From the End of the World to the Kid next Door

When I was starting college back in 1966, I took up the banner of all sorts of social ills; the Viet Nam war, natural foods, saving the Bay, so on and so forth. However, as the years of my life have bore down on me (I just turned 65) I’ve come to believe that all of these social problems have one, common root cause, exponential human population growth. There are many experts who say we are on the edge of world wide over-population right now while others say we are 50 or 100 or 200 years away from a crisis situation. One thing they all agree on is that the crisis is going to come. There are some idealists who bury their heads in the sand and say that technology will avert the crisis. The sort of technology they talk about hasn’t even been around for a hundred years, a microcosim of time in the context of human history. Civilization only came to the into the realm of humanity something like 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. That amount of time, itself, is a micro amount considering the several hundred thousand years ago when homo erectus (upright man) was still around, a recent homo sapien ancestor (homo sapiens are us — human beings as we are popularly referred to). I’ve fiddled around with technology all my life and the only I really trust about technology is that it always breaks down. I use my computer and the internet everyday but when I wanted to document a collection of my writings, I saved it to electronic media, the easy and immediate thing to do, but for the sake of reliability I also saved it to the printed page of paper, a media which is much more reliable and very well proven.

The woes of overpopulation are not unfamiliar to anyone unless, perhaps, you were brought up in a cave on a mountain or in a desert, totally cut off from humanity. The popular entertainment media is filled with numerous portrayals of the overpopulated earth and there have been such portrayals for many years. I remember one episode of the initial Star Trek series where Captain Kirk falls in love with a woman who lives on an overpopulated planet where the people were so numerous they were living chest to chest with each other and there was no place to sit down. Pretty absurd, eh? But those were the early days. As they were pioneering science fiction, they could get away with such naive and preposterous overstatement.

More than 30 years later, with much more experience and technology like CGI . . . 

(to read the conclusion, click here)