The single biggest influence on the planet?

[iain]

I believe your definition is the more common one as in: "Dropping a load of beef on a bitchs chest!"

 

Maybe you could settle for any time feces from one partner is found on the other, regardless of the technique.

[David_Parker]

E-rock said:

David_Parker said:

ScottP said:

IMO the the single most destructive thing we do to our planet is procreate.

 

 

Along these lines, I nominate the Pope. A paradigm shift within the Catholic church towards birthcontrol would be simply........HUGE!

 

The first nation in the world to attain zero population growth was Italy. Furthermore, catholic population is quite low compared to other world religions.

 

Hmm, Erock, I don't know where you get your stats, but I wasn't aware of any country with zero growth over a time period in excess of a year. While Italy is certainly mostly Catholic, the Catholic religion extends far beyond Italy. Italy is also western Europe where to the chagrin of the Pope, they are willing to use birth contol anyway. Still, the majority of Catholics as a whole do not use birthcontrol. You must look south to Mexico, Central and South America for the evidence. I'm not picking on Catholics exlusively. In the US, i think the Mormons are worse than the Catholics as far as procreation goes. Still if you could choose one person who has extensive control over an issue, the pope is pretty darn powerful. I'm not aware of other religions that have one single person who could affect so many people.

[Fairweather]

scott_harpell said:

in terms of money "defense" kicks the shit out of energy i would assume given the money just the U.S. spends a year.

 

You may find it interesting that annual "defense spending" is third place in US government expenditures, and nowhere near the 2 trillion spent by individuals/governments on energy....

 

http://policy.house.gov/assets/ann_rep2002.pdf

 

BTW Scrambler,

 

The book might be worth a look. Using free markets to solve problems.....

 

 

I doubt you'll get many big government/lefties to hop aboard though.

Edited November 19, 2003 by Fairweather

[E-rock]

David_Parker said:

E-rock said:

David_Parker said:

ScottP said:

IMO the the single most destructive thing we do to our planet is procreate.

 

 

Along these lines, I nominate the Pope. A paradigm shift within the Catholic church towards birthcontrol would be simply........HUGE!

 

The first nation in the world to attain zero population growth was Italy. Furthermore, catholic population is quite low compared to other world religions.

 

Hmm, Erock, I don't know where you get your stats, but I wasn't aware of any country with zero growth over a time period in excess of a year. While Italy is certainly mostly Catholic, the Catholic religion extends far beyond Italy. Italy is also western Europe where to the chagrin of the Pope, they are willing to use birth contol anyway. Still, the majority of Catholics as a whole do not use birthcontrol. You must look south to Mexico, Central and South America for the evidence. I'm not picking on Catholics exlusively. In the US, i think the Mormons are worse than the Catholics as far as procreation goes. Still if you could choose one person who has extensive control over an issue, the pope is pretty darn powerful. I'm not aware of other religions that have one single person who could affect so many people.

 

From Original CIA Data

 

Growth

Italy -.01 ( I said the FIRST, not the longest standing)

U.S. .85%

Chile 1.23%

Brazil 1.16%

Panama 1.53%

Mexico 1.73%

Peru 1.93%

 

Though these numbers seem high compared to U.S. growth rates they are typical for global population growth rates, i.e. near the mean. The highest population growth rates (greater than 3%) are in places like Africa, and the Middle East. Many of these nations are predominantly Muslim.

 

 

 

Population of Latin America 500 million

Population of Latin America in 2025 (projected) 650 Million

 

Contrast this with:

Population South Cental Asia 1.5 Billion

Projected 2025 2+ Billion

 

Simple solutions to complex problems do not work. Some fo the world's slowest population growth rates are in Catholic nations (Ireland, Spain, Italy). This alone suggests that education and proper planned parenthood funding are more significant than the influence of any single person. Perhaps if the pope changed his mind about birth control, world population growth would slow, but not very significantly.

