Avatar, The Noble Savage, and why certain ideals are flawed

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

At some point we'll reach "critical mass," right?

We hit critical mass decades ago.

No. What I mean by critical mass here is, everything dead boom.

I can't see how overpopulation would destroy humanity in one sudden event. We'd probably languish for a while as our numbers dwindle. If we've used up all of our resources, the subset of the population that controls what's left will stick around for a while before they finally die.

We're doing okay procreation-wise right /now/, but when we fill up the earth with people (and pollution etc), what then?

Then the children will die. It's happening right now in Africa, China, and India -- people are having loads of children, but they don't have resources to support them, so the children die. That don't stop 'em from having children all the same. It's like there's just nothing else to do in those places.

I would argue that there are still many places in the world that aren't filled with dead kids. For every Africa there's an Italy, where population is dropping. (I agree that the goddamn Indians who have nineteen kids and then get foreign aid are fucking leeches on society. Abstinence or at /least/ condoms.)

That wasn't anything close to my point. Obviously there are plenty of countries with negative population growth rates such as Italy, Russia, and Japan. All I was doing was answering your question about what will happen when our population exceeds the resource allowance for any given person. I have no idea how you got onto talking about specific countries and their current birth rates.

[otters~1]

Let's back up. Slappy's original point, which I was supplementing, was that the next few generations won't continue to have children, not because of a slow decline, but because of a catastrophic event in the near future brought on by our abuse of the planet. Critical mass was a misleading phrase which I shouldn't have used; it implies a filling-up-to-the-point-of-overflowing, not an abrupt cataclysm.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Huh. I must've missed that in Slappy's post, then.