everything is a remix

I love this site because we allow ourselves to digress from from the theremin subject from time to time.  Just look at where this topic went in only two pages!

Capitalism is a linear system.  The faster natural resources are manufactured into consumer goods ending up in a landfill or the atmosphere the richer and happier everyone is......but it is coming to an end.

One aspect that no one really wants to talk about is the fact that no matter what system of government or economy you refer to the biggest problem facing us is over population. There are nearly twice as many people on the planet today as there were when I was born!  That has never happened in the history of mankind. I am often amazed that we have managed to maintain our standard of living to this day with so many humans scraping for the dream of living in a house 4 times the size they need next to a Walmart.  

No matter how frugal I live my life I contribute to the problem and that is something that depresses me.  I was brought up learning how to survive in this system so I unfortunately can't go into the woods and live off the grid like Grizzly Adams.  Due to my dependence on modern medicine I would surely die.  How selfish of me!  What a dilemma! 

"...biggest problem facing us is over population."  - bisem

I agree and recall lots of serious public talk and hair-on-fire concern about this when I was a kid (40+ years ago).  Nowadays mostly *crickets* - which is weird because the problem is exponentially worse.  If our race could live within its means the world could give us everything we need for another billion years or so (the sun will likely become too hot after that, turning Earth into something akin to Venus).  Tragedy of the commons writ about as large as it can get.

"No matter how frugal I live my life I contribute to the problem and that is something that depresses me."

Some might mislabel this "liberal guilt".  But I definitely know where you're coming from, it makes me want to live in 400 sq feet, hand building recyclable 10 string guitars out of bamboo instead of digital Theremins.

Yes.   The theremin was invented back when things were really starting to spiral out of control.

"One aspect that no one really wants to talk about is the fact that no matter what system of government or economy you refer to the biggest problem facing us is over population." - Bisem

Hmmm.. Not sure about that.. Certainly here in the UK, thats almost the only thing many "liberal" types want to talk about.

I agree (and dont think anyone could really disagree) that "over population" is a major problem, and that continued increase in human population cannot be sustained..

But are we at this point yet? Is the reason why a large percentage of the human population on this planet live on the edge of survival really because we are over-populated? .. I think not!

It is my "belief" that "we" are driven by unseen natural forces - That, for example, the drive to propogate our genes over-rides rational evaluation regarding the best form or mechanism or "structure" for out offspring. When our situation / environment is worst and most ill-suited to the survival of our children, we produce more children.. Evolution has probably "computed" that there is more probability of gene propogation if one has a lot of children with few surviving, than if one has few children and devoted more attention / resources to these..... This "computation" is probably "wrong" for our present situation - but evolution doesnt "correct" quickly - Education and society can compensate (China for example - but here society introduced a big error by biasing the gender of children away from what nature would have produced)

I feel that often our focus on "over population" is a way to "pass the blame" to those who are "least to blame" - A whole African village can consume less, and contribute less to harming the environment, than a single adult in a rich western nation (or at least this certainly was the case until we started providing them with destructive technology)... Alas, it seems that a mindset has come into being - that even those on the edge of survival, as soon as they get elevated above this level, now aspire to ownership of technology - People who buy mobile phones when they dont have clean water in their homes !! - My daughter encountered this when working with a NGO in Ghana.. The phone a man owns is a status symbol.

Oh hell - its too late now.. But if, instead of exploiting the poor in order to grab more than we needed, we had ensured that more of the benefits of technology had trickled back to them.. If we had eliminated (rather than increased) poverty, I do not believe there would be an "over population" problem.. If we had not imposed our utterly dysfunctional social perspectives on those we dominated, and instead allowed them to keep the structures they had developed, we would all be living better lives.

I think that with enough will, and use of technology for betterment of all humanity, we could probably sustain twice the present global population - There is no reason, for example, why cities need to be above ground - We could have all our industry and transportation and even residential accomodation in a form which did not consume land required for food production... We talk about colonising other worlds as a 'solution' when we dont even have any 'colonisation' of the vast 'land mass' under our seas.

I really think we could do it - we could ALL be living good lives - lives free from the guilt we carry, free from the effort of supressing this guilt, free from the helplessness we feel as we see suffering WE have caused.. And lives free from every form of poverty.

And I dont believe that we need to go back to bamboo guitars or old "natural" construction methods.. I dont think the technology "caused" our present problems, I think the abuse of the technology has been harmful, and that the destructive capitalist drive to produce waste, rather than to recycle - and the way that 'capital' has been 'managed' and hoarded.. these are the problems..

But these problems can be overcome - they are ideological IMO - Get rid of the concept of "property" and "ownership" - Imagine.....

