Population
Humanity continues to grow, year after year. We are estimated to be at 7 Billion people on this planet by 2012. 8 Billion by 2025. After that is still anyone's guess, but one thing is for sure, the Earth can only give us so much.
We live on a continent that only accounts for 5.1% of the world's population (out of the 6 major ones). It's not like we can know what over population feels like. That includes Canada, the US, and Mexico all together.
The Dugger family is really what made me start thinking about this. They have 19-20 kids (I'm not sure). I really think that in the future, we will live in a world that limits the number of children we can have. China already does it. Maybe that is a freedom we currently have, but if you ask me, I'd give it up.
Now this is not an argument towards those who have lots of kids. If you have 3, if you have 4, that's totally fine now. Lots of people will say "I had my 4th child and he or she is the best thing ever". "How could you limit me from that"? Well, I'm not deleting children here. I'm limiting. There will just be too many in the future. The price of everything will raise, supplies of food, both veggie and meat will start to dwindle, and more and more will be left to fend for their selves.
Look at property for example. Where at in Pennsylvania can you just buy cheap acreage and build a house? It's not easy to do within 20 miles from where I live. We are running out of room to live comfortably. People migrate into cities to survive. While there may be places left to do so right now, what happens in 100 years?
I look into my trash bin. Plastic Coke bottle, tin can, junk mail, papers. I fill 3-4 of these bags up a week. Some guy comes and takes them away. They get thrown into a hole in the ground and covered over. Out of sight, out of mind they say. But given a long enough time line, where do you put it? Rachel and I are only two people, creating 300-500 bags of garbage a year.
I'm 26 years old living in 2010. This isn't that big of a deal for me. I'll be long gone and dead before this starts to wear heavily on the human population. But humans will have to change in order to survive. And population control is just one area. I don't think it will naturally stem off. I don't think the Dugger family is planning on not having any more kids because they are worried about over population. But if it were up to me, I'd try to keep our population about where it is right now.
One more argument against is sheer numbers vs sheer numbers. What if India and their 1 billion people decided to attack us? They would outnumber us and take us over, easy as pie. So what does the government and military want? More people, more citizens, more tax dollars. So you won't see limitation anytime soon from our government.
Solar Changes
So every bit of life that we have on this planet can be linked directly to our sun. It shines everyday. Releases it's energy across 92.9 million miles of space and strikes our little ball of rock. I'm not sure on the number, but we have to be 0.0000000000001% of the total area it strikes. All that energy wasted into space. And all that energy we should try to get our hands on.
Right now to get energy, we focus on burning the product of the sun shining on our planet's surface for millions and billions of years. Plants feed on sunlight. They feed the animals that we eat, and they also eventually die. The leftover plant matter eventually turned into the oil that we use today. But of course, there is only so much of it. We will run out. It won't run into our cars like air and water does on this planet. We hit the gas pedal on our car and millions of years worth of stored energy is released and our car magically goes.
So far, collecting solar energy has focused on getting it from our surface. Not only does it take up room down here, it also is affected by the rotation of the earth and cloud cover. Solar panels would not do good where I live. So why isn't humanity busy trying to collect energy in space? The sun would shine 24 hours a day and would be earth weather free if the collector was detached from our planet.
Now this doesn't consider the promise of creating our own source of fusion. But until we do, I don't see why we don't try to figure out the energy mess right now. Solar technology should become super cheap and be standard equipment for us. I'd place solar panels on every square inch of my roof if it was cheap to do. I could care less about looks. Free electricity is exactly what is it. Might save some of that super hot heated house in the hot Summer months as well.
I don't know how this space technology would work. Maybe a large collector would strike a solar panel, the collector would release a battery of something. That's for the engineers. I'm just supplying the idea.
In Closing
Life only lasts so long. Everyone and everything dies. I don't know why a human lives 80 years and a dog lives 10. But that is the way it does. If I could, I'd live 1000 years. But I can't. Around 2070 I would be 86 years old. Not too hard to make it to considering the advances in medicine. But I will die. I could be ignorant and just party hard until my last day, not caring about this place I live. But I feel its the right thing to do to try and solve these problems presently in front on us.