I thought it would speak for itself that I didn't mean disabled people should be thrown out in the desert as well. Guess that wasn't clear, fair enough.

The point is that if you open the door to the extermination of one group, that could open doors to others. In a perfect world, we would be able to easily tell the bad ones apart from the good ones and give them proper rehabilitation, but we don't. The best we have is the beaurocrasy to try and not leave anything unchecked and hope that the further innovations, technological, political, and philisophical, keep propelling humanity to a better place.

Anyway, I'm done arguing this. If I argued further, I'd just be repeating myself and barely any of my points have been argued against already. To each his own, I suppose.

Like that other guy, I halfway agree with you. People should be penalized for abusing it, and I'm guessing you're exaggerating, but ouright murder probably won't fix anything, horse are expensive.

Just cutting off any kind of free money to those kind of people would make the problem solve itself, wouldn't it? No money = no food. Either you start working or you die. Seems like a good artificial natural selection to me. After all, you'd have to be immensely stupid to sit there and starve to death.

Yeah, or they start committing crime and get sent to jail.

Then the jails start filling up, they eventually get released with a criminal record and no way of getting money legally off the bat.

Gabe, shame. I figured you were smarter than to pull out the "perfect world" argument, as there is nothing more subjective than the concept of a utopia.

In general, the idea of a perfect world is one without disease or murder. But unless we did have limited breeding, or some form of culling (ala Logan's Run), we would become incredibly overpopulated without nature's ability to pick off those of us who are not meant for survival. I am by no means a humanist, and I think the idea that humans are above nature because of our technological prowess is sick.

Yes, but in this sense that would be part of the perfect world. My only point here is that killing is wrong. No one deserves death for whatever purpose. Anyway, I'm just hoping down the line we'll have the means to spred to Mars. Carl Sagan once said humanity is too fragile to keep on a single planet. Cowboy Bebop would be evidence of that. As for right now, with Swine Flu, global warming, and social and economic unrest, I'd say there's plenty of death in store for humanity in the near future. I'll do my part by not having kids and choosing to adopt if I do choose to become a father.

Given the mass reproduction rate, even a plague would only make a dent in the population.

The best part? If a plague were to wipe out an entire generation, even though this would actually carve down the numbers to a healthy sum, we would feel the need to breed twice as fast and twice as often to "make up for it".

how do we deal with overpopulation?
What do we do with the nukes left from the cold war?

the questions answer them selves, just every now and again nuke an overpopulated city, while highly unethical, is by far the most efficient path


seriously, they need to do a form of slaughter that can be hidden from civilians
OR
Use this to our advantage.
Slave trade could do wonders for the economy, or we can use the extra people and use them for war, we could rule the world
and every now and again we could grab some of the orphans and simply train them while there young for highly advanced military officers or soldiers
this is only a problem if people look as if it's a problem, but it can also be so much

You win for comedian of the year, Skillswords.

I'm going to assume that was an ironic reply in the same vein as that one about culling Irish babies and feeding them to the poor.

Even if the world's birth rate settled to one child per parent, population would continue to rise for some time, since there are more people in each ten-year age group than the immediately elder group. It will take some years before the age distribution equalises.

One solution might be to limit every one to a single child (two per couple). The deficit from child and infant mortality, and indeed from those who do not reproduce, might be met by awarding an extra birth licence to those whose children die, or allowing extra birth licences to be bought.

In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, humanity had worked a sort of benign eugenics program into breeding restrictions. Every one was allowed one child (I forget if that was per person or couple), extras were awarded to those who excel at some career, academic or athletic, with the hope of promoting genes for intelligence and physical fitness (the theory behind this is at once strong (artificial selection) and questionable (you may not be selecting for genetic attributes)). Extra licences could be purchased, but were expensive (the idea being that being successful enough to afford them is a desirable trait, though its heritability is extremely questionable), and the rest could be won in a lottery (the origin of this tradition is a significant plot point in the book Ringworld, which I won't spoil. Suffice to say, the idea of a birth lottery might itself be a good one, but the true intentions behind it in the story raised my incredulous eyebrows).



Another interesting, if inelegant solution to overpopulation I once heard was that everybody could eat another person. The idea I think they had was that half the world's population should eat the other half, though the very same instructions could reduce the population to a single person if the cannibalism was organised in a "Russian doll" fashion.