Thursday, June 24, 2010

Could all humans be eliminated through overpopulation?

As if we really needed more evidence that the End is Near, now comes the prediction by another member of the Ministry of Fear: Australian scientist Frank Fenner, who predicts that human beings will become extinct in 100 years. The culprit? Well, the first is Global Warming, because everyone knows that Global Warming is going to kill all of us, and we have to say that.

But the other cause of the extinction of the human race is more interesting: overpopulation. That's right: having too many humans could result in not having enough of them.
Fenner, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said homo sapiens will not be able to survive the population explosion and “unbridled consumption,” and will become extinct, perhaps within a century, along with many other species. United Nations official figures from last year estimate the human population is 6.8 billion, and is predicted to pass seven billion next year.

Fenner said that is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”
Isn't the solution clear? If overpopulation will bring about human extinction, then the only way to prevent human extinction is to depopulate them. We can head off the elimination of human beings by eliminating human beings.

You gotta love science.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never know when to take you seriously. It is often difficult to tell if you are just dense, or incredibly disingenuous.

Martin Cothran said...

I think the better explanation is that people trained in modern scientistic education to think in exclusively univocal terms are just not capable of understanding irony.

KyCobb said...

Of course present trends won't continue, despite the insistence of the Right that we can continue doing things exactly as we have been without consequence. The spectacle of a GOP Representative suggesting that the real tragedy in the Gulf was that anyone had the nerve to suggest BP take responsibility for the destruction they have caused and actually apologizing to BP perfectly encapsulates this mindset.

Lee said...

I think the government needs to take its share of whatever blame there is in the Gulf oil leak. After all, the regulators whom we pay handsomely to prevent such happenstances somehow fell down on the job, did they not?

They say never to ascribe to malevolence what can easily be attributed to incompetence. However, for the cynically-minded, BP was, after all, a major contributor to Obama's campaign. Certainly, if Bush were still president, the oil money/corruption factor would be mentioned by somebody.

But there is a practical concern here about hammering BP too hard. I'm not saying they don't deserve it. But do we really want to drive them into bankruptcy before they fix it? At this point, there is no good purpose served in rubbing BP's nose in it.

But the Obama administration shows its Chicago roots in the way they put the bully in the bully pulpit. There is nothing in the Constitution empowering the president to shake down a private corporation for billions of dollars, to place in a slush fund for distribution as the president sees fit. Nor is there a law in place empowering this action. BP may not inspire sympathy as a victim of presidential bullying, but it's an extra-constitutional shakedown nonetheless.