 

As for the Mormons, they comprise a TINY fraction of world population, they could have 100% growth rate and the only place it would be noticeable is in Utah.

 

 

Edited November 19, 2003 by E-rock

[j_b]

Fairweather said:

many big government/lefties

 

errh ...

 

let's see:

 

"As a presidential candidate, then-Gov. Bush had strong words on the subject of big government. "Big government is not the answer," he said in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican convention on August 13, 2000. "I trust people; I don't trust the federal government," he said in an October 17, 2000, debate with then-Vice President Al Gore.

 

But President Bush's record indicates quite a different view. On the size of government, a recent study by New York University and the Brookings Institution shows there are 1 million more actual government workers today than in 1999. That brings the total to more than 12 million — the most since the Cold War ended."

 

[...]

 

"However, the report states, "most of the 1.1 million new on- and off-budget jobs appear to reflect increased spending since the Bush administration entered office. Many of these jobs have been added at agencies involved in the war on terrorism, but many have also been added at domestic agencies such as Health and Human Services."

 

And it's not just the size — the cost of government is also up. Discretionary spending on transportation and other non-military items increased by 21 percent under Bush. The taxpayer watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste also says pork barrel spending is up 48 percent since 2001."

 

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/Politics/biggovernment030922.html

[scrambler]

E-rock said:

David_Parker said:

E-rock said:

David_Parker said:

ScottP said:

IMO the the single most destructive thing we do to our planet is procreate.

 

 

Along these lines, I nominate the Pope. A paradigm shift within the Catholic church towards birthcontrol would be simply........HUGE!

 

The first nation in the world to attain zero population growth was Italy. Furthermore, catholic population is quite low compared to other world religions.

 

Hmm, Erock, I don't know where you get your stats, but I wasn't aware of any country with zero growth over a time period in excess of a year. While Italy is certainly mostly Catholic, the Catholic religion extends far beyond Italy. Italy is also western Europe where to the chagrin of the Pope, they are willing to use birth contol anyway. Still, the majority of Catholics as a whole do not use birthcontrol. You must look south to Mexico, Central and South America for the evidence. I'm not picking on Catholics exlusively. In the US, i think the Mormons are worse than the Catholics as far as procreation goes. Still if you could choose one person who has extensive control over an issue, the pope is pretty darn powerful. I'm not aware of other religions that have one single person who could affect so many people.

 

From Original CIA Data

 

Growth

Italy -.01 ( I said the FIRST, not the longest standing)

U.S. .85%

Chile 1.23%

Brazil 1.16%

Panama 1.53%

Mexico 1.73%

Peru 1.93%

 

Though these numbers seem high compared to U.S. growth rates they are typical for global population growth rates, i.e. near the mean. The highest population growth rates (greater than 3%) are in places like Africa, and the Middle East. Many of these nations are predominantly Muslim.

 

 

 

Population of Latin America 500 million

Population of Latin America in 2025 (projected) 650 Million

 

Contrast this with:

Population South Cental Asia 1.5 Billion

Projected 2025 2+ Billion

 

Simple solutions to complex problems do not work. Some fo the world's slowest population growth rates are in Catholic nations (Ireland, Spain, Italy). This alone suggests that education and proper planned parenthood funding are more significant than the influence of any single person. Perhaps if the pope changed his mind about birth control, world population growth would slow, but not very significantly.

 

As for the Mormons, they comprise a TINY fraction of world population, they could have 100% growth rate and the only place it would be noticeable is in Utah.

 

 

Hmmm...seems that raising the standard of living exerts economic pressure to keep the average rate of childbirth low. The birth rate of economically developed countries is fairly low. It's inevitable, the standard of living will increase in highly populated countries such as China and India. These countries are already seeing the economic benefits as labor shifts offshore to these countries. A rising standard of living should act as a self-regulating population check. Europe, the United States, and Japan have already provided a bellwether of this phenomenon. Seems the sooner we can convert to clean energy, the less overall impact to the environment will occur.

