1. Lots of people die quickly. This is sort of the default option here, one of the likely outcome of too many of us sitting on too much of our hands, figuratively speaking. People-studying scientists called "demographers" use a measure called Pop to determine if there are too many people or not, and currently Pop is at record highs. The risk is that Pop will get too high and suddenly collapse, resulting in death, and eerily mirroring the scene at my 9th birthday party.
2. People die in a controlled way. Ironically, we can't draw straws because there are too many people for us to have enough long straws. Have people flip coins? You'd destroy India's central banking system. No, we are talking about assignation to death camps by evil artificial intelligence based on average transcription WPM on a QWERTY keyboard (phew!). We are talking about tinpot despots drawing up naughty and nice lists from pole to pole to sweep political inconveniences under the sheepleskin rug of human eradication quotas. We'll get that twerp Drake too, no problem.
3. Volunteer dying. Ok listen up, suicide is not the answer. Unless it came with a small stipend for your surviving family or a government program of your choosing. We could have it be opt-out like organ donation, send in the form every year or board the bus to the local murder gulch. Difficulty here is that not enough people are going to volunteer die, so at a certain point compulsory volunteer dying may still be necessary.
4. Child limitation policy would reduce the number of children you are allowed to have. How would this work exactly? Here is my idea exactly. Okay, if every person has one descendant on average, the population stays the same, that's multiplication. So how about this. You get a sticker when you're a tween. This sticker is redeemable for one baby. You can turn it in and get a descendant! But, it's easy to lose stickers and you can NOT have a replacement if you lose yours. Soon there will be very few people - indeed. The downside, this greatly increases the weight of grandmas relative to normals.
5. Prophylactics. No thank you!
6. Offworld colonies! Lots of advantages here. First of all the number of disasters and deaths involved in trying to populate Venus would be astronomical, literally! Does it even matter if space travel is possible or if cryogenesis works? How about the sweet satisfaction of blasting 500000 frozen corpses onto mars every week while faking footage of a red Eden on B.E.T.? That's right, this is a racist suggestion! They all kinda are.
The following types of comments are prohibited by thread law.
-"Start with yourself" or other such petty variants, I don't have a particular issue with this but just shut up, have some dignity and shut the fucking up.
-"The world could support the many billions in satisfied leisure if only the rich capitalists would stop with the massive overconsumption of resource consumption blah blah blah i am FUCKING STUPID, AND IGNORAMUS" Yes and no. More precisely, no. You cannot tell me there should be 7 billion people walking around eating rices and wearing leafs. Its to many. For fuck sake. You know it and I know it, and knowing it, why post it?
-Memes, i dont like them, unless they "are funny"
Sincerely, swampman
Coauthored by BEE VENOM
Edited by swampman ()
swampman posted:People die in a controlled way. Ironically
getfiscal posted:ocean. colonize. now. fucking. now. hurry.
Are you talking about sea floor, sea surface, or somewhere in between? How about all three? Lets talk about rising sea levels when half the ocean's volume is IKEA Submersible Bachelor Bubbles, ok?
Superabound posted:bring back the greatest monsters of the 20th century
Overpopulation is a 21st century problem, or maybe if we drag it out long enough it can be a 22nd century problem, and it will require 21st century and 22nd century solutions respectively. You can't just commit genocide anymore okay? "Oh I'm gonna murder you all, cause your religion is inferior," that is hillbilly shit and doesnt play to a globular audience. Who's gonna enjoy a stupid cliche paramilitary tossing villagers into mass graves for 90 minutes in Steven Soderbergh's movie about it
Superabound posted:bring back the greatest monsters of the 20th century
The classic Universal monsters! Such as The Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the wolf man, the invisible man, and the creature from the black lagoon.
libelous_slander posted:I only watch HBO's game changing award winning series, "Girls"
well SPOILER ALERT for the last couple episodes it looked like there was a evil illuminati group scheming to distribute a genetically-engineered-by-nazi-scientist-to-only-kill-minorities virus. but then at the very end they find out that the evil illuminatis are actually good neoliberals who have engineered an equal-opportunity sterility virus because they're worried about overpopulation which was cool and funny
quavers posted:what about a disease that selectively kills men? it solves other problems too
Not a very good long term solution, imo. Reproductive Potential is primarily determined by the size of the female population, meaning if one wants to limit population size it's more productive to kill the does than the bucks. A challenge when managing game animals, where males are the target preferred by most sportmen.
swampman posted:How about age limits, they tried that before right? For like 100000 years. Age limits were at 40 or something, I say, 30 would be fine, and bring back child labor. Just my opinion.
