X-Message-Number: 14640
Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2000 09:32:44 -0700
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Re: Overpopulation

At 05:00 AM 10/8/00 -0400, Phil Rhoades #14631 wrote:
>...make no mistake, humans (in our current form) cannot 
>survive without an earth that has substantial biodiversity:
>overpopulation and wasted resources on technologies of
>destruction IS a survival issue.

People cannot live without the Earth?  Yes, immense difficulties have so
far attended all the projects that have tried to create independent
self-sustaining habitats for human beings, but isn't it simply a question
of when such projects will succeed?

Were the Earth to be utterly destroyed in one hundred years by a moon-sized
asteroid, I think that humanity would survive, even if we
were---unaccountably---limited to our current form.  Much sooner than that,
the technology will exist to allow ordinary people to live elsewhere.

But then this implies that the much vaunted dependency of humanity upon our
natural environment is frequently overstated.

Moreover, there is the moral perspective.  While many praise Nature's
terrible wastefulness, profligacy, and endless cycles of large animals
hunting down and chewing up small animals, we should praise instead our
human moral ideals.  We alone can envision a world in which ideas may die,
but where creatures never suffer or die.

What can be more important than the experiences of living beings?  As for
now, Nature (or Nature's God) has not done a very compassionate job for our
planet's living populations.  The pain and pleasure, happiness and despair,
and success and failure of living creatures has evidently been normalized
to provide for maximum reproductive success.  But we can choose instead to
arrange for immense joy, contentment, happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction
and immortality to be life's norms.  There isn't any reason why over the
course of the next million years the solar system can't spring to life with
vastly more living matter---matter which can benefit from existence
infinitely more than the one ten-billionth of the Earth's mass (our
biosphere) presently does.   (See http://www.hedweb.com  for The Hedonistic
Imperative.)

Lee Corbin

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14640