Hey, di Filippo, if you’re really so worried about the number of people on this planet:
Did you ever feel that all the world’s problems–environmental, cultural, political–could be the result of just too many fucking people on the planet? (“Fucking,” as used here, is a precisely descriptive adjective, and not a mere kneejerk intensifier.) Nobody wants to talk about this issue, since it’s too fraught with ethical conundrums: First World versus Third World, Elites versus Marching Morons, People of Color versus People of Pallor, Age versus Youth, Healthy versus Sick, Coercion versus Choice. What a minefield! And, yes, I know the “good news” about how the rate of population growth has leveled off, leaving us with a projection of “only” nine billion souls for mid-century, and even a hollowing out of certain countries like Russia, Japan and Italy. But I still say the current population level is at the root of most of our troubles.
S.O.D. has the solution for you:
You first.
On a more general note, I agree with Lenny when he notes that overpopulation angst looks suspiciously loe bog standard capitalist propaganda about useless people, scroungers, dole scum, only on a global scale. The idea that our problems are unsolvable because there are too many people fecklessly breeding and hence natural resources are running out, is very convenient for those who have hogged the greater share of our world’s riches, while it lets the rest of us off the hook as well. No point in trying to change the world if everything you’re going to do is going to be swamped by the endless hordes of poor brown people. If there are too many people in the world and no matter how you divide its wealth the majority of people will remain poor and miserable, that means I don’t have too feel guilty about my own comfortable middle class lifestyle, or bother my betters about the far greater wealth they have amassed. It’s the sort of propaganda that does well with well meaning liberals and leftists, intelligent enough to see how difficult it is to change the system, but not intelligent enough to see through the fallacies of the overpopulation myth. It’s been that way ever since Malthus and sadly, science fiction has often been at the forefront of this propaganda effort, from “The Marching Morons” to Ideocracy.