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Originally Posted by popcorninthesofa
Appreciated your opinion AJ. I think what Kam meant was that without oil or some other cheap energy source, there would be no way to sustain the population we have now. The math does'nt add up. Population was steady for many centuries before the industrial revolution when it peaked.
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Actually, population has fluctuated sometimes wildly. Population has been on an overall upward trend for the last 40 or 50,000 years (but that was easy because all of us are descended from a population of no more than about 10,000 breeding pairs living about 50K years ago). But with various diseases Europe alone had two or three big die offs from plague alone (at least one of those was half the population of Europe and that's just one continent). It is almost certain that we cannot maintain 8 or 9 billion people (that number, barring a catastrophic event is a fait accompli at this point) without technology. There are (relatively) cheap energy sources that could be deployed now but I doubt that the United States will do them in a timely or sane fashion. As far as agriculture the thing that would be *most* useful is GMOs but, for reasons that mystify me, people seem to think that there is a fundamental difference between taking the genes of one living thing and randomly mixing it the genes of another living thing (what we've spent the last 12,000 years doing with all our crops and the last 20,000 years with animals) and taking the genes of one living thing and non-randomly mixing it with the genes of another living thing (genetic engineering). Certainly from the gene's point of view, those are equivalent.
Perhaps you are right. I read the article that Kam linked to to be saying that Bill Gates was saying we should use vaccines as a way of culling the population but it is certainly possible that I misread it.