Poemranker [Replying] Mon May 20 01:40:14 PDT 2024

Replying to a comment on:

In another age, I would have married young, To a pre-selected man from my village, had too many children, broken my back with my hands, died early, rested beneath the second of three crosses behind his house, while our hated king lived on a far away hill. I would have believed in servitude and done what the priest said, until my husband came home drunk, layed me and fell asleep. Then I would have hung a red lantern for seafare to Paris.

Ranger

17-Oct-06/2:24 PM

I'll have to ask forgiveness for sidetracking. I tend to chase butterflies when I'm supposed to be hunting the jabberwock, although they always turn out to be Jabberwock-Life-Force butterflies, so they're a partly relevant quarry.

So the world's population is going to outgrow the planet's means of supporting it. That's true enough, but while the human race is prosperous it will always grow, and that cutoff point will be reached one day regardless of how long it's put it off. I don't believe it could ever be practically possible to keep the earth's population static. If you only want to look fifty or a hundred years into the future, then fine. Your argument is valid, regardless of whether it can be successfully implemented. But this is immediately either giving a greater moral status to the children of the next 50-100 years than to those born after, or it's saying that we have a diminished responsibility towards those born after the cutoff point.
Unless, of course, you are just going for buying us a bit more time in which to find a complete answer. That's fine by me. And I'll grant that the obvious solution is fewer births...plus social change which makes it unnecessary to have many children. But, if you accept that we're going to max out the planet sooner or later, you've also got to accept that we need a more permanent solution as well. Maybe we could populate Mars.

Please grant me 'theirselves'. It'll make my day.

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