we got one, (more but this is the closest) keplar 22-b. whit lightspeed it will only take 600 years to get there. we might aswell just shoot them randomly into the sky.
I believe Alpha Centauri has a Goldilocks planet. But that's dumb, because that'd still take YEARS upon YEARS to get to. Here are some less fanciful solutions for the present. ⢠A one-child rule, with massive income taxes for those who break it ⢠A colossal propaganda campaign to evoke scorn for those with multiple kids ⢠Mandatory sterilisations after the first (successful) childbirth ⢠A fixed child license of two or three with the right to trade licenses at government institutions, with a tax so that it even fills the coffers ⢠A rationing system where each family gets a fixed amount of water (divided into drinking and washing), food and other stuff, but where rations shrink for each child after the first (though dividing them equally) to make life harder for the families with extra children I prefer the ones which make extra kids unappealing, rather than the ones that just prevent them. I've also only listed fairly humane options, though the sterilisation and rationing ones are pretty... unpleasant.
Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest, etc. It works every time, but not without a large amount of deaths... Maybe not the best way, but it's better than sterilizing people without their consent.
I still wouldn't want to live in a society as you pictured it here, Nerdsoft. Besides, children are already a financial burden, why make it worse? Best you can do is recommend people not to have kids, or only one, or adopt. Some parents decide for that on their own already.
And about finding planets that are habitable, we already found dozens of them, we just don't have the technology to get there.
They are potentially habitable, we don't know for sure. All we do know is these planets exist in an area far enough from the sun where liquid water can exist.
All we do know is these planets exist in an area far enough from the sun where liquid water can exist.
they have already ruled out the option that kepler22-b is a gas planet. they dont know yet if the water on it is constant vaporized or actually in rivers and oceans on the ground like earth. or if the atmosphere is dense enough. lots of questions we can't answer the next 400+ years since we can't come close enough. even if we used light speed.
of course this is just 1 and the closest planet kepler has found. out of the total of 503 planets untill dec. 2012. they can search for planets up to 1000 light years. wich means. about 3% of our milky way. xD
I still wouldn't want to live in a society as you pictured it here, Nerdsoft. Besides, children are already a financial burden, why make it worse? Best you can do is recommend people not to have kids, or only one, or adopt. Some parents decide for that on their own already.
What do you suggest? ALLOW the population to remain unsustainable? ALLOW us to just... die through our short-sighted decisions? I want this species to live. And also, what's wrong with letting our greed help us out? What's wrong with rationing when it will save our future? What's wrong with my ideas? Tell me at least.
so chances of habitation on the planets I had in mind are very, very high.
only in the very very long future. a giant space station for a few million people is more realistic the next few hundred years. and even that is not certainly possible. in theory it is of course, we can make the designs. but reality isn't theory.
what are the planets you have in mind? planets in our own solar system? or planets like the earth in a different solar system?
if the latter then it doesn't matter how many we can find. they are all so far away that we can't possible get there in less then 200 year if we go by light speed. (and i doubt we will ever go by lightspeed.) (the closest found sofar is 600 light years away)
The main point is we have more chance of finding a planet that resembles awesome-face then inhabiting a planet in the next 50 years.
Didn't I already hint at it? Parents are already accepting a financial burden when getting children without unfair suppression. I am against the criminalisation or penalisation of getting children. And there are other things to do first, like making birth control affordable to everyone including the poor, or telling those ultra-religious that god may not want them to swarm earth.
tl;dr: I know we must do something, just not this, now. We theoretically have the capacity to feed most humans on earth, we just consume like idiots and let tons of food go to waste while others are starving.
I honestly haven't read much of anything that went before, but regarding this notion that no matter which way you look at it, overpopulation is some impending doom hanging over us all, here's some interesting reading material I picked up on the web:
Climate Change and 'Overpopulation.' Some reflections, The Corner House, Dec. 2009, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/climate-change-and-overpopulation
The Corner House, Resources: overpopulation, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resources/results/overpopulation
Why Climate Change Malthusians Are Wrong. On Population, James Faris, Dec. 2009, http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/10/on-population/
George Monbiot, The Population Myth, Sept. 2009, http://www.monbiot.com/2009/09/29/the-population-myth/
George Monbiot And The Persistence Of The Population Myth, Michael Barker, Nov. 2009, http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker34.html .
Woops, and there broke the links. Let's try that again, if they break again, I guess I'll leave it to a kind mod or forum dweller to fix:
Climate Change and 'Overpopulation.' Some reflections, The Corner House, Dec. 2009, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/climate-change-and-overpopulation .
The Corner House, Resources: overpopulation, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resources/results/overpopulation .
Why Climate Change Malthusians Are Wrong. On Population, James Faris, Dec. 2009, http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/10/on-population/ .
George Monbiot, The Population Myth, Sept. 2009, http://www.monbiot.com/2009/09/29/the-population-myth/ .
George Monbiot And The Persistence Of The Population Myth, Michael Barker, Nov. 2009, http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker34.html .
On a different fourm website, one person asked if homosexuality was evolution's way of decreasing the population...what are your guy's thoughts on it?
There are a few things not working with that notion...
Evolution is not a planned process. Something doesn't happen in order to attain a certain state.
If homosexuality would be evolving, that would mean there's a selective pressure towards it. Problem is, the genealogic line ends at homosexual individuals (they don't produce offsprings), so any genetic influence cannot be the case (and I'm assuming here their influence on the survival of family members is low; furthermore family members might not even carry any relevant genes).
But anyway, homosexuality has always been around, not only in humans but also in many animal species. And yet we grow and grow. So as partydevil said, it would be doing a poor job :P
