JR'S Free Thought Pages
No Gods ~ No Masters
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JR'S Free Thought Pages |
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Exponential Growth, Collapse and Entropy Our Planet is Overpopulated by Unthinking, Uncaring Voracious Homo Sapiens By JR, January 1, 2026 (Edited and Updated) Two is company; three is a crowd – Unknown People who hate kids and dogs can’t be all bad – W C Fields Foreword Planet earth is becoming seriously unsustainable by capitalist plunder, greed and the preponderance of humans who refuse to understand the contradictions of an infinite economic growth model, a finite planet and the imminent extinction of all species except stupid humans and their countless pets. Moreover, we live within the confines of a grotesquely unequal corrupt global tyrannical dogma called capitalism ruled by greedy oligarchs and financial mafia parasites that are dominated by banks and venture capital cockroaches such as Black Rock led by Larry (Rat) Fink. If you are too squeamish to mass murder people via the state military apparatus as is happening in Gaza there is a private mass killer you can hire from mercenary company called Black Water. Government killers such as the USA (25 million dead since 1945) have hired theses psychopathic sacks of dog shit on numerous occasions. Their unfettered power is legally backed by the state and equally psychopathic conservative and liberal political ass kissers who underwrite their horrendous crimes.
Military Exercise Of Colombian Mercenaries Fighting For Ukraine But there was once the divine right of kings and popes who continue to hold on to the billions they have stolen from their former empires never to be repaid. The current world order of Godzilla cancer capitalism can also be challenged and replaced by justice and peace. Human nature is not locked into conditions described by Thomas Hobbes or the grim scenario of other authoritarians such as William Golding in his infamous novel Lord of the Flies. Democracy is and always has been a fraud; there is no reason to deny free will and moral principle by accepting the grim premises of Hobbes or Golding - so wake up people! Most indigenous people from the Americas captured by their diseased and violent Christian barbarians were shocked at the conditions of the many homeless (which persists today) when they were taken to European societies, often as slaves. But in returning to the issue of human overpopulation, surely like all other species, the unthinking homo sap is also on the short list for extinction. In 1925, just one century ago the earth’s human population was 2 billion and has now quadrupled to 8 billion, most of who are overweight and lacking in self-discipline and intelligence, the quintessence of stupidity. I wrote this rant about irresponsible humans (semi-intelligent chimps) about four years ago. https://www.skeptic.ca/On_Overpopulation.htm Let’s be honest, at least 95% of children born were not planned. The graph of human population growth which is shocking since the 1950s is exponential, invariably leading to calamitous outcomes; in most cases oblivion, a synonym for entropy. In the late 1960s while in graduate school I happened to read The Population Bomb by Stanford zoologist Paul Ehrlich who convincingly argued that the population of the world was at that time (about 3.5 billion) was unsustainable, my wife and I decided to have one child. My intuitions and in many cases glaring observations have been that most humans are incredibly stupid as IQs are in free fall; a glaring example being last night which was New Years Eve and fireworks were ignited at midnight by certain pin heads and blockheads in our inconsiderate neighbourhood. This was ear piercing random noise, not unlike barking dogs, motorcycles, vehicles with noise making “mufflers”, commercial flights roaring over our city and low flying private aircraft dive bombing as though it were a wa zone throughout our community by assholes with too much money and nothing intelligent to do. Noise for example is a pollutant, like the countless contaminants in our air and water. Persistent exposure to noise can lead to serious health issues that include cognitive impairment, cardiovascular disease and sleep disorders. The most urgent environmental crisis of our era, the heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is intimately connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant - industrial noise. Like greenhouse gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world - and it’s not just impacting our physical and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we ultimately depend. Noise pollution is a longstanding menace which is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxlike, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet and more recently AI traffic. Those servers, including crypto trading generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of annoying noxious cacophonous noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term “data centers,” are making growing numbers of people miserable, insomniacs – and sick. But noise irritation is not new and it makes many of us such as me who value solitude and quietism literally make us sick – we’re sick of noise. But this is not new for those who value peace, silence and