Zika the saviour

D

droid

Well-known member
He's right y'know.

...call me Pollyanna, but I can’t help nurture the outlandish-but-not-entirely-impossible dream that we might be looking at our own salvation. We might be looking at the salvation of the planet itself.

Because there’s no denying that pretty much every problem in the biosphere hails from a common cause. Climate change, pollution, habitat loss, the emptying of biodiversity from land sea and air, an extinction rate unparalleled since the last asteroid and the transformation of our homeworld into a planet of weeds— all our fault, of course. There are simply too many of us, and— being mammals— we just can’t stop breeding. Over seven billion of us already, and we still can’t keep it in our pants.

Of course, nothing lasts forever. My money was on some kind of self-induced die-off: a global pandemic that left corpses piled in the streets, or some societal collapse that reduced us to savagery on the third day and a relict population on the three hundredth. Maybe a holy nuclear war, if you’re into golden oldies. The problem with these scenarios— other than the fact that they involve the violent suffering and extermination of billions of sapient beings— is that we’d wreck the environment even more on our way out, leave behind a devastated wasteland where only cockroaches and stromatolites could flourish. The cure would be worse than the disease.

Many well-meaning folks have pointed out that birth rates decline as living standards improve; since so much of the world still lives in relative poverty, the obvious solution is to simply raise everyone’s quality of life to Norwegian levels. The obvious fly in that ointment is that your average first-worlder stamps a far bigger boot onto the face of the planet than some subsistence farmer in Burkina Faso no matter how many kids she might have. Mammals like me don’t need a brood of children to wreck the environment; we do it just fine with our cars and our imported groceries and our giant 4K TVs. Elevating 7.3 billion people to levels of North American gluttony does not strike me as a solution to anything other than fast-tracking the planet back to Scenario One.

But look at Zika. It doesn’t kill you, doesn’t even present symptoms in most cases. The worst you have to fear is a few aches and pains, a rash, a couple of sick days.
All it really does is stop you from breeding...
Click to expand...
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6461
 
B

bassnation

the abyss
This is the plot to Utopia. Applauding this as a positive development for humanity reeks of misanthropy and eugenics, especially when this is likely to affect the third world disproportionately.
 
Last edited:
B

bassnation

the abyss
If you love Zika, have you also checked out old school diseases like AIDS and malaria? Yellow Fever. Doing great things for mankind!
 
D

droid

Well-known member
Have you looked at the future recently? Long term, the best thing that could happen to humanity is a pandemic, preferably in the West.

Forced sterility is gentle in comparison.
 
D

droid

Well-known member
Or to put it another way, is it preferable for hundreds of millions of people to die from starvation, war, disease & natural disasters, or for them to never have existed at all?

If youre not a misanthrope, youre not paying attention.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
bassnation said:
This is the plot to Utopia. Applauding this as a positive development for humanity reeks of misanthropy and eugenics, especially when this is likely to affect the third world disproportionately.
Click to expand...

Liberal hand-wringing about "eugenics" doesn't alter the fact that the world's population is growing rapidly and nearly all of that growth is happening in less developed countries.

And as droid points out, the options are for there to be a slowing of population growth now due to some kind of control on the third world's collective fertility, or a slowing (if not a drastic fall) in the near future caused by a huge increase in war, starvation and disease.

Which is the preferable option, would you say?
 
D

droid

Well-known member
As Watts points out, the key to decreasing fertility in the developing world is rising living standards.

Unfortunately raising living standards of the developing world to US level would destroy the planet several times over.

However, this does not mean that third world fertility levels are the problem per se. If the US was wiped off the map tomorrow, we might survive for another couple of hundred years.

The ideal scenario for long term human survival is: Reduced global fertility + devastating pandemics in the wealthiest and most industrialised nations.
 
D

droid

Well-known member
(Obviously the ACTUAL ideal scenario is the dismantling of capitalism, capital, hierarchical systems of control and the establishment of a truly democratic, emphatic global technarchy dedicated to sustainable development and preventing climate change - but let's face it...)
 
D

droid

Well-known member
lol. High praise.

But look at even the mildest estimates and we're in for a bad time.

In 50-100 years the Middle East will be a black scorch. Tens of millions of refugees will turn to Europe as Africa becomes a desertified oven. Europe will be dealing with its own internal refugee crisis as the mediterranean boils and its major cities flood. Russia evolves from kleptocracy into barbaric criminocracy. China is a smog covered tomb. Deforestation reaches 100% due to population pressure in South America. Famine is a daily occurrence as crop yields fail due to acidification, and barren oceans decimate the food supplies of remaining coastal communities. Pandemics run rife and resource wars turn nuclear. Catastrophic decline in coat sales.
 
Last edited:
M

martin

----
But look at even the mildest estimates and we're in for a bad time.
Click to expand...

Pants.

It'll be a bit hotter, that's all. I recently saw a video of Lynnrd Skynnrd performing live in Alabama (in the 1970s), one of the muggiest US states, and everyone on stage and in the crowd was having a right laugh, so I wouldn't worry about a small spike in humidity. It'll just mean a decline in coat sales.

I'm all for a population cull. I'd just prefer to be selective about it. Starting with anyone who finds cat videos remotely worth sharing. And Major Laser fans. And people who take more than 90 seconds to get cash out of an ATM (unless they're disabled). Wishing babies with Satsuma heads on us, though - you're bang out of fucking order, Droid.
 
trza

trza

Well-known member
I dont want to rain on your mass death parade but Zika has killed next to nobody and the birth defects are related to the mosquito spray or something else and the rare cases of paralysis are still being studied. I guess we have to wait for the next virus.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
droid said:
lol. High praise.

But look at even the mildest estimates and we're in for a bad time.

In 50-100 years the Middle East will be a black scorch. Tens of millions of refugees will turn to Europe as Africa becomes a desertified oven. Europe will be dealing with its own internal refugee crisis as the mediterranean boils and its major cities flood. Russia evolves from kleptocracy into barbaric criminocracy. China is a smog covered tomb. Deforestation reaches 100% due to population pressure in South America. Famine is a daily occurrence as crop yields fail due to acidification, and barren oceans decimate the food supplies of remaining coastal communities. Pandemics run rife and resource wars turn nuclear. Catastrophic decline in coat sales.
Click to expand...

Yah but the iPhone 105 is gonna be totes awesome, you wait and see!
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
trza said:
the birth defects are related to the mosquito spray or something else
Click to expand...

I've seen a couple of reports of this but it's hard to disentangle the real science (to the extent that there is any yet) from run-of-the-mill anti-pharma conspirabollocks.
 
trza

trza

Well-known member
I don't want to ruing anyones eugenic fantasy love in but South America is like Africa in terms of underpopulation and underdevelopment. Just huge parts of the continent are not even accessible by roads or even remotely developed. The Chinese are dangling development projects in front of the politicians faces and asking them to jump at the chance and the indigenous people most susceptible to diseases are probably going to lose the most.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top