So I keep seeing this ad for a movie about some sort of murderschool in a dystopian future where a bunch of people have to die because overpopulation or some such nonsense.
Firstly, I don’t recall seeing a single POC in the preview. Someone less pasty White than me can and probably already has done a better job than me of explaining why an apocalypse where only White people survive is problematic, but let me just state for the record: Seriously? …Seriously???
Anyway, time to blow a giant hole in the entire premise of the movie: overpopulation and having no resources left is not a thing that’s going to be a problem. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we could squander our renewable resources by electing a few generations of Captain Planet villains–something the election of Lord Dampnut ought to show is is far from outside the realm of possibility–but that would be a product of willful stupidity, like a nuclear war, not something that occurs inevitably as a product of having “too many” people on this planet.
This has also been explained earlier and better (see videos at the end), but let me just say this much: the limiting factor for how many humans we can have on this planet is waste heat. If we block the sun’s infrared and ultraviolet light from reaching the planet (something we could do with today’s technology), that means we have 10^17 Watts to play with. Assuming we have a power source that’s clean, reliable, powerful, and efficient, like beamed solar or fusion, we can create a ridiculously luxurious society for 10,000 Watts per person--in other words, our upper population limit for the Earth is ten trillion people, barring the invention of some sort of thermal superconductor.
But surely that’d be cramped, right? No. Imagine an arcology with 10,000 square feet of floor-space per resident (to be fair, this does include common spaces and super-efficient indoor farms). If it has five thousand residents, that’s fifty million square feet, and if its a hundred stories tall, that’s five hundred thousand per floor; if it’s a rectangle twice as long as it is wide, that’s a footprint of 500 by 1000 feet. If you average eleven of these buildings per square mile of the Earth’s surface (and it’s worth noting that you can have these on the oceans and in the arctic, because they’re arcologies), you can house that entire ten trillion population above and still give eighty percent of the Earth’s surface to nature.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s any number of reasons that might not happen, but the point is that it’s possible. And the fact that it’s possible means that all this hand wringing about there being too many people on the planet is utter bullshit.
Anyway, the videos I promised above:
