300 Million and Counting

Yesterday, the population of the United States of America reached 300 million people. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world behind only India and China. Don't worry, we won't be catching up to them anytime soon, both of those countries have over 1 billion residents.

I have some rather radical views about procreation. If the human race had any kind of moral terpitude at all, we would stop procreating immediately. We are destroying our planet and we can't stop ourselves. We are going to kill ourselves off and we are going to take most every other species of life on this planet with us as we do so. If we were at all moral or responsible, we would take ourselves out of the game gracefully and give the rest of nature a chance. But the human race is nothing of the kind, and so we are racing headlong into species suicide and in the process we will bring about mass extinction of tens of thousands of other species.

At least now the mechanism that seems most likely for our species suicide is global warming which most likely wont result in the complete annihilation of life on this planet and will give mother nature a base with which to start over. For me growing up, the much more likely threat was nuclear holocaust which would have been much more devastating to life on this planet. Though even there, scientists suggested that some life would survive even a full blown thermonuclear war. Cock roaches were often mentioned as a species likely to survive such an eventuality.

The problem with the means by which it appears mankind has chosen to commit its suicide is that it is a slow and painful process and is going to cause a whole lot of long term suffering for our species and the other species inhabiting this planet. As far as species suicide goes, global warming is slow. It will take generations to complete while in the meantime, the planet will become more and more inhospitable to human habitation. Drought, famine, disease and other severe conditions will make this planet a pretty miserable place to be. Nuclear holocaust oh the other hand is relatively quick. Kill off 50% of the worlds population in just a few hours and everyone else dies within a year from radioactive fallout and nuclear winter.

Still, I think a voluntary cessation of procreation is really the way to go. It is less destructive of the other creatures that share this planet with us. It isn't as long a process as extinction by global warming (we're all gone in a 100 years or so). And it would be a whole lot more comfortable for the human race as we go out since a radical decline in population like that would certainly go a long way in reversing the human made phenomena that are causing global warming.

Look, we're gonna kill ourselves anyway - don't you think we should at least be responsible about the way we do it?