Christmas Gloom and Doom

Having grown up in a dysfunctional family, I think it's always appropriate to share a little gloom and doom on Christmas.  I watched this video from www.upworthy.com the other day about human overpopulation and exponential growth.  Here's the link: http://www.upworthy.com/a-smartypants-scientist-makes-an-easy-analogy-about-our-planet-and-now-im-scared  .  I hope you will watch this short video, so that you can follow my train of thought.

First of all, let me say that the video is a gross over simplification of a very complex problem, but the analogy the speaker uses is basically on target.  The speaker refers to a test tube filled with food to which he adds one, one celled bacterium. The bacterium reproduces every minute so that in 59 minutes the tube is half filled with bacteria and half empty of food.  In the next minute the bacteria reproduces again, doubling in population, and in that minute the test tube becomes full of bacteria and depleted of food.  The speaker postulates that the human species is in it's 59th minute.  If you look at the historical record, you see that world population growth was relatively flat until the beginning of the industrial age.  World population did not reach one billion until around 1804.  After that, it doubled by 1927, reached 5 billion by 1987, 6 billion by 1999, and is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050.  You can see that this is not exactly exponential growth, but does represent an alarming trend.  It must be also be noted that birth rates are decreasing and the rate of world population growth is decreasing as well, but I'm not sure that's a positive sign, and here's (at least in my mind) why.

I think that any reasonable person would agree that there has to be a finite carrying capacity for the human population on our planet.  I don't know what that number is, but based upon the population growth of the last 200 or so years,  it does seem that our test tube is rapidly filling up.

I remember a similar analogy from back in high school.  In this case, lab rats were allowed to breed without any restraint of food and water, but the increasing population was confined to the same amount of living space.  Eventually the population seized  to thrive, and ultimately collapsed.

So, here we have a two pronged problem.  On the one hand, our population continues to expand, using up available resources, and polluting and taxing our environment, and, on the other hand we have increased competition for the remaining resources.  It must be noted, that even at our current population, over one billion people live in extreme poverty of less than $1.25 income per day.  I doubt that the pie, even if we were all willing to sacrifice our own well being for the sake of humanity as a whole, is big enough to allow the current world population a comfortable life style.

In fact, I believe that just the opposite is beginning to happen.  What I see, both around the world, and in our own country, is the hoarding of resources.  The world's uber (sorry, I don't know how to add the umlaut) wealthy control almost all of the available resources, and are increasing unwilling to share, while the rest of us compete for the decreasing remainder, and become both unwilling and unable to share.  We are, like the lab rats, becoming less able to function as a normal society.

I'm not sure what we can do about this dismal situation, but, Like Pascal's wager, here are our choices.  We do nothing, and bet that things will improve.  If we lose that bet, our world is doomed.  Alternatively, we chose to address our problems, and, even though we may still be doomed, at least we will have made some improvement in our own lives and the lives of others, and we have a chance of winning the reward of heaven on earth.