Meeting Dr. Doom: Scientist wants to kill 90% of human population
sas.org
sas.org
His page on the speech: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Controversy.html
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mims-Pianka_controversy
Pianka has stated that Mims took his statements out of context and that Pianka was stating what would happen from biological principles alone if present human population trends continue, and that he was not in any way advocating that it happen.
Pianka is an AAAS fellow, Senior fulbright scholar, and overall respected ecologist.
Mims is associated with the discovery institute, believes in intelligent design, and doesn't believe in global warming.
I know where I'd place my bets.
The problem is that overpopulation is indeed harming a lot of things. And the only easy feasible solution is "send them to space," only we don't have any planets we could possibly colonize.
edit: I went and looked at the numbers: to maintain a static population would require blasting 75 million people into space annually.
the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us [1]
There are varying degrees of mendacity involved in making the above statement. The most honest thing to say would have been, "I want my share of natural resources to be higher than it is, therefore I want fewer people." It becomes more and more dishonest to say, "I fear for the planet/environment, etc". But what is this "the world"? Is it the trees? That would be an interesting thing, to be an herbal supremacist. It goes FAR beyond the typical yuppy habit of paying 80 dollars for a pound of Darjeeling. But, really, by "the world" he means "the people", thus
the people WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us
And who is "us". Who else could "us" be besides "the people". Therefore,
the people WOULD clearly be much better off without so many people
Clearly, we are dealing with an idiot. Even if the roundaboutedness of the above statement were accepted, his prophecies of apocolypse should be self-correcting by killing off most of us anyway. His is a college-level equivalent of the grade school bestseller "Ishmael".
But...he's not really an idiot, as I've deliberately misinterpreted him in the very manner that he wants to be misinterpreted. The correct translation is this:
my group WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of your group
I agree that this is a rational thing to say. It indisputably results in a value true for all inputs "my" and "your". This attitude is very common as a result, and even if he never honestly advocated the genocide of x billion people, clearly it "WOULD" be a nice thing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mims-Pianka_controversy#Respons...
I think it's more like if you're in a traffic jam. Everyone in that traffic jam would probably believe that the traffic would flow better without so much traffic. This is a reasonably assertion, and turns it more into your second assertion:
the people WOULD clearly be much better off without so many people
That's not a "roundabout" statement. The meanings of "people" are slightly different in the two positions. More accurately:
humanity would clearly be much better off if the population were lower
Indeed, there will always be some pretty evil people in the world with designs like these. Let's hope that he doesn't have the specifics nailed down...
This Pianka is a shame for science and ecology. We can find smarter solutions than this.
Am i wrong?
Clancy's "Debt of Honor" had a former Japanese WWII pilot hijack a 747 and fly it into the Capitol during the President's State of the Union address, destroying 2 of the 3 branches of the U.S. government.
It spooks me that the bad guys probably read Clancy's (and others such as Pianka) works for ideas.
Pianka claims that his words were misconstrued: that he merely stated that, due to wayward policies, we were headed for a pandemic and consequent population collapse and that an airborne form of Ebola could be a possible cause of such events. See the links provided by other posts.
Killing 90% of the human population would actually cause greater ecological catastrophe in the long run. Society is, albeit slowly and unevenly, modernizing and becoming wealthier. This means that population is projected to peak around 9-10 billion (UN figures) and begin declining before the beginning of the 21st century. As technology improves, we might eventually reach a point of relative stability, where we can satisfy nearly all material desires (I believe they are finite, though immense) with a stable population, and I'd imagine that this is likely within a few centuries. This, of course, requires that we don't destroy ourselves or the earth first, but I'd give us a better than 50% chance. All bets are off, though, if we conquer death and aging and still have the desire to procreate-- then we pretty much have to colonize other planets-- but I'm not terribly worried about that one.
Killing 90% of the earth's population in such a way would result in a cycle of chaos and turmoil that would leave humanity in an utterly wrecked state, especially after the revenge wars that would ensue against those responsible (or blamed) for the plague. The state of humanity would be set far back, and we'd have to go through these ecologically net-negative phases of development again.