Peterkin

No. But they are still possible candidates. True. I don't know who will actually do, but I do believe that the more people can, the more likely it becomes that one of them will. I'm not convinced the two scenarios are technically in the same realm of probability. Or diplomatic negotiability. The slightly larger previous question was whether the proliferation of nuclear weapons guarantees safety. I say "No", but I can't prove it. With that wholly inadequate contribution, I will now go back to watching "Madame Secretary".

Those are two possible candidates. Pakistan, Iran, China... or any number of unknown terrorist and criminal forces that get hold of illicit nuclear material for purposes you can't begin to guess, and set dirty bombs off in unpredicted locations. The existence of those things guarantees that everyone's at risk, the more players, large and small, national and transnational, known and unknown, will try to get in on the action.

It's insane. You can't regulate or negotiate insanity.

Yes, I think that's part of it. There are periods in every life of something like hiatus or fallowness, when not a lot happens, when we're not particularly creative or productive. Like writer's block or burnout; sometimes grief, or recovery from physical or mental trauma, depression... a lot of bad shit rains into people's lives, and they need time to regroup, rebuild before they get on with the next thing. Most of what happens in that interval is not noted or recorded. Usually, these periods last weeks or months, and then we're back at the desk, on deck, on the route, on the assembly line, our good reliable old selves. (not really; never the same) Those times-out are blank in the memory; time resumes, as if no time had passed. But life has gone by without us, and we can never catch up.

There is another factor. We calculate the segments of past time in relation to the whole. When you're two years old, a year is half of your life. Odds are, you can recall only the last week or so as a continuous segment, in which a large part of what happened was unique, unfamiliar. You may not recall any suppertimes except the one when you threw a tantrum over the carrots, but that's still an event. That week was 1/104th of all the time and events you've experienced, and you're already allocating memory-space according to significance. As your mental faculties expand, so does you memory - at the same time that novelty of experience and memorability of individual events diminish. What happened in the past week becomes a smaller and smaller portion of all that has happened in your lifetime. When a year is 1/50th of your life, the past week contains only 1/2600th of your experience, and most of what happened in that period is insignificant. (I also think Covid and lockdown tended to flatten all of our experiences, as fewer venues and opportunities for social encounters were available and much of our daily activity became constrained routine.)

No. At least, not by conventional means. Too few. However, if DNA is taken from all the individuals that are still alive - plus as many remnants of the dead ones as possible - it could be saved for a renaissance in some post-apocalyptic future.

There are some variables that could reduce the ill effects. If you are naturally nocturnal and don't have to make a huge change in your life habits, that would make the shift easier. The worst part of shift work is usually the shifting itself; having to reset your internal rhythms every few days. So, continuous night work is less harmful: once you've made the adjustment, you develop new habits. Another factor is: How much time do you have off work? Sleeping when everyone else is active puts a serious dent in your social life and relationships. Being deprived of sunlight is a further consideration: If you have two or three full days to be outdoors, and find pleasurably activities, that would be great help. And you would probably need a SAD light in winter. As a career, night work is not for everyone. As a short term arrangement, you could take steps to minimize the adverse effects..

And we're paying to prop them up And they don't usually clean up after themselves.

Oh, they're noticed all right! We don't need to clear forests anymore - though of course we still do it - they're also burning down by themselves. This is largely due to changed and changing climate. We're not talking about something that may or may not happen in the future: It already has. I do appreciate your concern about extinctions - it is an alarming situation. But it's not simply or solely caused by the number of people. It is caused far more by industrial farming and resource extraction, and by the pollution, energy-gluttony and waste of the global economy. Ultimately, the only thing poor people can do to alter their circumstances - in living conditions, decision making, economic arrangements or reproductive freedom - is rise up against their masters. And that means an awful of poor people get killed. It's not an action to be undertaken lightly.

I'm not seeing how that relates to one sex or another benefits from lack of action. If not enough input from women, ask the fathers here present: How many believe they would better off if they had more children than they have?

i don't see a direction or a depth. My failure: all I see is unfortunate outcomes from ill-considered decisions. Bad for everyone.

If one considered the nations with the highest birth-rates, one could assume that men, who dominate the culture of those nations, drive the birth-rate upward, and one might further assume that's because they have something to gain. But it certainly isn't a longer life. More soldiers to carry on internal and border disputes? Hardly a benefit to the soldiers. An excuse to keep women out of the workplaces and schools? Again, it's hard to see a benefit to men or women - or anyone - except despots and despotic oligarchies.

divided equally between its ^human^ inhabitants ? It might be a start, but we have already killed off a great many other species and are rapidly extinguishing the rest. We are already in the process of discovering how difficult subsistence is for humans in an environment stripped of its ecological complement. With average temperatures, spike temperatures, rain and wind patterns, rivers and glaciers, the very land itself shifting continuously, what is a subsistence farmer - anywhere on earth - supposed to rely on? The only way a human population of this size or larger can sustain itself is by moving into self-sufficient cities, a substantial part of which are underground, with their own energy generating capability, water supply, mass transit and pedestrian walkways, and produce its food locally in intensive hydroponic farms and meat factories. And even so, population growth would be restricted by available space and water, but presumably, the inhabitants could see directly, for themselves, the limits and limitations of their environment. Thus far, humans have always assumed that there was more of everything, someplace else or in the future, available through conquest or trade or technology. Only recently is becoming clear that a sphere is finite.