the contemplative life. When my wife and I watch the cultural wasteland called television, we usually have the volume turned off, especially for sports programs with the dead beat dialogue of illiterates and current emphasis on mindless immoral gambling and betting which at a more intelligent and civilized time was illegal. Intolerance to noise is not new. Simply read 18th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788-1860) famous essay “On Noise” when they didn’t have pickup trucks that look and sound like tanks. There’s a pay no taxes Christian pastor that lives on our street that has a noise making muffler on his Volkswagen sub-compact that you can hear several blocks away when he starts it up, in addition to a massive sidecar motorcycle and beastly Ford Expedition SUV. These are the insensitive jerks the late great George Carlin talked about in his skit “Some people who ought to be killed”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVlkxrNlp10 Then there are the contaminated waterways in the Fraser Valley Bible belt of BC with reeking smells of livestock agriculture and air contaminants that continually roll through the community from overly developed real estate projects (with no democratic oversight) especially here in Chilliwack and unsightly overdeveloped urban areas to the West that include Vancouver and its countless overdeveloped suburbs. It’s an ongoing money-driven disgrace. All this in addition to 2025 being the hottest year on record, one of the annoying upshots of global heating being the decimation of lawns in Southern British Columbia by chaffer beetle and their larvae that have emigrated north and devoured by racoons, crows and other ravenous critters. My lawn looks like a war zone. Anyone who has even a tincture of optimism or hope for the future of 8 billion people and all other life on this garbage dump planet is in a state of delusion and denial. French writer and politician Jean-Luc Melenchon discusses human overpopulation and other human induced environmental disasters and earth destroying idiocies in his recent book Now the People, Revolution in the 21st Century! As the trash heap called planet earth crammed with 8 million homo saps cries RAPE! Read the piece from the first chapter called “Unsustainable” and the section titled The Force of Numbers. The Force of Numbers Before present If the year of my birth in the middle of the last century is any indication, I have some connection to the calamities that began around that period. Indeed, if you take a closer look at the twentieth century, there was a pivotal moment around the mid-point in 1950. It seems that the euphoria that followed the Second World War had numbed our vigilance. We had come through the worst of it, and it seemed that there were exciting prospects in store: decolonization and endless growth. All this seemed to suggest that the good life for all was just around the corner. Yet a vast change was about to occur that went almost unnoticed: for, in this same moment, human population numbers began to accelerate dramatically. The effects would surely make themselves known over time. You can see it in all the graphs – energy consumption, fertiliser use, water consumption and the extraction of all manner of resources: around 1950, these numbers all began to spike. The combination of booming population and the capitalist mode of production was about to wreak havoc. Both grew in a manner incompatible with the survival of the ecosystem on which they depended – and, indeed, each amplified the harmful consequences of the other. It is telling, in this sense, how the earth sciences refer to the year 1950. Everything before this date is called ‘before present’. In fact, after 1950, the dating of materials required adjustment for the altered level of radioactive carbon, as a result of the use – and open-air testing – of nuclear bombs. This level would never be the same again. It seems that history has a certain dark humor: the dawn of a new age of human life was marked by the ominous appearance of the weapons that could end all human history. Numbers and history Human history is fundamentally shaped by population numbers. Obviously, many other factors help explain how human societies develop. But in the end, numbers change everything. We cannot understand any human reality without considering its consequences for the ecosystem in which it is embedded. Now that the capitalist mode of production has a market of several billion consumers, it has a vastly different impact than it did during its initial rise in the nineteenth century, when both population numbers and production levels were much lower. The nature of predation on the ecosystem has changed completely. To produce and sell more and more, the usual plundering of the ecosystem has become simple devastation, which has gone beyond the point of no return. We can get a better sense of this by considering two important numbers: over the twentieth century, the production of goods increased fifty times over, while the human population quadrupled.1 This was the moment when the global ecological crisis began. But if we want to really get to grips with some of the most important new realities facing politics today, we need to draw the right conclusions. Unfortunately, politics and even political thought seem to pay rather little