Bumble, I'm talking about the global population, not that of specific countries in Africa that are being royally fucked by AIDS. In terms of the problems I'm bringing up, it is the most industrialized nations with the highest populations that contribute to these issues, not a nation like Botswana. In terms of the world population, and the world's problems with pollution-type issues, Botswana probably doesn't even register.
oucheh wrote:Pretty interesting Scott. So people SHOULD be allowed to suffer slowly from some of the worst diseases on the planet just to maintain natural order? I don't quite follow. If there is a cure for AIDS that not only stops the main virus but also keeps it from mutating I think that that is a great idea.
There is no way to avoid the fact that at some point we're all going to do die, and if we expect it to happen naturally, it's time and place will be out of our collective control. But what about people suffering of HIV/AIDS that are 20-60? Don't they deserve a "new lease on life". I see nothing wrong with letting nature take it's course, but I certainly think that it is in the best interests of society as a whole to find a cure for an epidemic such as AIDS.
-Jeremy
I'm not advocating suffering, or advocating that people die slowly, or saying that there shouldn't be a cure for AIDS. The two points I was trying to make were
1) I don't think it makes any sense to suggest that pharm companies would rather have people die of AIDS when they could sell people a cure for it and then sell them all manner of other drugs for the extra decades that the person would live
and
2) Every step mankind gets closer to removing major causes of death is on the one hand a good thing for the people who will now not die from those causes, but on the other hand is a bad thing in that it will significantly amplify many or all of the population-related problems that exist on a worldwide level, with a fixed volume of space and resources.
So there are some minuses that go along with the plusses. And the minuses can end up being just as catastrophic if not moreso, with regard to sustainability of human life on planet Earth.
Maybe science will find a cure for garbage. And for toxic emissions. And for energy demands. And for the fixed quantity of physical space on this planet.
These are things that will have to happen if the human race is to continue expanding in size and living to older age.
Ugly as it may sound, I think there is an age range where people are generally (with exceptions) burdens to society versus contributors to it. Maybe it's something like burden from age 0 to 16, contributor from 16 to 60, burden from 60 to 120, something like that. I'm just making numbers up here, but I think there's some generalized merit to the sentiment. Things like social security and medicare are good examples. If you believe what was said in the State Of The Union Address, then within just a couple decades, the funding for maintaining old folks will have gigantic financial costs, what did Bush say, something like 60% of the entire Federal budget?!? As causes of death are removed, this situation becomes worse and worse.
And the only way to have enough money coming in to take care of the elderly will be to have ever more and more people being born, so there are always enough young folks around to support the old folks who can't do anything to support themselves. This system will necessarily eventually fail, it cannot be sustained, because there is a fixed amount of livable space on this planet. Maybe it's 500 years off, or maybe it'll be more clearly worrysome before the end of our lifetime, but there will come a day where this continued expansion of the size of the human population will be realized to be a dead end. Unless we cover the entire planet with skyscrapers that are 100 stories tall, eventually there will simply not be enough space for us.
As ugly as they are, diseases and wars are things that keep this in check.
Prisons. I didn't even think to bring up prisons! They're a problem at play here, too. And crime in general, I think, will be more of a problem as overpopulation's ill effects are amplified more and more.
I don't want anybody to die of AIDS, or cancer, or anything painful. That's a dream world. In the real world, there is a battle on, and on the one team you have human beings who will reproduce at an unsustainable rate for whatever reason, and on the other hand you have things fighting to keep the balance, which in our case are diseases and the like. In the case of lions or tigers or some animal of your choosing, if their population expanded beyond a certain point, it would be kept in check by lots of them starving to death because there is only so much of a food supply to sustain them. That's how nature works. In our case, we can genetically engineer foods in a lab that could easily feed the entire planet worth of humans and then some. And we don't really have natural predators so much anymore, big nasty animals that eat us if they catch us. We've conquered them, too, with guns and the like. So diseases and natural disasters are a couple of the only things nature has left to keep us in check, to keep us from destroying the planet.
I didn't design this system. It is maybe random happenstance that this is how Earth turned out, or maybe it's like this for a reason, nobody really knows. Unless you dispute the notion of evolution (which few people around here would), diseases like AIDS that can evolve like mad are, in a warped sense, the pinnacle of life, or maybe anti-life, on this planet. We like to think of humanity as being A-number-one, the top of the food chain. Diseases tell us otherwise.
Again, I am not pro-AIDS. And I'm not against fighting it, either. I'm just saying there are a whole different set of problems that come with winning the battle agaist disease, the increased and more-aged human population, and they can potentially result in the worsening of quality of life for *everyone on the planet*.
