A billion people

This is a map showing the relative populations on Earth. There are two massive blobs. Far East Asia with about two billion people and South Asia with about two billion people.

Not long ago I saw a headline I was highly skeptical of. It suggested that America ought to shoot for a billion people effectively tripling the current population. The idea is that it would sustain our growth and wealth. To me that is about as asinine as the old bumper sticker I used to see that read: “When I die I’m taking it all with me.”

Of course when a person dies nothing goes anywhere all the mass and energy that made the mind work is left to disintegrate and become incorporated into other carbon based lifeforms. And today each of us carbon based lifeforms, especially in the “developed world” has ownership of scads of stuff, Mostly plastic or sold or protected by plastic. That plastic is poisoning the Earth. If we grow by a billion people to match India and China we will have to figure out how to do it at the same time as we curtail the spread of this and other poisons which have become indispensable as we crowd out the rest of God’s creation.

The Chinese have always had a vast fertile landscape to grow their tens of millions turned billion. In doing so they have crowded out a great many species. Today they are busy overfishing the oceans while their traditional farmers are emptying the Earth of animals for bogus cures for Chinese who will take the useless medicine to improve their lives until there are no more pangolins or bears or any of hundreds of similar animals.

The Earth faces a more imminent threat than the Sun’s Super Nova a billion years or more from now. Humans began a serious extinction of useful animals as they spread out beyond the confines of Africa a couple hundred thousand years ago. They felled forests transported new animals to locales that infected wildlife and remade the Earth. There is no doubt that increasing populations is currently baked into progress and development and wealth and politics. But a billion more Americans will make one more continent unsustainable for the transient value of a few thousand more billionaires who corrupt politics by virtue of their vast fortunes.

Japan is the interesting world power to watch. Its xenophobia has kept it free of foreign genes and now its people are declining to a point where Japan’s native flora and fauna have a chance to rebound. How an increasingly doddering elderly population of disappearing rural hamlets will face this future is of great fascination to me. I believe the shrinkage of human populations is one key to avoiding either nuclear war, death by poison or the Rapture. Just watch the great die off of African wildlife which had a hundred thousand years of practice surviving humans until chainsaws and American made automatic rifles were passed out like candy.

A billion more Africans in the Congo Basin will kill that continents diversity and Ditto the destruction of South America’s Amazon. Soon it will look like Indonesia’s Palm Oil Plantations only Africa and Brazin will be growing more Big Macs for a burgeoning and ravenous human population.

By the way I’m almost ready to write something about this empty post relating to China. Their solution to having a billion people is to bring about Rand Paul and the libertarians greatest fear Harmony by Dictatorship. That’s one way to rule a billion people.

NOTE: This and other recent posts were spewed out with no editing because my head needed a quick emptying.

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