+460 The greatest threat to the survival of mankind at the moment is overpopulation and resource depletion. It's funny to think that we might be the first species to go extinct by being too good at surviving, amirite?

by Anonymous 12 years ago

ohh the irony

by Anonymous 12 years ago

The greatest threat to the survival of mankind is mankind. But, then again, this is coming from someone (me) who doesn't fully subscribe to secular humanistic ideals about humanity...

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Mankind caused overpopulation and resource depletion...

by Anonymous 12 years ago

well, if people would stop having a crap load of kids, like freaking 19 kids and counting, we could lean towards decreasing the pop. haha, but the irony. oh man.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Humans are not the first species to use all their resources then die. It's happened many times before.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

@1166437 (twisted_memories): I never said we would be the first to deplete resources :)

by Anonymous 12 years ago

But that's being bad at surviving...

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Humans managed to use resources from every source on the earth except parts such as the mantle, most of those animals died in their own small environment, but don't take it to seriously, I wrote it as a joke, an observation.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

DINOSAURS! Well... Maybe not... Anyway, so humans have access to a large environment? We still suck at surviving if we all die (but I don't think that will happen any time soon due to our own overuse and depletion of resources).

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Yep, and I think we did pretty well if we can survive hundreds of thousand of years with advanced shelter, technology, communication and discoveries.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Cockroaches are still winning! lol

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Yeah, like the aliens in "Signs" :)

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Funny, but we wouldn't go extinct. It would still be a huge tragedy because millions of people would die, but in reality the population would just decline until it reached a level that could be sustained by the then-presently available resources.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Not necessarily... if the resources run out, then that means it can't sustain anyone.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

@1166442 (Anonymous): True that, but it would just start again at a smaller amount of resources though, so it would happen but be progressively slower.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I tried to fix the problem and all of a sudden, you make me the bad guy

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I think they should actually consider putting a limit on children you can have. Maybe 2? And then you can adopt after that. I don't want my grandchildren to live in a world where there is so little natural beauty like forests and lakes because they have been destroyed and polluted by humans.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Doesn't China and other Communist countries already do that?

by Anonymous 12 years ago

You are probably quite right. But it should really be introduced in other countries too. I'm not american, are you? Would you say its getting over populated? I'm from malaysia and its pretty damn overpopulated in my city.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

unfortunately i am american. i do, however, live in a small town (i just put chicago for my profile because more people would recognize chicago, which is about 3 hours away) so its not overpopulated, but i'm sure that other places are overpopulated.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

The problem with that is that it takes away basic human rights that we as a society have agreed upon. There is no real answer.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Yeah unfortunately i think you're right. But when it gets so bad its threatening our survival as a species i'm sure they'll take into account some measures such as this.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Unfortunately, if the choice comes down to 2 options (giving up the right to have as many children as your loins can possibly produce or human extinction) then complaining about losing that right will be naught but whining and selfish bitching. It really sucks, but so does life. Choices aren't always fair, but you can only work with what's given to you. If I heard of a person who chose the ability to eat chocolate every day over an entire country's population surviving (as weird as that scenario would seem), I would despise that person. Yes, you should have the right to eat chocolate every day, but if your exercising that right is killing loads of innocent people, then not giving it up is despicable in my opinion. P.S Ben Franklin did say, "Those who give up freedom for security will lose both and deserve neither". I don't dare try to speak on behalf of man much wiser than I as if I know for certain exactly what he meant, but I'm fairly confident he meant...

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I've said this to you before but OMG i love you and your comments. You have an analogy or a metaphor for every possible argument.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Once again, I'm grateful for your very kind words. I sincerely thank you.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

(cont'd) the surrender of security to avert a potential, relatively minor and contained threat as opposed to a guaranteed worldwide major threat.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

They tried that in the Among the Hidden series. Didn't work out too well.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I was about to say that.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

But in that story there was food enough for the populatoin that the government was keeping back. In a situation where it was truly limited and stretched to the smallest rations I don't think anyone would even want children let alone 3.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I'm sure there are plenty of humans smart enough to live off of renewable resources.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Nothing lasts forever, sadly.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I'm sure there are plenty of humans smart enough to live off of renewable resources.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

There's approximately 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe, pretty sure some resources could be found someday.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

All resources necessary for human survival are renewable. As someone above said, if our need for resources such as food became greater than our ability to produce them, than many people would die and our population would return to lower levels. Resources aren't just going to suddenly "run out" and cause everyone to suddenly die. As long as there is sunlight, people will have the ability to grow crops and purify water. If the sun burns out, then at that point, yes we are fucked.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

It's not so much that we're good at surviving, it's just that millenia of complacency and inbreeding have rendered our concept of "survival of the fittest" completely null

by Anonymous 12 years ago