Its now or never

grahamg

grahamg

Old codger
Location
South of Manchester, UK
Apologies for bold type on thread title, I'll explain why I've used both the type and provocative title eventually, but here are some thougthts given to me on the world's future you might wish to engage with here:


"How many of you have seen a Golden Toad, Black Rhino, Leatherback Turtle,Sumatran Elephant, or a Western Lowland Gorilla lately? Well, I'm sure a Brown Spider Monkey, Siberian Tiger, Orangutan, or a Vaquita, (species of Porpoise), or a rare mammal like a Pangolin or Saola has crossed your path this week? You say no? All these animals have something in common. They are on the endangered species list.

Our civilization is now on the precipice of a precarious precedent, preposterous as it might sound. The human race is about to become an endangered species. The time to act is now so our society does not follow the dodo bird and wooly mammoth into the abyss of extinction.

New laws must be legislated immediately to accelerate predator, pest, and parasite control. Habitat management and environmental methodologies must be instituted faster than you can say "Jack Robinson." Mankind must draw on disciplines such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, ecology, climatology, geography, and pornography.

Death rates have exceeded birth rates throughout the world. The shocking reality is as the older populace dies out, who is left to take of the babies? Who is left to potty train them? Who will change their diapers or Pampers or Huggies? Who will manufacture their jars of Beechnut or Gerber baby foods? Who is left to milk the cows for their sustenance or other nourishment if they happen to be lactose intolerant? YES..This is a scary but inevitable scenario.

There is only one course of action that We The People of the planet Earth must follow . There is only one Long and Winding Road we must take. Are we Beetles or descendants of Mice and Men? Indeed, we must follow The Road Not Taken. The time has come,the Walrus said to talk of many things. Let us all as human beings embrace that we do not go gentle into that good night. "
 

grahamg said:
Apologies for bold type on thread title, I'll explain why I've used both the type and provocative title eventually, but here are some thougthts given to me on the world's future you might wish to engage with here:
Our civilization is now on the precipice of a precarious precedent, preposterous as it might sound. The human race is about to become an endangered species. The time to act is now so our society does not follow the dodo bird and wooly mammoth into the abyss of extinction.
Death rates have exceeded birth rates throughout the world. The shocking reality is as the older populace dies out, who is left to take of the babies? Who is left to potty train them? Who will change their diapers or Pampers or Huggies? Who will manufacture their jars of Beechnut or Gerber baby foods? Who is left to milk the cows for their sustenance or other nourishment if they happen to be lactose intolerant? YES..This is a scary but inevitable scenario.
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I don't know where you are getting any information about humans becoming extinct...due to a lower birth rate. Quite the opposite...human numbers are growing at a nearly unsustainable rate. the world population has gone from 1 billion to almost 7.5 billion in just the past 150 years....with the bulk of that growth occurring in just the past 50 or 60 years. Estimates of population by the year 2100 range anywhere from 9 billion, on the low side, to as many as 15 billion on the high side. If anything, if the human species goes extinct, it will be because of Overpopulation....or another asteroid strike. There are only a half dozen nations that are experiencing a lower birth to death rate, while most nations...mostly the undeveloped nations...are growing wildly. Here's some numbers to explore.....

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
 
You are correct of course

Don M. said:
[
I don't know where you are getting any information about humans becoming extinct...due to a lower birth rate. Quite the opposite...human numbers are growing at a nearly unsustainable rate. the world population has gone from 1 billion to almost 7.5 billion in just the past 150 years....with the bulk of that growth occurring in just the past 50 or 60 years. Estimates of population by the year 2100 range anywhere from 9 billion, on the low side, to as many as 15 billion on the high side. If anything, if the human species goes extinct, it will be because of Overpopulation....or another asteroid strike. There are only a half dozen nations that are experiencing a lower birth to death rate, while most nations...mostly the undeveloped nations...are growing wildly. Here's some numbers to explore.....

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
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Dear Don,
thank you for your response and of course you are correct. I had been a bit lazy as usual and failed to notice that section myself when I chose to copy the views given under the title "ITS NOW OR NEVER", although I admired the general tenet of the views shown.

