The Continuum Hypothesis

What's this web site about?

I'm David Anderson. This is a soapbox for my social and political opinions. It has nothing to do with the continuum hypothesis (CH) (I happen to like CH, and the domain was available).

Human overpopulation and its consequences

In high school biology class we had a project involving growing a bacteria colony on a Petri dish. I smeared the agar and put the dish in an incubator. After a couple of days there were some colored disks - bacteria multiplying and consuming the nutrients. I forgot about it for a few days, and when I opened the incubator again the dish was covered with a thick gray scum - the bacteria had consumed all the agar and died.

There are individual human geniuses - Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein - but as a species we're like the bacteria on the Petri dish, controlled by our individual drives to survive and reproduce. In fact we behave even more foolishly - we use our intelligence to try to pack a few more of our kind into our Petri dish, thinking we can outsmart nature. This foolishness may destroy us.

In my opinion, the central problem facing Earth is human overpopulation. This, and its chain-reaction effects, are ruining Earth, are disrupting the natural processes that produced life, and in the worst case could lead to the extinction of humans. Social problems - injustice, economic inequality, genocide, cultural extinction, etc. - exist and should be addressed. But they're insignificant compared to overpopulation. The overpopulation problem will eventually solve itself, as it did in the Petri dish. Is a better outcome possible? Considering human nature, probably not. But we have to try anyway.

Life on Earth ebbs and flows. Species evolve and compete. Every species reproduces faster than is necessary to replenish itself. A limit is reached - food supply, territory, predation, competition. The population declines, and eventually grows again, in a roughly sinusoidal pattern.

Except for humans. By some quirk of evolution, we gained an extravagant amount intelligence. This gave us absolute dominance over all other species, and eventually - through technology - the ability to reshape our entire environment, and to quickly burn through a supply of energy that has been accumulating in the Earth for 4 billion years.

It also removed the natural limits on the growth of our population. Except for the occasional plague, famine, and war (whose net effects, thus far, have been relatively minor) human population has grown exponentially over the last 10,000 years. As of 2008, the human population is 6.6 billion and growing at about 1.5% per year. This has various consequences:

  • Carbon emissions are causing global climate change, with possibly catastrophic consequences.
  • Producing enough food for 6 billion people requires farming techniques that are non-sustainable - they reduce biodiversity, they pollute, they destroy topsoil, and so on.
  • A variety of factors are causing extinction of other species on an unprecedented scale - about 1,000 times faster than the historical average. The largest factor is that humans have colonized most of the animal-friendly land on Earth, and made it unlivable for most other species.

What is the ideal human population of Earth?

Some people equate this question with: "how many humans can sustainably live on Earth?". That is NOT the question. More is not necessarily better.

Many valuable aspects of human life - culture, art, society - rely on having a critical mass of people, perhaps living close to one another. So we need cities. But how many, and how big? In addition, production of food and goods requires a certain population for economy of scale.

I think a population of about 100 million would be ideal. That would allow for a few cultural centers of a million or so people, while at the same time letting people live outside of cities with little or no pressure for land, and allowing huge areas of land to revert to their natural state.

The combination of low population and technology unlocks wonderful possibilities for human society. People can live where and how they want. There will be no more desperate struggle for survival and security. With the elimination of rat-cage-like overcrowding, people will actually seek contact with one another. Utopian visions well be realizable.

How can we reduce human population?

Reducing human population doesn't require eugenics or mass extermination; it just requires a sustained decrease in the global birth rate. Here's how we can achieve this:
  • Achieve awareness of the need for population reduction among a critical mass of people.
  • Create an international, neutral "Population Control Forum" (PCF) to manage the population reduction process.
  • The PCF formulates a plan: how should population decrease over time, and what "offspring distribution" (the distribution of number of children per adult) is necessary to achieve this.
  • The PCF specifies a "national population reduction program", including:
    • Free government-provided contraception.
    • Education programs (formal and adult) on the need for population control.
    • Wealth redistribution (tax and welfare structure) to encourage the target offspring function (e.g. tax structures that discourage parenting > 2 children, and that encourage 0 or 1).
  • Countries meeting PCF targets practice economic sanctions and immigration controls against countries not meeting the targets.
The idea is to gradually make life more comfortable for people and societies that are working to reduce population, and less comfortable for others.

Initially only a few countries will participate in PCF. As the "gross national happiness" of these countries increases, less enlightened countries will come on board.

Technology: more harm than good?

Can technology solve the problems resulting from overpopulation? Probably not. Life on Earth is a complex system. The complexity exists at all scales, ranging from the cells in our bodies - intricate webs of chemical machinery - to the web of dependencies between species in an ecosystem.

This incredible structure is just a snapshot of a vastly more powerful time-varying system: evolution. Evolution has spent billions of years tinkering and inventing.

Although evolution is the aggregation of dumb processes, it is, in a sense, smarter than humans will ever be. We humans will never fully understand, much less reproduce, what evolution has created. Technology is primitive and impotent compared with evolution.

Technology works wonderfully for some things. It lets us build machines to handle our basic needs (food and housing) in a tiny fraction of our time. Medical technology extends our lives and reduces suffering. However, when technology interferes with evolution, it generally becomes harmful.

Religion's Big Lies

Many aspects of organized religion are harmful to life on Earth.

  • Belief in a supreme being eliminates a sense of personal responsibility for the fate of Earth. God wouldn't allow Earth to become a lifeless desert - would He?
  • Religions promote "faith": a brainwashed, unquestion acceptance of an existing power structure, fictional ideology, and social status quo. Faith-zombies are unlikely to wake up to the reality and consequences of human overpopulation.
  • A central feature of almost all creation myths is that humans were created separately from the rest of nature, and that the rest of nature was created to serve us. This is a horrible and dangerous falsehood.
  • The false claim that "(human) life is sacred" is a catch-all argument against any form of population control.
  • Religions compete in an evolutionary arena. Their success is not based on truth or merit, but rather on their ability to gather adherents. It's relatively easy for parents to indoctrinate their children. So it's not surprising that many religions discourage birth control, and encourage over-reproduction by their adherents.

The role of economics

Population growth is good for the global economy. It creates new markets and provides cheap labor. In the business media, "growth" is assumed to be desirable. It's not.

In the short term, population control is likely to curtail the current frenzy of greed and overconsumption. In the longer term - once we learn how to act like Buddhas rather than bacteria - every human should have everything they really want. But that's a topic for a different soapbox.

The role of the media and politics

A common headline:

World population to increase by 70 million

The story then goes on to speculate on how we're going to provide food and energy for all these new people. The question of whether the population really must increase by 70 million is never raised.

Nor is population control is ever discussed in the political arena. If a politician were to raise the population issue, his opponents would find it easy to hysterically characterize this is anti-religion, racist, government run amok, and so on. It would be political suicide in the current environment.

Changing this situation is the necessary first step to saving the world. Citizens of countries with free speech can do something about this - bring the population problem into the political arena, detach it from hysterical associations, and demand that politicians take a stand on it.

What can you do?

  • Investigate organizations such as Population Connection and Negative Population Growth (caution: some of them take a US-centric view, and are obsessed with immigration).
  • Write about population control to your elected representatives.
  • Try to put population control in the media: write letters to the editor, call in to talk shows, and so on.
  • Write about it in Web forums.
  • Link to this site.
  • Talk to your friends and relatives.