National Geographic and Over Population

I think that population growth can be a problem in the future. I see the whole issue of what to do as very problematic. First off, in the article is says in a few places that demographers were taken off guard by drops or booms in population e.g. baby boomers. So this means that there are other things affecting population. War, disease, science, and conceptual ideas as it stated all play a role. Let’s say for arguments sake that war and disease had no effect and conceptual ideas were a fad that faded.  Notice I left out science. If we have a population that is naturally inclined to facilitate life expectancy, science is the tool for the job. It has proved that way so far.

I have two ideas or hypothesis’s for this. One being that the carrying capacity would be reached and we would come to a point that would require alternative resources. It is possible those resources would be synthetic foods to artificially increase the carry capacity of earth.

My second idea and probably less likely choice is that we would see a population increase. However, we might hit a “Breaking point” that after the increase of longer living people we would balance out in a sense that the new live to be 75 might average at about 100. And the population birth/death rate might equalize. Don’t forget that the population booms and slow downs are most likely going to be in there sometime.

 This second idea is based on the book, The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil. My idea isn’t actually in the book but that’s why it’s an idea. The singularity is in essence the fusion of technology with the soma. Our intelligence and creativity will combine to produce essentially bionic humans. I’d love to be around to see this. This would lead to increased population size as well.

However, both ideas produce ethical dilemmas. In the first one, creating artificial animals is questionable. I don’t have any specific comments at the moment. But more importantly the second one creates longer living people. This is problematic. Is there a certain point when the quality of life is defiled and it’d be better for a person to depart? I believe its ok to use means necessary to keep people alive but to what extent?  These kinds of questions are pretty big in regards to the permissibility of the actions taken.  I will be discussing, I imagine, some of these issues in the next paper. Clearly with the amount of literature and arguments behind the questioned posed, there will be substantial work put into the paper. Later on, i may put more thoughts on here. Most likely asuming ones at that and related to the article read.