BTW Radishrose, I think I get your comment, are beetles the only species likely to survive Armagedon?
 
Most of us will have at least heard of Charles Darwin and probably less will realise that we were not created by some sky fairy but instead evolved from a primordial for want of a better word soup. Darwin wrote about this in his book "On the Origin of Species" but for a variety of reasons, non of them good, his later book "The Descent of Man" has been variously blacklisted, outright banned, and widely condemned because it exposes a truth that is indigestible by the "kum by yar we're all equal" delusional "right" thinkers.

I don't like long quotes but in this case I believe it is justified because few would otherwise read it and it perfectly encapsulates something that is being worse than ignored by society today.


You probably won't like it.


"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected"




 
There is a lot of truth in Darwin's "Descent of Man". In virtually every other species, the rule is "survival of the fittest". Humans try to take care of everyone...which, on the surface, is a good thing. However, as our populations soar, and fewer opportunities exist for large numbers of that population to support themselves, something is going to "Give". In Darwin's time, "marriage" might have had some influence on populations, but today, marriage seems to be of little importance insofar as procreation is concerned. In some segments of our society, 70% of the births are to unwed mothers.

A UN study conducted in the late 1990's concluded that the optimum sustainable population would be no more than 6 billion. We are well past that, and headed for at least 9 billion. When 1/3rd to 1/2 of the population is living in or near poverty, and those lucky enough to be able to support themselves are being overstressed with taxes, etc., to support these excess billions...there WILL be a thinning of the human Herd. Many futurists have predicted that this "tipping point" will occur before this century is over.
 
Don M. said:
There is a lot of truth in Darwin's "Descent of Man". In virtually every other species, the rule is "survival of the fittest". Humans try to take care of everyone...which, on the surface, is a good thing. However, as our populations soar, and fewer opportunities exist for large numbers of that population to support themselves, something is going to "Give". In Darwin's time, "marriage" might have had some influence on populations, but today, marriage seems to be of little importance insofar as procreation is concerned. In some segments of our society, 70% of the births are to unwed mothers.

A UN study conducted in the late 1990's concluded that the optimum sustainable population would be no more than 6 billion. We are well past that, and headed for at least 9 billion. When 1/3rd to 1/2 of the population is living in or near poverty, and those lucky enough to be able to support themselves are being overstressed with taxes, etc., to support these excess billions...there WILL be a thinning of the human Herd. Many futurists have predicted that this "tipping point" will occur before this century is over.
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What to say in response to the unexpected way this thread has developed, or slightly unexpected way?

I have read "On the Origin of Species" and visited Downe House, in Surrey, Darwin's home and seen the experiment he designed to try to demonstrate the importance of earthworms (a threaded rod through a large stone in the ground, which due to the action of earthworms beneath it in the soil, allowed the nut to be tightened every now and again as they'd moved so much soil to one side.

The clip taken from "The decent of man" does sound "risky" nowadays and I was not familiar with it and also controversially Aeron said, quote: "it perfectly encapsulates something that is being worse than ignored by society today."

I've read Desmond Morris's books, The Naked Ape, The Human Zoo, and Manwatching, so like to think I've got some insight into more contemporary thinking on this kind of "Eugenic theory" as promoted by you know who, and his National Socialist Party, in the 1930's and 1940's. I cannot remember precisely what he said about eugenics but he did address the subject of the increasing levels of divorce in the UK, and said he believed it would lead to a "nation of broken hearted people!" The reason he said that was because he thought human evolution had made the survival of the parents relationship, and the slow development of human babies/children into adulthood permitted by this relationship nurturing them for so long as a result (an extraordinary length of time in the animal kingdom) crucial to human evolution.
 