attention to these developments, beyond imagining that they are a kind of backdrop to events. This is not the right way to look at it. In fact, the steep acceleration of the population growth curve and the triumph of capitalism have turned the whole structure of human civilization on its head. If humanity wants to find a way to exist and not to self-destruct then surely capitalism is not the right scaffolding to build on. If the history of human civilization does indeed function in concert with capitalism, then this also sets an end point for its future existence. The number of human beings, in a sense, sets an expiry date for capitalism; that is when decay and entropy set in. The pace of numbers Our present era is, in many ways, exceptional. According to the United Nations, on 15 November 2022, the number of human beings on this planet surpassed 8 billion.2 This total doubled in just seventy years. Nothing like this has ever happened before, in such a short space of time and involving such large numbers. It should never happen again. Otherwise, there will soon be 32 billion of us. In the meantime, it is amazing to see how suddenly the rate of increase has accelerated. It took 300,000 years for the number of humans to reach 1 billion. That was close to the start of the industrial era, in around 1820.3 But a hundred years later there were already 2 billion of us. The second billion arrived 3,000 times faster than the first one had. After that, the pace quickened further still. We now have an extra billion people every twelve years or so. They are arriving 25,000 times faster than the first billion did. The trend is continuing. There are expected to be 10 billion people on the planet by 2100.4 Then the number should start to fall: too late, we fear. But let us not get bogged down with the total number. The pace of change is perhaps even more crucial. In past eras, human history used to unfold at a rather more patient tempo. It took 160 generations to get from the first vestiges of agriculture and animal husbandry to the permanent settlement of people in the first cities.5 But now, the increases in the number of humans have produced much shorter and more visible stages. And every time the world’s population has doubled, this has been accompanied by a radical change in the human condition itself. This was already the case in the Neolithic period. This distant era gradually started to make itself felt less than 10,000 years BC. This was the first significant doubling of the population. In some regions, people went from gathering to farming, from stone tools to metal ones and from hunting to rearing livestock, alongside many other developments of similar magnitude. They turned human life and history upside down. History accelerates ‘You see,’ I was told, ‘the space from one end of this room to the other covers two millennia. And they’re still the same objects.’ I was in the Egyptian antiquities room at the Louvre. This comment made me wonder about the pace at which human history unfolds when it comes to the different phases of material production. This room of Egyptian artefacts imagines that it is proceeding at a snail’s pace. But what a whirlwind tour even this is! Did the Egyptians of that era know what an incredible leap forwards their population numbers and level of production represented, compared with the depths of time from which they had only just emerged? How could they even have guessed at that? But the increases in population numbers really do set the pace of history. We see this when history visibly ‘speeds up’. To get a better idea of this, it is worth imagining a calendar which condenses the entirety of human history into just one year, starting on 1 January and ending on 31 December.6 I often use this example because it really illustrates how slow material change is when there are not many people. It’s really slow. In fact, the opening parts of the calendar are almost blank. Nothing happens for ages. But, by the time we get to the bottom of the final page – the last few hours of the year – we have more events to write down than could fit on all the earlier pages put together. The more people there are, the greater the onrush of technical innovation. If we condense human history into just one year, our first human ancestor was born on 1 January at 0:00 a.m. True, they invented the first tools on the first day. But fire was not tamed until the end of October. So ten months out of twelve passed with no changes worthy of note! Funeral rites appeared for the first time on 13 December. The Lascaux caves were painted around 28 December. In those days, people hunted and gathered on paths which they wandered along one generation after another. The Neolithic Revolution and agriculture began on 30 December. On 31 December, at around 4 a.m., came the invention of the wheel. The first steam engine went into service at 10 p.m. on the final day of the year. At 11:46 p.m. on New Year’s Eve comes the first use of nuclear energy. Everything else – in other words, the bulk of our inventions – arrives in a hurried burst a few minutes before midnight. For instance? The first touch screen telephone was launched at thirty-one seconds past 11:58 p.m. Between the birth of my grandmother and that of my granddaughter, the number of human beings increased six fold. How many pages would I