"Saving" the planet is funny, as if the planet had any intrinsic worth beyond a receptacle for as many humans as can sustainably fit there. SMBC put it nicely, without humans, Earth has no worth as there's no one to assign it worth.
Rofl.
We'll never have a proper hyper-Malthusian population crisis anyway, as the Third World can easily self-correct in periodic orgies of violence and disease, and our insane surplus can feed everyone on this continent 10x over.
That's certainly true, but:
- We have had significant food shortages for quite a while now; we've tried increasing the food supply, and it's only lead to bigger food shortages.
- On a completely different note, our way of creating more food weakens the environment greatly. Here's a thought experiment:
Pick a random asteroid. Your favorite one; just make sure it isn't too big. Now imagine it hitting the earth 20,000 years ago. What percentage of Earth's life would survive? Imagine it hitting the earth today. What would that percentage be now?
So like Daniel Quinn briefly says, if we keep on going this way, our only hope is that we manage to completely "tame" the world in a short enough time, because hell, if a significant natural disaster happens before we manage that, we, and the rest of the planet, is screwed.
My only hope is that we get viable colonies off Earth before someone manages to weaponize smallpox or something.
Meh, it's not like a smallpox pandemic couldn't extremely easily spread from one planet to another
. Our only hope is that after we manage to nearly wipe ourselves out, we come up with better time-travel than they did in Twelve Monkeys. And that when we send Bruce Willis back in time, he actually goes and shoots the crazy dude, instead of having-sex-with some random psychiatrist.
(agdfahdh, this CFC censorship, infringing on my right to use 4-letter words as abbreviations of much-longer-phrases)