I found this explanation on one of the many websites relating to Darwin and his cousin Galton who wrote about eugenics:-

"His (Darwin's) political opinions (and Galton's as well) were strongly inclined against the coercive, authoritarian forms of eugenics that became so prominent in the 20th Century. Note that even Galton's ideas about eugenics were not the compulsory sterilisation or genocidal programs of Nazi Germany, but instead he hoped that by encouraging more thought in heredity reproduction, human mores could change in a way that would compel people to choose better mates"
 
Maybe it hasn't been noticed but humans are pretty greedy and want things when they want them. Animals might get in the way for land development or be of use somehow for a variety of things like cosmetics, fur, aphrodisiacs, jewelry.


With a limited life span humans will use resources for their comfort and enjoyment and nature in all it's bounty takes a back seat to what mankind wants.

Nice thought to want to preserve what has evolved on planet earth but the reality of 7 billion plus humans wanting and animals in nature dwindling isn't going to come into focus until earth can't supply resources to the quantity being used up by those 7 billon plus consumers.
 
Knight said:
Nice thought to want to preserve what has evolved on planet earth but the reality of 7 billion plus humans wanting and animals in nature dwindling isn't going to come into focus until earth can't supply resources to the quantity being used up by those 7 billon plus consumers.
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Living in the country, in the deep woods, I see the basic rules of nature, in action, from year to year. When the weather has been kind, and there is plenty of natural food available for the critters, we have an abundance of deer, and squirrels, etc. However, in years when the weather has been hot and dry, the next years "crop" of critters is substantially smaller. The animals seem to know how many of them can survive decently under a given set of conditions. Humans, however, seem to think that they can continue their "growth" no matter what the future holds. Some people question the wisdom of all these GMO food crops, or the feeding of growth hormones to the farm animals, but the reality is that if food processors weren't "enhancing" our food supplies, we would already be in a situation where some grocery store shelves would be half empty, and the food available would be substantially more expensive. The United Nations estimates that about 10% of the global population....mostly in underdeveloped nations...are suffering from chronic undernourishment...and as the global population continues to rise, so too, will that number.
 
Don M. said:
Living in the country, in the deep woods, I see the basic rules of nature, in action, from year to year. When the weather has been kind, and there is plenty of natural food available for the critters, we have an abundance of deer, and squirrels, etc. However, in years when the weather has been hot and dry, the next years "crop" of critters is substantially smaller. The animals seem to know how many of them can survive decently under a given set of conditions. Humans, however, seem to think that they can continue their "growth" no matter what the future holds. Some people question the wisdom of all these GMO food crops, or the feeding of growth hormones to the farm animals, but the reality is that if food processors weren't "enhancing" our food supplies, we would already be in a situation where some grocery store shelves would be half empty, and the food available would be substantially more expensive. The United Nations estimates that about 10% of the global population....mostly in underdeveloped nations...are suffering from chronic undernourishment...and as the global population continues to rise, so too, will that number.
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Thank you for your contributions to this "serious" thread, and I have to agree with both Knight and Don M, but have discovered a funny thing about the guy's views I used to start this thread. He's told me he wrote those views or cobbled together different pieces of information as a way of creating humour (he is from the US so it may be easy to see our sense of humour may be different). He told me it amuses him to throw in a few clues he isn't serious as he posts these things all over the place, and one indication I might have picked up on was the bit where "Jack Robinson" came up and in the list of sensible academic institutions we should be looking to for assistance he did add "pornography" didn't he, and his views were in a "light hearted" area, so you have to say "gotcha" at least as far as I'm concerned. He was very nice about it too, and I've told him I'll be alerted to his humour in future, plus the original provocative title and much else is maybe worth our "enjoying ourselves, whilst continuing to take it seriously."
 
As a devout and fully committed hedonist I couldn't give a flying gig about alol of these gloomy predictions...
 
Oh really, that's nice for you I guess

Ralphy1 said:
As a devout and fully committed hedonist I couldn't give a flying gig about alol of these gloomy predictions...
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Maybe so Ralphy but as we've now discovered this thread was started by a guy (from New York) trying to create some humour so I guess he wont give a flying fig or gig either how you feel, and haven't you objected or come up with something negative about another one of my threads recently? You can just leave them alone if they irritate you and let others who feel differently discuss their viewpoints in peace or have a good laugh, whatever :confused:
 

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