William Shatner: Humanity won’t survive to reach a Star Trek future | Hacker News Reader

William Shatner: Humanity won’t survive to reach a Star Trek future

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"I may not be a scientist, but I play a space captain on TV."

Why should William Shatner's opinion matter in this area? Best case this is just confirmation bias

>>“The planet can’t sustain seven billion, let alone 10 billion. It’s such a complex problem. And nobody’s dealing with it. Nobody!"

Really!? Loads of people are dealing with this problem.

Should Shatner's opinion matter? I dunno, but I tend to listen to people that have live long healthy productive lives and that have seen some stuff that I have yet to experience.

Being in my 60s, I have seen the 'before' and 'after' pics of a population about doubling over my lifetime. Many things have improved, many things are worse. Population stresses infrastructure, stresses societal behavior, increases competition for resources.

Agricultural technologies, increased energy production and associated efficiency technology, and communications systems have enabled humans to increase beyond their individual capabilities; otherwise the planet's natural processes and delimiters would have killed enough humans to stabilize.

I do not see "loads of people" working on population problems. I do see some people working on the problems caused by an excessive human population - but only those problems where there is a quick profit.

So, he’s not just an actor on TV. He’s also a fairly smart guy in real life. And a science fiction author.

I submit that we should generally listen to people who have demonstrated intelligence, wisdom, and creative thought and who have applied those to thinking and communicating about the future of humanity on this planet.

I think William Shatner actually qualifies pretty well on all those criteria.

"And I remember coming to England and giving an interview saying, ‘Hey, this is what’s going to happen.’ And the interview that was published was, this stupid actor thinks there’s going to be these terrible things. I remember resenting it. Because I’m an actor, can’t I have an opinion?"

> Why should William Shatner's opinion matter in this area?

Why not? Nobody's opinion should matter or not matter based purely on who they are. It should matter or not based on their reasoning, data, and experience. Shatner being an actor says nothing about the validity of his argument either way.

Didn't some recent study show that the worry of overpopulation isn't really an issue as there appears to be a critical point where it slows down significantly because of individual wealth going up which results in less children?

Large population growths seems to be directly correlated to poverty and our focus should be to get everyone out of poverty.

"The real reason everything is happening is there’s too many people.."

Bingo. I believe that excessive human population is the root cause of many global problems.

But what defines a "Star Trek Future" in the context of this question? The level of technology? The utopic society and healthy human relationships? Or just simply becoming a space-faring species?

I believe, and not necessarily because of environmental issues, that the species has much less than half of a millennia to be dominant, and much less than 100 years of the modicum of stability that we have had from 1946 to 2000. Gen Z may never know 'stability' in either society or economy.

I really wish I could disagree with him. But I can't.

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