need to list all the radical upheavals contained just within this period? From quantity to quality This helps us see that the rising number of humans is not just a quantitative development, however impressive those billions may seem. It does not just alter the ecosystem by exploiting its resources. It also transforms human society. It prompts qualitative social change. It massively extends the number of social interactions between individuals, the way in which they occupy space, the level of accumulated knowledge and the way in which individuals express themselves. It likewise alters the physical balance of power between social classes and nations. In the long term, the billions of human beings thinking, exchanging and acting at the same time have (almost) nothing in common with the small, semi-nomadic bands of the distant past. Just as each generation moulds a new people, each major change in population creates a new humanity. The growth of the world’s population has, indeed, brought radical changes in the human condition. A single ‘human people’ is emerging. This is, first, a result of living conditions becoming more homogeneous as humans have converged in the cities, after tens of thousands of years of peasant society. Second, it results from an extreme but contradictory rise in individualism. In a way, the age of the ‘hyper-individual’ is also the age of hyper-connectedness. Finally, we are now talking about an educated humanity. The accumulated stock of knowledge is available to everyone, and soon it will be available at any moment, by connecting to the terminals of the universal library of artificial intelligence. One thing is for sure: these vast changes initially take place somehow under our noses. They emerge slowly and then gradually come to mould the whole of society. Contemporaries are too buried in their own concerns to notice: everything new and novel fades into the background of their routines. But these developments do indeed stick. The proof was plain to see in 2013, the same year the global population reached 7 billion. That year, more farmed fish were consumed than sea-caught fish, though this news did not itself make a splash. 2013 was thus the year when humanity turned from hunting to farming in the sea, too. The numbers in the cities In 1950, only 20 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. The rest lived in the countryside. By 2000, these proportions had been inverted both in Europe and in the Americas.7 But this also happened rather quietly. Today, city life has become a matter of course. It is as if it has always existed. But it has not. It appeared rather belatedly. This only happened around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, when the first cities were established. For more than 200,000 years, human history was essentially a semi-nomadic life in bands of varying sizes. Then the rise of living in cities produced a new way of being human and a very new way of living in society. Now, in the age of large numbers, urban life is the fabric of all our societies. The contemporary human being is a homo urbanus, shaped by the walls, streets, squares and networks that are part and parcel of city life. But cities are more than just scenery. Cities have always been deliberately created products of human effort. In turn, they shape the communities that produce them. At every longitude and latitude and in every culture the city patterns human behavior. But it also makes people dependent on access to collective networks for them to be able to produce and reproduce their material existence. In contemporary societies, the architecture, advertising, street furniture and social problems are often identical – and have a dismal standardising effect. At the same time – unlike the dozens of past centuries in which styles, colours, sports, festivals and their calendars all developed incredibly differently – today a general phenomenon of creolisation is blending the entire human space and bringing out something new in common. Creolisation is Édouard Glissant’s concept referring to the constant creative invention in a society, resulting from the encounter of different cultures present within it. He developed this concept by analysing the context of a deliberately fragmented slave society in the French Caribbean. The Creole language was produced by slaves as a means of understanding and exchanging. Creolisation is the ability to create something new from what already exists. It’s an ongoing process. This urban world has also given rise to a new social and political actor, namely the people, and new forms of action, namely citizens’ revolutions. This development is wholly wrapped up with the two major parameters of our era: large numbers and the rise of the ‘boundless’ city that is today their home. The hyper-individual … So we are talking about another way of being human. People long feared the gradual dilution of the individual in the crowd, the levelling by the mass, the contagion effect that forces standardisation. The opposite is now true. The rise of the individual is an essential fact of our time, contrary to what might have been expected. Yet the longer history of our societies is essentially one in which individuals proudly considered themselves simply part of a group. They belonged to their community in the strictest sense of the