Re: population controls and the Paul Holdren controversy

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> > If a hypothetical outside observer were looking at our planet,
> > trying to pick a species whose elimination would most benefit the
> > planet and (the rest of) its inhabitants, I'd have trouble seeing
> > how to justify any choice other than Homo sapiens sapiens.  At least
> > I certainly hope such an outside observer is hypotheical; I_am_
> > human myself. :-/
> Won't THEY be surprised when our nuclear plants explode, and our
> chemical storage units start venting waste.

Depends on how our putative elimination is handled.  I can imagine
everything from just blink, one moment everything's going as normal,
the next every human is dead, all the way to something like humanity's
fertility rate falling to the point where despite our best efforts each
person produces, on average, < 2 children per lifetime, and lets our
population decay down to zero.

Even the former I don't think would be that disastrous.  Even if our
chemical plants break down and vent stuff, even if our nuclear plants
_did_ go critical (which I consider unlikely; they are designed to fail
in the other direction), I think the planet could deal with the
one-time hit.  Might be disruptive, but probably not as much so as the
late Cretaceous extinction event.  It's the _continued_ dumping of
assorted crap into the world around us that's so problematic.

> Eliminating humans = destroying the planet.

I don't think so.  We couldn't destroy the planet if we tried.  We
might be able to sterilize the ecosystem on the surface, but even that
would be hard.  (We could, fairly easily, kill off major fractions of
the large creatures on the surface; this is a long way from sterilizing
it and a long _long_ way from destroying it.  See
http://qntm.org/?destroy for more.)

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