An Unpretentious Plan for the Future
Betterment of the Human Race and Planet Earth.
By Zach Bickerstaff
Clearly we are in trouble. I’m sure
that few will disagree. Of course everyone has their own opinion of exactly
what our problems are and many of these opinions conflict. But it is abundantly
clear that the world has a great many problems upon which everyone can agree. I
shall endeavor to concisely explain my long range plan to remediate these
problems and endow the Human Race and Planet Earth with a long, prosperous,
peaceful and happy future.
The Problems
More than seven billion people
inhabit this planet. That’s enough people to fill up Yankee Stadium thirteen
thousand times. If you snapped your fingers once per second seven billion
times, it would take you 221 years, ten months. We haven’t stopped reproducing
either. If anything, we are speeding up. By the year 2050 it is predicted that
there will be close to ten billion people. The planet cannot stand up under
such a biological load. Seven billion is bad enough. Can you imagine how much
poop seven billion people produce? Climate change is a big concern despite the
fact that many people deny that it exists. Many of the deniers are now coming
around and are finding the courage to accept the fact that something needs to
be done. People also argue about the causes of climate change but when you
strip away all the scientific jargon and theories, what it comes down to is
that there are just too many people on the planet – dirty, messy, inefficient
people. The notorious garbage island in the Pacific wasn’t made by penguins and
wallabies; it was made by human beings.
Environmental problems aside, the
human race itself suffers greatly because of its own fecundity. A conservative
estimate says that thirteen to fifteen percent of the world’s population is
starving or undernourished. 3.1 million children die of malnutrition each year.
Malnutrition is a terrible way to die. It’s not a quick death, it is slow and
painful. Often parents will feed their children instead of themselves. When
they die the children are orphaned and roam the slums, begging for handouts and
searching garbage piles for scraps. Speaking of slums, overpopulation assures
that there will not be enough wealth to go around. 36% of the world’s
population, almost two billion people, lives in poverty. Vast slums exist in
South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil and India. People live in run down
shacks constructed from whatever they can get their hands on; pieces of cars
and trucks, packing crates, driftwood, bamboo, palm fronds, etc. There is
rarely any running water and sewers consist of an open trench flowing with
human and animal waste.
This “lack of wealth” or the unfair
distribution of it is the root cause of war. Few wars have been fought over
purely ideological issues. Acquisition of resources is far more often the case.
In the 20th century alone an estimated 108 million people were brutally
killed by war, far more were injured, and made homeless. Again, the root cause
of this is overpopulation; too many people, not enough resources.
So now we have identified the
problem. So how do we solve it? The big problem is that this is indeed a very
big problem. People tend to be selfish and very uncooperative creatures so they
are highly unlikely to go along with any solution. The first step is
organization. No solution is going to be effective unless everyone, or nearly
everyone, goes along with it. The world is divided up into nearly two hundred
different countries. You might think that the United Nations would be a good
place to start. No. The UN has no teeth and can’t control nearly enough of the
population to be effective with, well anything. When was the last time they
stopped a war? There are many people who understand the value of a world
government. Realistically, it’s the best, fairest form of government; everyone
plays under the same rules, it’s far easier to track criminals who break the rules
and it will make war unheard of. It will be much easier to disarm the
population to prevent armed revolt, war and mass murder. The immigration
problem will be solved because borders will no longer be necessary. Once this
achieved, good, solid, enforceable population growth rules can be put into
place and there will be nothing that those who do not have the courage to
cooperate will be able to do about it.
Another very important problem that I
haven’t spoken of is the loss of jobs to robotics. Granted, this has been going
on a very long time. Surely you have heard the term “Luddite”. It comes from an
English mill worker named Ned Ludd who destroyed a new automatic loom in a fit
of anger in 1779. He was angry because the new machine had taken the gobs of
several workers, including his. Such a machine
is a primitive form of robot.
Technology is advancing at an
alarming rate. Think of a job, any job. Within fifty years, a robot will be
able to do it. Artificial Intelligence is even replacing artists. There are
advanced programs that can compose music. One was programmed to compose in the
style of Beethoven. It wrote a piano sonata and a panel of expert musicologists
was tricked into believing it was an undiscovered work by the master himself.
So, in the next hundred years or so
the human race will be out of work. I seriously doubt that the robots will turn
against us though, like in the Terminator film series, that’s just the stuff of
science fiction. But it will be a very serious problem and the cause of much
conflict; many people competing for a very few jobs. The solution is a
government that will fairly and equally award what few jobs remain to those
qualified and deserving and to divide up the wealth and distribute it equally
to those who cannot be employed. The only other alternative is to outlaw
advanced technology and / or provide “makework” jobs and that simply will not
work over the long term.
But this still leaves us with the
problem that the population is growing and there are not enough resources to go
around as it is. Remember, fifteen percent of the population is starving. The
simple solution is to simply grow more food. But that’s not as easy as you
might think. I well remember driving across the state of Texas, hour after hour.
Texas is really big and there are vast stretches of open, undeveloped land. I
kept thinking: “why does nobody live here? Why does nobody farm this land?” I
soon realized that it was because there is no water – or nearly no water – just
enough to keep cacti and sagebrush alive. There is certainly not enough water
to sustain the huge, sprawling suburbs of the Northeast US and not enough water
to irrigate anything but cacti and sagebrush. And that’s the problem on a
global basis too. There is a lot of water on this planet but the vast majority
of it is salty. Only 2.5% is fresh and only 20% of that is usable by humans,
the rest is locked up in ice caps or is polluted.
Even if we could figure out some way
to feed a gianormous population of ten billion, that still leaves us with all
the problems of garbage and human waste. Think about how much poop ten billion
people produce.