word. This sense of belonging extended to all fields of life. Obviously, it was also the rule in all areas of cultural representation: the way in which people referred to themselves, to their place and their formal status within the community, to their identification with parts of the tribal totem and so on. To ignore this sense of belonging was to cause serious offence. Until a very recent moment in human history, everyone was defined by social ties that were stable, specific and limited. These connections identified us in the eyes of others, and thus in our own eyes in return. These were the relations of family, of neighbourhood, of the housing block, of the occupational hierarchy. But all such ties have now become too volatile for them to permanently define us throughout our whole lives. If anything, the opposite is true: the more people there are, the more complex the pattern of an individual’s social relations. There is a systematic connection between the explosion in human numbers and the rise of the individual. The more people there are, the more they are integrated into long chains of interdependence. These interdependencies are built differently for each person, according to their evolving social position, needs and obligations. But the more people there are, the more these relations are changeable, and the more each person asserts their own individuality in their personal handling of this situation. Added to this is a growing and ever-changing mass of entitlement codes, personnel numbers, identifiers and passwords, whose details, interconnection and rationale only the individual can know. They are all markers of personal territory. If we had to give this particular type a name, we could speak of the rise of the hyper-individual. Hyper-socialisation But there is also something rather paradoxical about all this. The age of great population numbers is also an age in which each and every human being is thoroughly socialised. To live our lives, we need to be ever more bound to long chains of dependence, and we constantly have to draw on all kinds of connections. Uninterrupted communication has become the material basis for a new way of being human, in which we are ever more closely connected with others. This is the basic condition for anyone who wants to take part in the life of our society. Given that the old means and customs of personal communication were once much more limited, it was only to be expected that a new system would eventually replace them. This field has seen a real transformation. Considered in the broad sweep of history, the vast change represented by our digital connectedness happened only very recently. This connectedness makes it possible to integrate every individual into a social network forming a long chain of interactions. It also allows us to create a much more intensive web of individual relations. These changes all generate greater interdependence, but also a radical individualisation of each person’s relationship with the rest of the community, seeing as each human being is integrated into this network in a personal, individual way. The two processes go hand in hand. Vast digital worlds are now within the individual’s reach. Thousands of applications are becoming accessible in all areas of activity. Of the most common, 4,000 are satellite applications. Earth and space form a permanent continuum for all of us – the gateway to countless digital worlds. The possibility for each person to access all the information, relationships and services involved in this sphere of connections gives the digital arena a central role that would, until recently, have been simply inconceivable. Its physical infrastructure has extended on a massive scale. Billions of smart phones, tens of billions of online objects turning their data into information, billions of ADSL routers and fibre-optic connections, millions of base stations and hosted servers. Then there are the millions of miles of cable carrying the data, and the thousands of observation and communications satellites gathering information 24/7 as they circle the planet tens of thousands of times over.8 All this reflects quite some investment. And also vast profits: for the longevity and the sheer reach of this technology is guaranteed by human needs, and no effort has been spared in moulding what are today considered ‘needs’. This will be a crucial structure of society and of private life long into the future, without which all manner of possibilities will be closed off. Or so we should imagine, unless electricity supplies are interrupted by climate change. This is the Achilles heel of the new context. Hyperconnected Already when the human population hit 5 billion, it saw a new community emerge within its ranks – and with it, a whole new way of life. At the end of the 1980s, the first companies started to provide Internet access. Its early use was immediately combined with the rise of the first ‘social networks’ (blogs, Hotmail and Six Degrees). A September 2022 report by the UN-linked International Telecommunication Union (ITU) gives some idea of the kind of contagion effect this had: there were 82 million computers connected to the Internet in 1997, but by September 2000 there were already 377 million.9 One billion people were connected in 2005; then almost 4 billion by the end of 2016. Since 2022, the