Poemranker [Replying] Mon May 20 03:44:38 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-06/2:53 PM

Of course I can, but how can you possibly hope to stop the entire world's population growing? You can slow it down - through birth control - but I don't believe anyone could ever stop it. Therefore, overpopulation will inevitably happen one day. Does our task, by your account, end simply with pushing back that day? We cannot predict exactly what the world will be like in 300 years, but we can say pretty confidently that the planet will not be any bigger. We can also say that the natural resources are unlikely to have suddenly replenished theirselves (*grin*), and you've already said we can't rely on future technology to provide. So yes, population control will be a useful tool for giving a bit more breathing space to the future generations. But we still need to come up with an ultimate solution (nearly said 'final solution' there, that would have been interesting...), either to hold a static population level (which I don't think can be done) or find a new way of accommodating and providing for everyone. Maybe we could build massive tower blocks and multi-storey farms.

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