When advocating the glorious aspects of long life spans to people, one of the objections I am often first offered is the ‘over population’ problem. But despite the doom and gloom rhetoric the modern fear based media and special interest groups promulgate, there is little to worry about. I’ll cite an excerpt from one of Michael Chricton’s excellent speeches

In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergoe famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure

http://www.matus1976.com/blog/2004_feb.htm

The cause of these incredibly wrong and dire predictions comes primarily from the tendency of people to draw linear projections out indefinitely of short term trends and of the population doomists to perpetually ignore *why* populations grew so rapidly since the mid 1800’s. Instead they just pointed out that they had, and that they would continue to. However, the populations in post-industrialized western societies continue to drop. When immigration is taken out of the equation the population growth of most post-industrialized nations is negative. The tremendous booms are occurring in previously impoverished societies that are now industrializing, like India, China, etc. But they will go through the same trend that the west went through. Children in those countries are a source of income now, a manner of helping to ensure your own survival. But in the west, children are costly burdens, and the wealthier and more industrialized a nation becomes the fewer children are born, unfortunately. Indeed, once the entire world industrializes the population growth of the world will likely go into the negatives. Hopefully longer life spans will neutralize this trend, and humanity will start to spread out among the starts.

Defusing the “Population Bomb” -
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-15-99.html

Population Reference Bureau
http://www.prb.org/
http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educators/Human_Population/Population_Growth/Population_Growth.htm

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“The people that hug trees are the same ones that complain there isn’t enough housing.”

From – The Open Space Mentality
http://www.solohq.com/Articles/Mouhibian/The_Open-Space_Mentality.shtml

Indeed…

The people who chant ‘sustainability’ are the same ones who impose zoning restrictions on building height and mandate X number of acres per dwelling. The people that scream about the population bomb are the same ones opposing globalization, the only humane manner to slow population growth. Instead of letting more people live longer healthier lives, they would have the worlds poor die from malaria, malnutrition, dysentery, better off dead than to burden the earth any farther! The same people who profess reproductive rights are strangely silent on China’s 1 child policy, where millions of abortions are brutally enforced as a government mandate to curb population growth. The same people who cry the ends never justify the means are completely silent…

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Emphasizing the need for an insurance policy for humanity and intelligent life, and the threat posed by pure accident or stupidity, a 50 year old killer flu was sent to thousands of labs.

Scientists Scramble to Destroy Flu Strain
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20050413%2F0431560760.htm&related=off&floc=NW_1-T

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From a www.solohq.com discussion

Well, the question is the why there are insurgents now and not when Saddam (who was also secular and not best friend with Islamists) ruled the country?

There were plenty of insurgents while Saddam was in power. Saddam did his best to capture and torture and kill them, and their families, to keep them at bay. It is much easier to maintain civility when you enforce it with the methods that murderous tyrants use.

Aaron has it right. The 100,000 number first appeared in an article in the British medical journal, Lancet

Right, and the authors were on record as being against the war and they also designed the survey questions and chose the locations the surveys were to take place. This is not how science is done, that it was published in a scientific journal is absurd. They also made no distinction between those killed by the US and those killed by insurgents. The worst part was that they extrapolated the number of killed from 44 families to the entire country of 20 million people to arrive at that 100,000 number. Even that grossly exaggerated number is still less than the number of people Saddam would have killed had he remained in power. (5,000 - 10,000 per month)

- Michael

www.Matus1976.com
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