Neither of us actually recommended that. I never even claimed that population reduction was a prerequisite to climate change mitigation; I said on many occasions that population growth would automatically stop if infant mortality were under control, standard of living was reasonable and women had reproductive choice. My main contention is and has always been that the necessary conditions for an effective global response to our common existential threat are: sincere consensus, resource redistribution and a dramatic reduction in wasteful consumption.

No. It's for less population growth altogether. But especially in places and among people who have less ability (due to religion, political conservatism, lack of access to birth control and infant health care, lack of education and opportunities, suppression of women's freedom of choice) to regulate their rate of reproduction, and who also have fewer resources to give their children a healthy, competitive start in life. Family planning is not a punishment for overconsumption; it's a prerogative long enjoyed by high volume consumers, which privilege also increases the purchasing and consuming power of the people who have it. They ought to share the privileges, just as they ought to share the surplus of goods they enjoy. Meanwhile, these same high volume consumers ought to reduce their waste and pollution, most notably and urgently at the corporate level, their energy use, their hold on power and distribution. Many individuals and businesses are doing this voluntarily and in innovative ways. Far more are not, and look for excuses to do nothing, or less than they should, or later. A few are actively seeking better recourses and solutions for the poor people - sometimes at considerable personal cost and risk. Some do not want to hear about altering their own lifestyle in any way. A few oppose it energetically, at considerable financial outlay, which, due to their wealth and power, costs them nothing at all. There are not just two homogeneous baskets of people to consider.

It was your word; your suggestion. I merely asked for an explanation of what that means or entails. I believe this to be case. Thus: probably, but not necessarily. The cows need to stop being tortured. Out of touch with reality, delusional, disoriented, irrational, out of conscious control. Thinking, communicating and behaving in ways that are inimical to own and others' wellness and security; disruptive to social order; ultimately threatening survival. E.g. bulldozing the forests that produce oxygen essential to life; electing violent megalomaniacs and compulsive liars to the highest public offices, shooting schoolchildren and drug addicts, bombing orchards, poisoning rivers, attacking health care workers.... +/-260,000,000 years vs 10,500 years and counting down fast, I would definitely peg the wild ones as more sustainable. Pretty much. Universe 25 and Twitter.

for reference, I attempted to answer: Not: The answer to which is: It was rhetorical. Obviously, neither your solution of reducing craziness while population continues to grow, or mine of reducing population through reproductive freedom and improved living conditions, which I believe would incidentally reduce the craziness, will ever be tried by any non-existent collective humanity that could be encompassed by the theoretical "we" that should be doing what we each think should be done.

There is no "we". Each of us can try to to affect what we are able to reach. Voting, writing letters, protesting, getting arrested, turning off the air conditioner, donating money, eating less meat, practicing birth control, picking the slugs off our lettuces by hand instead of setting out poison traps. We can each do something.

We know exactly which organizations and individuals should be doing what. We also know that they are refusing or failing to do it in a timely and effective manner. It's just not in the immediate interest of the powerful to facilitate the long-term welfare of the powerless. In climate change mitigation, in population control, in economic reform, in political compromise or in the preservation of ecosystems. The only things be we can be quite sure of: a growing, hungry, threatened human race will not improve the situation.

Nolne of which you have supplied, any more than have all the overcrowded, overstressed civilizations - without even mentioning the enormous profits to be gleaned from the craziness. It happens automatically with improved living conditions, lower infant mortality, the liberation and education of women. Let's try both and see which works better.

Okay. How? Given the present state of politics, economics, religiosity and environmental conditions - who [bearing in mind there is no unanimous "we", only individuals and organizations] should be doing what, how where and with what resources?

Because we're using up the resources and killing every other species - that was happening before we heated up the atmosphere and threatened nuclear holocaust. The more crowded we are, the crazier we get.

Couple of things about that: Thing 1: Viruses already exist, and are already coming for the vulnerable; they don't need any help, though they're getting plenty from the lunatic right. Thing 2: Explain about resetting the economy - who is expected to do this, where, on what scale, by what measures? Not necessarily, if the remainder, bereft of human labour to create all the stuff for them resort to more and more mechanization, which requires energy production: an automated world of super-consumers can still be overheated. It would be wiser to reduce population voluntarily, by empowering women to control their own fertility. Not so very strangely, the same political entities that oppose reproductive rights also oppose ecological initiatives.

I can just about discern an overall trend. By no means conclusive, of course. If a patient's chart looked like that, without intervention we could say, "We won't have a definitive diagnosis until after the autopsy."

Especially if it takes that long for some people to pay attention!