This graph shows world population growth throughout history. The data comes from the United Nations. I like to pay attention to the part of the graph that shows humanity just muddling along for tens of thousands of years. I like to contrast the short, brutal, filthy lives those humans undoubtedly led with the lives of obese, whiny Americans.
Human beings the world over owe their lives to technology or, more specifically, to the men responsible for discovering it was possible. Most people, as this graph so amply demonstrates, would not be alive in any time but the last few hundred years. Most of us would not even have been born.
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It is about time to move off this planet. Throughout humanities history we have “moved” on. Staring in Africa, mesopotamia, europe… It seems to me a logical next step for humanity or else we stagnant.
I think your post was optimistic, though most seemingly apply this data to the Malthusian theory of chaos when our planet can no longer sustain itself.
Instead, your little blurb simulates how, if it weren’t for the enormous population explosion, life would have been that stagnant “muddling along” for a while longer.
It’s as if the end perpetuates itself with advances to only increase the World population and, so utterly, and majestically, succeed in doing so without having to “move off this planet.”
—Pi
thanks pi!
i do contend the malthusian theory. the earth is an organism and will not get to a point where it cannot sustain itself.