• Question: Do you believe the whole earths population should be culled via a virus to ease stress on resources ?

    Asked by Kingsmill to Cristiane, Nicki, Nikolai, Richard, Samuel on 10 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      Well I don’t think you will find any scientists who actually want a load of people to die!

      It is true that the growing population is causing the biggest stress on resources, but the goal of many scientists is to find ways to be more efficient with what we have so there is enough for everyone.

      It is likely that human population growth will have to slow down in the future though, just like any animal or bacterial population which is limited by resources. Higher populations will also increase the risk of massive epidemics, along side issues like rising antibiotic resistance, so it is possible that at some point a disaster like that could happen.. lets hope not though!

    • Photo: Richard Simons

      Richard Simons answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      That’s a pretty extreme question! I actually answered something very similar in another post, so here’s a condensed version.

      ABSOLUTELY NOT; there is no moral, scientific, econnomic or environmental argument which supports that idea.

      There is an issue with the size of the global population, and, unfortunately, it’s set to keep growing for a while longer. However, the reason for this is that there a significant number of people living in absolute poverty where many children die before age 5, for these people having many children is the only way to guarantee that some will survive to adulthood. Now that we’re working to tackle child mortality more of these children are growing to adulthood, and so the population is growing. Through better education and
      economic and industrial growth we can break this cycle, and, as in many of the developed countries, family size in developing countries will wall to an average of about 2, which means no growth. The way that we do this is by fighting poverty, not people.

      Please watch this video from Hans Rosling:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkSO9pOVpRM&t=132

      If we’re clever about how we use our resources there are more than enough to go around, even when there are 9 billion of us 🙂

    • Photo: Nikolai Adamski

      Nikolai Adamski answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      That is quite radical and I don’t think any scientists actually considers this a viable option.
      How would you decide who survives? Are you prepared to be the first one? The moral and ethical implications are terrible and I think no one could actually justify such an extreme measure.
      Back in the 18th century a ‘scientist’ called Thomas Malthus already thought that 1 billion people is too much for this planet. But science and innovation proved him wrong. Now we’re facing 10 billion people and science and innovation will (in my opinion) hep us again.
      In the long run, the best thing to ease population numbers is education. Specifically education of women, as they are the ones who do the family planning, i.e. decide how many children they have.

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