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 20^th 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.