A reader comments about water & cities:
“It is not overly dramatic to say that the world’s “use once and throw away” attitude has enabled a slow-motion water apocalypse.”
I posit that our population is already beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth; we’ve been borrowing from the future in our usage of water, crop land, forests, and hydrocarbon fuels for decades.
Someone needs to develop a virus which causes sterility in all post-infant humans alive today, so that there is not another birth until those infants (and those in gestation) grow to adulthood. And even that might not be enough of a dip in population. I suspect the “adjustment” will be a lot more nasty than that fanciful notion when it comes.
In my darker moments I figure it’s going to be a nasty plague which will leave the survivors with two tasks: burying the dead and learning how to restrain our reproductive capabilities to stay within the carrying capacity.
How we step over the “all [human] life is sacred” line, without justifying casual murder, will be quite an accomplishment. Cordwainer Smith approached that problem in his two Norstrilia stories – when a child reached the age of majority, they were examined by representatives of the government (the “Instrumentality”) as to whether they would be contributing members of society, and those who didn’t pass were humanely killed. The criteria were skipped over, as it wasn’t really the point of the series.
I suspect we’ll never get there, and will instead discover population dynamics apply to humans as well as deer, wolves, and other creatures which consume resources. We’re just good at dodging the bullet, as it were.