counting has mostly been done the other way around: it is said that one-third of the world’s population is still without Internet access. The rest – 5.3 billion people worldwide – share a life on the web. They love it. Human beings have a taste for personal exchanges in which they join in with the most varied human communities, on the basis of something they share. In this age of huge population numbers, we can further see this in the growing number of people active on the best-known social network, Facebook. It has developed together with the further doubling of the world’s billions of people. In 2008, there were 400,000 users, but by 2015 there were already 1.5 billion. And by 2022 there were almost 3 billion of them. The following year, an agency specializing in this field calculated that some two-thirds of human beings are active on a social network. But here is the most striking thing: mobile phones are the way most people access the Internet. Some 92 per cent of Internet users are connected from a smart phone. Today, three-quarters of people over the age of ten have one in their pocket. Have we understood quite what this means? Every human being has a physical and interactive connection to (almost) everyone else. It is as if we’ve sprouted another organ. Being in many places at once Hence, a new era of human sociability was born. It soon replaced the letters sent by post – and even speaking on the phone. Chat rooms and social networks took over. Some of my readers likely have next to no idea of the other world which we so recently left behind: the world without social media, without instant messaging, without a connection accessible night and day with all your contacts or ‘friends’, ‘subscribers’ or ‘followers’. It makes up an increasingly inclusive global community, an intense web of connections that has simply no historical precedent. This is another effect of the great acceleration. In this connected world, the real and the virtual are not two distinct conditions, but simply two different moments in time. We see this in the rise of a new type of personal behaviour: being present in more than one place at a time. We can be here at the table, chatting with other people, while simultaneously connecting with others via instant messaging. These possibilities have an impact on every part of life that they touch. That is why this technology has become essential for political activity too. Millions of people are now trained in the use of networks for countless reasons, some of them trivial. These same tools are available when they need to turn their emotions to political mobilisation. They do this with the same force of spontaneity, the same linguistic ingenuity, and the same codes and ways of being that they have learned from apps. Taken as a whole, social networks and group chats are places where people build relationships of a kind never seen before. This is also where citizens make themselves heard, when issues that stir them into action appear online, along with situations in which this fact of being present in more than one place at the same time is an asset for taking action. Hence, the networked online space is the main and sometimes even only contemporary agora – the starting point for countless protests. This new era of politics is the direct product of the age of mass technology and of the individualisation of human communities. Social networks are now an integral part of the fabric of human society. This has given the political space a new dimension. The shape of the problem The rise of population numbers presents a special kind of challenge. It has an unstoppable dynamic. Each increase in the number of humans means more children for the next generation. This also means that ever-increasing needs must be met. But the capitalist mode of production does not settle for that. It must constantly create new needs and new markets – and continually find the techniques and raw materials necessary to provide for them. There is a close interconnection between the number of people, the development of relations between individuals, and technological understanding. But it would be mistaken to blame the number of guests who have showed up at the party. Numbers are not a problem in themselves. It is just a form that the problem takes. Would you tell someone that they have too many children? And what concrete conclusions should we draw from this? We obviously need to give people the proper means to control their reproduction. But the aim cannot be to fix limits. Instead, we need to give everyone the choice, so that they can control their biological functions and not let these latter decide their fate and their social outcomes. Reining in predation on the ecosystem, this is the one problem for which realistic solutions could and should be found. But how should we approach this issue? We all know the ‘green rule’: never take more from nature than it is able to replenish. There is also an implicit idea nestled within this: the need to square the rhythms of humans’ activity aimed at reproducing their own material existence, and the ecosystem’s activity in reproducing the conditions of its own balance. So here we arrive at a revolutionary idea: action to create such harmony in today’s global reality. But to what end? And how?
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