2nd part of #15. prove your worth, the rHizzonE
quavers posted:what about a disease that selectively kills men? it solves other problems too
can Capital Punishment and Workplace Injury be weaponized
when people complain that the third world is the most problematic re: overpopulation aren't they neglecting to think about how many hundreds of times more resources western children eat up than a third world baby? i'm sure its a little of both third world birthrate and the insatiable bottomless westerners, but doesn't a middle class baby consume more and produce way more waste than some villages? if counter-overpopulation procedures like birth control education etc are put in place in the third world shouldnt lifestyle austerity measures be put on first worlders as well?
reggaelolita posted:a lil offtopic, but i have a sincere question that id like a smarty man, woman, or other's thoughts on:
when people complain that the third world is the most problematic re: overpopulation aren't they neglecting to think about how many hundreds of times more resources western children eat up than a third world baby? i'm sure its a little of both third world birthrate and the insatiable bottomless westerners, but doesn't a middle class baby consume more and produce way more waste than some villages? if counter-overpopulation procedures like birth control education etc are put in place in the third world shouldnt lifestyle austerity measures be put on first worlders as well?
Third worlders rely on their offspring for care in later life. The more offspring the more stable their future in old age. It's not going to stop any time soon. First worlders rely on cheap labour for their quality of life; so high third world birth rates are useful there too. It's likely more effective to slow first world birth rate in terms of resources as a starting point, this is already happening. Economically, of course, that's not something that works very well as having a large old age population and small workforce isn't ideal and there is a lot of effort to stop the dramatically lowering birth rate in certain countries. It's a dynamic system though, and so it's hard to predict exactly what the long term effects of any policy will be.
also racism
reggaelolita posted:a lil offtopic, but i have a sincere question that id like a smarty man, woman, or other's thoughts on:
when people complain that the third world is the most problematic re: overpopulation aren't they neglecting to think about how many hundreds of times more resources western children eat up than a third world baby? i'm sure its a little of both third world birthrate and the insatiable bottomless westerners, but doesn't a middle class baby consume more and produce way more waste than some villages? if counter-overpopulation procedures like birth control education etc are put in place in the third world shouldnt lifestyle austerity measures be put on first worlders as well?
the issue is that if one assumes finite resources, more people mean fewer resources per person. The technocratic liberal who is likely to have an opinion on "over-population," generally envisions an ideal world in which everybody has an iPod and drives an electric car and is is rich as them. Obviously any increase in population threatens this goal, and thus they are prone to identify the number of people as the problem rather than the number of resources consumed per person.
The same kind of person prefers waiting for uncertain technological developments and economies of scale to make an all electric personal vehicle fleet viable, rather than investing in proven mass transit infrastructure for similarly selfish reasons, they like their car based lifestyle and if all else fails, will resort to the old "no political-will" argument, regarding investment in mass transit.
There are some hard limits regarding the total sustainable human population, mostly related to how much food we can produce. Today almost all of the most productive land is already under cultivation, meaning as the population grows we either have to increase the productivity of land we already use, or begin cultivating land considered marginal today.
While there is still a lot of room for increasing the efficiency of todays agriculture, who knows how far we can take it. Unfortunately a lot of land is being lost to desertification and more intensive cultivation in arid regions just makes this worse. Elsewhere, as more people are driven to clear tropical forests, either for corn and beans, cattle ranches, or oil palm, we threaten to lock in catastrophic global warming.
One of the greatest challenges faced by modern climate engineers is how, in the face of increasing demand and prices for agricultural commodities, to prevent the development of tropical forests. Probably it will involve massive payments to Brazil and Indonesia, but today there's absolutely no political will, and it's hard to imagine a future in which that Will will ever manifest.
Squalid posted:While there is still a lot of room for increasing the efficiency of todays agriculture, who knows how far we can take it.
it really requires crop standardization which is really bad for genetics & adapting to changing conditions.