[ScottP]

lI1|1! said:

the sun's gravity.

 

like duh, without it we would fly aimlessly through the galaxy.

 

i win!

" The single biggest influence on the planet? "

I'd agree that the combination of the energy from the sun and the gravity from the sun are primary and secondary influences respectively.

 

"single most destructive thing we do to our planet"

I still say procreation.

Like bacteria in a petri dish, we will continue to grow and prosper in the medium until we overpopulate, soil that medium and die in the poison that is our own waste. Overpopulation brings plague and disease; even when there is enough food. With crowding, not only do social ills come but also physical illness...disease...plagues....

 

BTW...

The United States leads the way in waste production: 200 million tons a year. The average American citizen consumes 17 times more overall waste than our counterpart in Mexico and hundreds of times more than the average person living in African. The idea that a higher standard of living is a population check might be accurate, but a higher standard of living isn't going to slow the resource depletion and resultant waste flow.

 

 

 

 

[scrambler]

Short answer for those who don’t care for the long answer: For less impact, change the way we do things.

 

lI1|1!, your example is highly improbable. A more likely scenario is the increase in the sun’s luminosity resulting in the outward shift of the Constantly Habitable Zone (CHZ), in other words, Mars becomes habitable (if enough water is available on the planet) and Earth becomes inhabitable. This solar scenario is predicted by the processes occurring in the sun such as gravitational coalescence of the core and the resultant increase in solar output. In any event, it’s something that won’t (shouldn’t) happen in our lifetime. We’re talking distant future.

 

So I’m thinking real solutions for real problems that we face today and into the near future. In that respect, the occurrence of another ice age, which is predicted by the proxy evidence stored in such things as ancient lake sediments, rings in tree logs, Antarctic ice cores, etc., is also fairly distant in the future. The last ice age or glacial advance ended about 10,000 years ago.

 

I mentioned sex as the most significant influence on the planet and, really, there are other things that lie outside the human realm such as plant photosynthesis that are important but I wanted to keep the list limited to things affected by human actions, specifically our influence on the biosphere. So yeah, sex and its sometimes consequence, reproduction. A person could also argue that all human activities are directly or indirectly involved with this prime directive of all sentient life, which happens to be reproduction or replication. People have even suggested that all creative works are the result of the sublimation of sexual desire.

 

I think it is the ‘way’ we do things in the maintenance of our standard of living that must change. For instance, you mentioned the amount of sewage produced. Now this could be an artifact because sewage systems are not as well developed in some parts of the third world so how do you measure output? I agree in a certain extent, for example, considering such things as cows. One cow produces about 20 times the waste products as one person. Again, transform the way we do things. The glass is half full and the rational expansion and application of technology will allow us to increase the capacity, in our case, increase the carrying capacity (until we can pull off such scenarios as terraforming Mars).

 

Practical solutions for practical problems. That’s why I included the reference to the item involving the coming change in the production and procurement of energy. Many of the big problems facing our world today are linked to our use of energy. Fuck I’m tired of the doomsayers stuck in Malthus’ world. This only means that they lack imagination to solve problems. The optimists will solve the problems. For everyone’s sake, let’s raise the standard of living globally.

 

[JoshK]

E-rock said:

David_Parker said:

ScottP said:

IMO the the single most destructive thing we do to our planet is procreate.

 

 

Along these lines, I nominate the Pope. A paradigm shift within the Catholic church towards birthcontrol would be simply........HUGE!

 

The first nation in the world to attain zero population growth was Italy. Furthermore, catholic population is quite low compared to other world religions.

 

Roman Catholics are the largest group adhering to a single church. Christianity as a whole is about 2 billion I think, and that includes many different sects from very religion to not very religious. Islam is second with something like 1.3 billion. It is predicted Islam will become larger than Christianity sometime in the next 50 years or so...