Why would someone think over population is a myth?

Question

Why would someone think over population is a myth?

Answer 1

those of us who live in low-population areas, with nothing but wide open spaces and fields of growing things have a hard time imagining the concept of not enough room or food.  People need to move out of the population centers and come breath some fresh air and live where there is some elbow room.  

Answer 2

Many people don't understand how we get the things we use, they look around and see that there is still more land to build houses and think we are fine. My sister told me she'll believe we are in a drought when she turns on the tap and no water comes out. Our resevoirs are at a 30 year low, but that isn't something she can see.

Denial is a wonderful coping mechanism.

Answer 3

overpopulation, huh? think about the vietnam war, it was one of our governments way of population control. this was the time the babyboomers were all getting old enough for the draft and such. if all those soldiers we lost over there would have had kids, and by now grandkids, this country would be way over populated. the empty houses that are all around now would be full and then some. all those mortgage brokers that gave loans to people they knew would never be able to afford, woldnt be in as much trouble as they are now they would have plenty of more suckers on reserve to take the bait.

Answer 4

It is the AGW alarmists that have created the current high consumption of carbon based fossil fuels situation, not the deniers and skeptics whose ideas would have led to high tech clean solutions more than 30 years ago. The central core of every argument or dissertation put forth by the alarmists is the same one put forth in the bible of the National Socialist New Left that clearly states a policy that denies the existence of 99.9% of humanities physical and material resources. This book called “The Limits to Growth” published and funded by group of billionaire elitists called the club of Rome makes the false assumption that we as a race have already discovered and are consuming every possible resource that is in existence and when we finish consuming them there will be no more forever.

This report was written by and funded by people with small minds and limited knowledge of the world and the solar system. It is a group of inbred blue blooded morons that because they have inherited great riches from their grandfathers and a staff to manage them for them they are like gods in their glory directing the fate of the whole planet and all that live on it. In all truth the world and its people would be much better off if all these blue blooded parasites would just stop breeding and die off like Darwin predicted the useless evolutionary dead ends should.

Right over our heads in near space we have access to ten times the resources we can mine on the earth. And if we go past Mars to the asteroid belt and the moos and rings of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune there we will be able to access a million times what we have on earth. In orbit around Saturn alone is up to 10 times the amount of water to be found on Earth in nice handy frozen chunks ready for transport. The asteroid that passed between the earth and moon a dew years back and scared the liberals out of their skins contained more high quality nickel iron than we have mined on earth since we discovered the use of it 3,000 years ago.

Alarmists deny the plenty that surrounds us in the new frontier and like their predecessors before Columbus deny the riches to be found out there just a step over our heads. But then it always has been the skeptics who deny the existence of limits that have explored new frontiers and opened things up so the cowardly can follow and steal it away from the productive.

The limits to growth of the head in the sand alarmists who would deny the human race its future of plenty so they can hog what’s here for themselves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_G...

A link about the future and the new frontier of plenty for all of humanity if they will only reach out and work for it.

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesIn...

How to reach this dream vote for any party except the democrats and the greens this year for all offices. Throw the Luddite bums out and maybe the world can be saved for future generations! Then the Jimmy Carter anti technology edicts can be reversed for the good of the American people and the world.

Answer 5

I usually hear this in connection with religion. "God said be fruitful and multiply", "God created the earth and everything in it for humans", etc.  Every once in a while there's some pseudo-science thrown in like "as biological creatures it's our job to reproduce as much as possible" or some kind of fatalistic view that it doesn't matter - nature will take care of it the way it's supposed to anyway.

Environmentally and sociologically I can see where those people are coming from, not that I agree. They look around and the water still flows, the gas pumps still pump, some people have more than their fair share, and as a species we're doing better than ever...so what's the problem?  It's pretty hard to undo thousands of years of traditional thinking and beliefs in just a couple of generations.

Answer 6

We have had people telling us that we are about to run out of our ability to feed our population for a couple generations. It has always appeared plausible, but while human population has doubled  we have doubled food production.

This leads to the assumption that we may be able to continually double our food production as fast as population. To have predicted when I was a child that human population could ever rise to its present levels without putting everyone in risk of starvation would have been laughable. People just did not see any way this could happen.

Today people in agriculture are saying that possibly we might be able to double our production again. This is the can-do attitude that calls  over-population a myth.

The view that we will run out of food appears to be about as strong, and the feeling that we can do much better remains.

Answer 7

The posting by donfletcheryh shows how some people want to believe that we wont have over population, at least not during his lifetime.  I believe the planet is already overpopulated.  There are food shortages in some third world nations that rely on grain production from other parts of the world.  Fossil fuels can not last forever and unless the westernized world changes its energy dependency it is unlikely we will be able to support the current population, let alone the larger population of the future.

I'm all for the "can do" approach to problem solving, but I don't ignore limiting factors.  Its not just food, it is so much more.

Answer 8

There are plenty of resources for the human population, especially food!

The problem is dictatorship governments who don't want to feed the people and are instead enslaving the "undesirables", and the inability to get food to those who actually need it.  We (the US) actually subsidize (pay)  farmers to NOT grow food to keep the market "stable", translation "high".  The earth can handle the population,  the powers that be don't want to share the wealth.   We now have european countries who are worried because they have zero population growth.

This means that an aging society will eventually have no working age people left to keep the society viable.  Only human beings could think up something so stupid as to depopulate themselves into non existence!

Answer 9

Because people have been predicting over-population for over 100 years and none of the predictions have come true yet.  It does not mean that they won't, but there is no evidence supporting any over-population theory.