The
Plan
It’s obvious that we need to reduce
the global population, not allow it to keep growing and try to deal with it. As
I have stated in the preceding paragraphs, there are too many people right
now, and we are looking toward the future – the far future. The long
term goal is to have no more people on the planet than can live in comfort and
relative wealth, be adequately fed and receive all the necessities of life;
medical care, a fair government, diversity, inclusiveness and the freedom to
feel safe from violence and intolerance. Experts differ in their calculations
but the consensus is that the global population should be no more than two
billion people.
So what do we do with the five
billion people who are dead weight? Well for starters, they would need to be
moved around. With a global government it will be much easier to move people
into more efficient and environmentally friendly locations. Massive structures will be built covering
square miles and rising a thousand feet or more. This might seem like it would
use up land that could be cultivated but in reality it would free up
cultivatable land by “putting everything in one place” - shops, theaters, hospitals,
schools, recreation, sports arenas, etc. Perhaps a million or more people could
live in one of these “mega-buildings.” In the United States, for instance, once
the ideal population level is reached, it would only require approximately one
hundred of these structures to be built and the entire population will be moved
into them. All other buildings will be torn down. The mega-buildings will be
built on land that cannot be put into agricultural use such as deserts, areas
with poor soil quality and salt flats.
Travel will no longer be necessary
except between one mega-building and another. People and goods will travel
through underground tunnels or on above ground monorails in environmentally
friendly, electrically powered rail cars.
However, such travel would rarely be necessary because everything one
could ever want will be contained within the mega-buildings. This would free the
land for agriculture, solar farms, wind farms and other types of
environmentally friendly types of energy. Fossil fuels will be rendered obsolete.
People will no longer need to own automobiles and will be free from the huge
expense of purchase, maintenance and insurance. The carnage of traffic
accidents will be a thing of the past.
A birth control program will be
established to stabilize the size of the population. Perhaps the best way to do
this is to selectively administer certain chemical compounds during routine
vaccinations which would prevent women from producing eggs and / or men from
producing sperm. It would be simple and completely painless. No one would even
know it had been done until they tried to have children. The selection process
will be based on genetic characteristics in an effort to weed out the more
troublesome aspects of the human condition such as genetic deformities, mental
illness, intellectual disability as well as social issues such as diversity.
An extensive education program will
be established which will contain curriculum to be sure that everyone is made
thoroughly aware of the necessity and importance of the steps being taken to
save the Human Race and the planet. It will also be used to educate people of
the evils of racism, toxic masculinity, misogyny and other destructive
behaviors as well as wean the population off of superstitious religious beliefs
which conflict with various aspects of the program such as birth control. To
this end it would be best to remove children from their parent’s sphere of
influence. Schools now provide most meals for children and supervise much of
their activity. It is a few simple steps to modify the school system to keep
children under the careful and nurturing supervision of the educational system all
of the time. Parents would be allowed to visit of course but the object is to
prevent them from teaching their children falsehoods and destructive behaviors
such as the aforementioned religious superstition, intolerance, bigotry and
racism. It would prevent parental child abuse. Alcoholic, uneducated, poorly
educated and mentally ill parents are notorious for abusing their children. How
many times have you heard news stories about parents doing unspeakable things
to their children?
Once the above measures are in place, the
population has been relocated and the land has been cleared, agriculture will
switch to plant production exclusively, becoming sustainable and eliminating
the highly inefficient, wasteful, inhumane and environmentally unfriendly
production of animal products. Fishing will be banned so that the oceans can
recover. This is not to say that everyone would be forced to be a vegan vegetarian.
That’s just not practical and many people would balk at the idea. Plus there is
the aspect that a vegan diet holds many dietary deficiencies. Vegans have to be
careful to find alternate sources of protein and the vitamins and minerals
which are usually supplied by meat, eggs and seafood. This is not something
that you can expect a large population to do. Our global government will have
detailed records on everyone; location as well as age, height, weight and
health status. Based on these factors and the ability – or lack thereof – to
contribute to society in a useful way, individuals will be carefully selected
for humane harvest. With modern technology a human being can be compassionately
and painlessly euthanized and the body can efficiently be processed into many
different wholesome and palatable types of food. There is nothing gruesome or
morbid about this. This is not the stereotypical, cliché cannibalism of the
Donner Party, Hannibal Lechter and Jeffery Dahmer. For instance, the head and
hands will not be processed. This is for two reasons. 1. To allow the next of
kin to have a funeral with an open casket. The head and hands will be mounted
on a dummy body. Afterwards they will be removed and cremated. Burial will be outlawed; it is wasteful of
valuable land which can be otherwise used for agriculture. 2. Many of the
diseases associated with the consumption of human flesh are transmitted by brain
and nervous tissue. The average human body contains between fifty and seventy
five pounds of usable meat. A rate of one billion humane harvests per year will
provide an adequate meat supply and pare the global population to an acceptable
level within five or six years. This solves both the starvation and the overpopulation problem. It’s a
win-win situation. Obviously only mature
people will be selected for harvest. No one will be eating little kids. A
minimum age, say 35 to 40 will need to be established. Of course a few people
may object to this but over time it will become routine and people will accept
their fate. Once the global population is stabilized and clean environmental
practices are established, the practice of humane harvesting could be gradually
phased out and we could once again begin farming cattle, pigs and other
livestock. But we must be vigilant and not let things get out of hand again. We
must be strict but gentle. The educational system is key to shaping the thought
process so that a tolerant, diverse population is maintained which has the
courage to make this plan successful.
Truly, we are in trouble and truly
the plan I have set out here is neither that complicated or difficult. The
outcome would be an Earth that could only be described as paradise. I have
heard other plans. At best they are patchwork / Band-Aid solutions. Here is a plan
that guarantees peace, sustainable, long term human happiness on a green, environmentally
sustainable Earth.
