RIGHT NOW! Not tomorrow.

There are already many areas of the world which can't sustain their community without involving the outside world. One clear example of unsustainability is the very meager 55 * 55 meter land portion that would be allocated to each person in Japan if the total land area of Japan was divided up equally between the population. The allocated land area must sustain all of each individual person's needs and must include areas set aside for industry, farming, water catchment, waste management, a percentage of roadway, a house (if not built underground), and every other detail of life. This is clearly an impossibility. If the rest of the world was to achieve the same ratio, in the prevailing anarchy, all of our hard earned knowledge would be lost in the struggle to survive.

Regardless of how high the people are stacked, each one of them still requires a certain amount of land area to sustain their life. Even if they live and die within the bounds of their high rise dwellings and contribute nothing to the well being of the society as a whole, their ecological footprint still impacts outside the building, because they still require food. Perhaps even cooked food.

A developing life form, anywhere in the universe, that has survived the gauntlet of almost insurmountable hardship in the early stages of evolution will emerge victorious at the "glory days of evolution" era, and will then reap the fruits of their past labors. But how does this society, which has always fought to survive throughout its development, now place restraints on itself so as not to overshoot the limits of its environment, as we have? How do they stop reproducing when that was a most essential key to their survival in the past?

Our clear priority at this time is to reset the population-environment balance, with our eyes wide open. We can't simply sit back and allow the natural process of population control to progress because society will stagnate, unable to function in the over stressed environment, with the inevitable act of aggression toward each other that may result in the permanent destruction of the planet's ability to sustain life at a useful level. Even if the planet survives in a useful state the next phase of human endeavor will follow the same path and meet the same hurdles, with the same result. Will we ever learn?

The devastating consequences from disturbing the incredibly delicate set of circumstances that make life on this planet possible cannot possibly be emphasized enough. If we do eventually fail because of our profound ignorance, our entire development right from the very origin will have been totally pointless. My children's life, my life, my parent's life and all before would be of absolutely no consequence at all. There is utter despair in failure after successfully surmounting all barriers to develop to a level which would have been absolutely incomprehendable in the early stages of development. Our future development can be equally as incomprehendable.

Any life form can be described as a series of complex atomic communities which each contribute to the well being of the whole life form. Each part is necessarily dependent on the rest to support its own function, so if one community develops disproportionately to the rest, the whole support base for that community will collapse, and it will die. The stupidity in that self indulgent act is blatantly obvious. In much the same way, humanity is just one community in the vastly diverse number of communities which link together to form our living planet. But humanity in its profound wisdom has allowed itself to expand far beyond the Earth's sustainable carrying capacity, and we will pay the piper. By definition we have become a very real malignant growth on the planet. If this problem isn't very soon addressed, the living planet will die, and so will we.

There is still a profound ignorance of the fact that there is no purpose whatever in life if this cycle of human endeavor eventually collapses. Even in our enlightened society, I commonly hear comments like, "What's the point in worrying about it. One person isn't going to make any difference", "It won't happen in my lifetime, so why should I worry", "It doesn't really matter anyway", "It's the way it was meant to be". How then would one expect a hungry and uneducated society to react to the population problem?

A lifetime of experience in an engineering environment, where reality very quickly slaps you in the face if you attempt any deviation from its exactly defined path, qualifies me to make the above comments. I have learnt from my experience that if you start off with a structure based on a flawed mechanical design the whole project will crumble if the fundamental problem is not directly addressed. Continually adding peripheral fixes is a very short term, and always failed fix. Addressing the fundamental problem is always the only solution.

The survival of humanity must be considered our paramount objective, preceding all else. Unless EVERYONE is made aware of the consequences of uncontrolled population growth, and accept their role in achieving a satisfactory solution, we don't stand a chance. A population reduction by political force, or some form of anarchy, can only be temporary.
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There would be some amazing lessons to be learnt observing the antics of humanity from a distant planet. But even armed with the knowledge of where the earth society went wrong, your own society would suffer exactly the same fate because that is the natural way, and it will always prevail. In the death throes of your society, out of anger and frustration your final act will be to topple the stone artifacts that stem from the superstitious doctrine of the extremist group which eagerly grabbed the reigns of power in the anarchy that followed the initial collapse. Just as it happened on earth.

There will probably be pockets of your race that manage to survive, but to what avail?

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