Death Sentence

The one greatest limit to human productivity in all of history has been Man's mortality. The matter of fact is that if we can crack the code of immortality, we can crack the code of the problems that come with it. All of a sudden, man-hours are at levels unheard of. 151,000 people die each day. 55 million a year. That's a huge amount of production that can be harnessed by society even further. Solving crippling illnesses suddenly becomes a very quickly approaching reality. It goes even further than this though. Out of nowhere, defunct systems across all walks of life find solutions. Such a huge amount of more people working an producing more can progress the human race in a way that has never been seen before. With this productivity, even the problems that come with overpopulation can be solved.

Except we aren't immortal, we die, and we don't have insane amounts of production per person. But we do face a problem paramount to any other - overpopulation. The sense of impending doom this century has been startling. Global warming has displayed the very real possibility that humans will one day no longer roam this planet as its self-proclaimed owners. The Limits To Growth is book that details the use of a computer to predict the effects the concept of infinite growth has on a finite system. It's credibility is highly questionable, but it is undeniable that a stable equilibrium cannot be achieved if we continue life in the same way that we are living it. 

Billenium is a brilliant short story by James Ballard addressing overpopulation, and follows two protagonists in a world with increasingly less and less space. The population of this world is somewhere near 20 billion, and the atmosphere is one of dystopia. When we look at overpopulation under a dystopian light, it becomes an incredibly frightening reality. When we look at dystopia, they tend to be evil or at least morally questionable things that can be stopped - totalitarian governments, mind-control or eugenics. We don't think of natural, unstoppable things like overpopulation. It's funny that we dont see that in truth, the greatest danger is not the outsiders, or the extremes. It's what we have accepted to be the norm, We accept population growth, but unchecked, it could bring about the end of civilisation itself.  

limits to growth