LOL ;-) Im not a dreamer anymore - I know it aint going to happen, not even the tiniest taste of its going to happen - we are going to continue the way we have been going - those who "have" will become (rightfully) more paranoid and live in their armed enclaves, those on the edge of survival will continue producing more children as nature dictates, and those between the two extremes will continue being trampled on or engage in pointless "revolutions" - and in a few years none of it will matter at all - everyone will be miserable - as humanity slips into irreversible extinction... or, at "best", "over population" will be the least of the problems - As one SF writer said "I cannot see the future - theres a mountain of corpses blocking the view".

"Yes.   The theremin was invented back when things were really starting to spiral out of control."

The theremin opened the door between dimensions - our wonderful peacefull world got invaded again by a new batch of technology demons* (the times before when this happened were equally disasterous - first was when we started using fire, the next was the invention of the wheel)

btw - I may be away for a few days - so I may be a while replying to any comments on the above ;-)

*in case anyone thinks I am being serious here, im not! - I know perfectly well that there never has been a " wonderful peacefull world " and that technology is only an abused tool, not the cause.. We are the reason why we dont have peace - Our tools only empower us to be more bloody than if we were just fighting without tools.

(I feel that often our focus on "over population" is a way to "pass the blame" to those who are "least to blame")

I actually agree with this statement.  I think that any self sustaining culture should inherit the earth....and if there are any left in the future they still may.   

Perhaps in a Star Trek society we could all live great lives in greater numbers but there is something flawed in our internal wiring that is going to prevent that called greed and distrust of one another.  We still have the ancient tribal survival instinct intact.

In a practical sense I believe we have the ability to provide for our basic needs through technology right now if we wanted to but we still don't have the means to deal with the waste including solid, nuclear and our more recent concern... CO2.  Perhaps once magnetic drive technology is released to the public we can float all of our waste to outer space for pennies on the dollar and hurl it off to the sun to be incinerated. Right now we have to live in our own poop!

" Perhaps once magnetic drive technology is released to the public we can float all of our waste to outer space for pennies on the dollar and hurl it off to the sun to be incinerated. Right now we have to live in our own poop!" - Bisem

LOL ;-)

I think the "live in our own poop!" is the big error in our thinking - Poop is not actually vile - its part of the natural order - and if it was used as it should be, we would not need millions of tons of artificial fertilizers or dangerous GM crops designed to be tolerant to the chemically engineered shit we dump in the soil and onto the crops... It astounds me that there are places where GM crops and chemicals are used for their soil, but human excreta is dumped into their holy river, which is effectively now an open sewer.... Food is produced for the cities, but the oeganic matter is not returned to nature for recycling, it is dumped where it cannot be assimulated and causes pollution and disease - and the disrupted natural cycle is "compensated" with artificially produced 'nutrients' and technologically modified crops.... WTF!

To me, we went wrong by regarding ourselves as above nature, and thinking of ourselves as anything other than animals - we created an artificial line - and everything "below" this line was "dirty" or needed to be "tamed" - Instead of recognizing the responsibility implicit in our  "superiority", and that our best route (the best way to obtain sustainability and long term success for our offspring / genes) would be to adopt the role of caretakers, we went to route of short term greed and exploitation with no thought for the future.. We enshrined "independence" but ignored the obvious fact that nothing is "independent" and everything and everyone is utterly dependent on everything and everyone else.

Most of our waste can be reused - or could be carefully stored and managed until we had the technology to recycle it.. The quantity of minerals we can extract from earth is finite - the rate of this extraction could be slowed if we first salvaged these minerals from "junk".. The only real problem wastes are the "unnatural" substances we have created, and these are primarily natural substances which have been changed or isotopically modified - enriched uranium, plutonium and the like - waste nuclear product or product produced through (at present) irreversible processes.

I believe we have the technology to "terraform" earth! Hell, there are serious proposals for schemes to terraform planets (and particularly moons) which have almost none essentials we have in abundance on earth - we could capture carbon from CO2 (all we need is a source of energy which did not produce waste - triboelectric, solar, thermal - whatever) and we could certainly reverse our direction and steer away from the precipice we are approaching if all the global resources spent on "defense" was directed to this task.

Everything thats wrong on planet Earth (from my perspective as a human father / grandfather) could be fixed - The work required to bring the planet back from the edge would provide enough employment and economic recovery that poverty could be eliminated - the science and engineering required would advance our technology and understanding by orders of magnitude more than war ever has, and rather than living pointless lives, many people would find meaning and purpose in their lives..

But we wont.. We are stuck with our past and our dogmas and our gods and our greed and our lusts - and our "need" to believe we are superior to some other group. No fix is possible until we have fixed our thinking and behaviour, until our social evolution has taken some major jump forward, and this has happened to the vast majority of people on this planet - in fact, all people - because the disruption that even a tiny percentage could cause would be too much - we have run out of time!

Fred.

By "poop" I was referring to all of the unnecessary waste that goes to the landfill because of the use and toss culture we now embrace.  Humans do however throw away billions of pounds of edible food every year.