I would eat the hell out of a lab grown burger tbh.

Brilliant idea 

If I see Jurassic Park become a reality in my lifetime I'll die a happy man.

You mean like in China where girls are aborted because families want their family name to be carried on so only want boys.

Sounds incredibly enlightening.

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Agreed, I dont think I'd call child restrictions enlightenment.

We will 'just' need to find alternatives for the natural resources that are in short supply, and possibly make better use of the vast regions which are currently underpopulated, that is if this happens in a timescale in which we haven't managed to colonise space.

Synthesised meat is a great start. I can already see in 50 years time us looking back and thinking how barbaric eating animals and donating human blood was.

Via science.

You mean like in China where girls are aborted because families want their family name to be carried on so only want boys.

Sounds incredibly enlightening.

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The alternatives to just continuing to breed are worse IMHO. Various papers on sustainability suggest that if the global populace consumed resources at the rate the western world does, the "sustainable" limit would be around 2 billion.

If we looked to the future with rose tinted glasses, where aids, cancer etc are solved, do you think the population will stabilise? It'll boom even more, assuming that the treatments are extended to those in 3rd world countries. If those countries are allowed to develop to Western levels, will lab grown meats etc be enough to support an 8 billion population consuming resources at a rate that currently could only be supported by 1/4 that number?

Before anyone attacks me for advocating some sort of racist stance or anything, I'm in favour of a global end to world hunger, aids, cancers. I don't believe that any one person has more of a right to these things than any other. But with that view I can appreciate that if humanity goes down that path, it would need to be responsible for its growing drain on resources.

Yes the system is broken in china, but if we're hypothesising about the future, and solutions to problems, I'd like to think that if it came to restricting the global birth rate, along with it would come a shift in culture, on a global scale. You could argue that there may be a point in time where parents might feel it's better to pool resources into bringing up a single child, regardless of sex, as it would give them the best chance to succeed when everywhere is overpopulated. It just requires a change in thinking.


And of course, there's always the chance that the system will end up in equilibrium if left alone. Higher population = higher demand for resources = less resources per person higher death rate. Other papers suggest that by the middle of this century the global death rate will be higher than the birth rate. That sounds good doesn't it.

Surely having a future where resources are depleted to the point that many die from starvation and illness, and then things "balance out", is much worse than just controlling breeding so that ultimately, over time, things balance out in a less polarised way? It'd have the added benefit of sorting the issue out before resources are otherwise depleted to the levels required to balance things out if left to its own.

I find this logic a bit like "maximum sustainable yield" used in fisheries management. The theory is that it's the maximum amount of fish stock you can harvest without the population declining, and that's how many fisheries are managed. To me that's treading a mighty fine line that could go over the brink, much like leaving things (population growth vs resource demand) to balance out.

I'd be all for controlling the population growth its clearly heading towards overcrowding and unsupportable populations, I'd go further and actually vet would be parents so we as a species can start to breed out genetic defects and other issues (sloth and stupidity).

The question with forcibly limiting population growth is who.

Who sets the guidelines? A countries ruler? A worldwide conglomeration? The farmers unions? Local authorities? World health organisation?

How do they enforce it and how vigorously, do we hunt down and murder all but the first born? Do we forcibly abort twins? What about Siamese twins? So now we're onto birth defects, do we abort those with a genetic disposition to obesity? Poor IQ?

A large issue with population growth is a growing aging population. Do we remove medical care for those over 65? Perhaps enforce euthanasia for vegetative or debilitative diseases?

The big benefit of doing nothing is that it will sort itself out, either by starvation and famine (as is currently going on in the third world) or by disease (as is predicted by Hollywood). We as humans don't have to make the tough decisions if we let nature sort it out.

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Tattoo cull.