People Are Living Longer, With More Disabilities Than Ever 129
skade88 writes "Worldwide, people are living longer. Their lives are starting to look more like the lives of Americans: too much food is a problem, death in childhood is becoming less common, and so on. Yet with a population that lives through what would once have killed us, disabilities are starting to become the norm. A research report from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has a good glimpse into the new emerging world we find ourselves in."
The Guardian has a nice visualization of the mortality data (but take note of shifting scales on the Y-axis).
It's not an obesity (Score:2, Funny)
It's not an obesity, it's just a different body shape....
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Must be the Spherical Cow [wikipedia.org]. Physics will be easier in the future.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's probably a problem, but it's much less of a problem than overeating, lack of exercise, stress and being under rested. I remember some years back dropping 30 lbs., just by cutting out between meal snacks and getting more shut eye.
It's probably worth researching, but until people are doing the things that are known to prevent obesity, there isn't much point in worrying about the possibilities of chemicals and such causing problems. In fact, you really need to rule out the things I listed to have any hope
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Those things are well known:
1. Get sleep between 10am and 2pm as well as whatever feels like a full nights sleep (6 to 8 hours). Having the feeling of being able to doze lightly for an hour or two before actually having to get up.
2. Have a well ventilated bedroom. I've heard people say how they were amazed they only needed six hours sleep when they stayed in a hotel room with combined air conditioning and filtering as well as blackout curtains (thick curtains that go all the way down to the floor and blocko
Speaking as an example... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later.
What's your point? Better that I was already dead?
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I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later. What's your point? Better that I was already dead?
I think the point is that there are more people like you in "the new emerging world we find ourselves in."
Re:Speaking as an example... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later.
What's your point? Better that I was already dead?
The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy. Even putting aside the individual pain and suffering, there are serious economic consequences. Unhealthy people produce less and require more from society. The sicker they are, the more this is true. Eventually society may have to let people die that they technically could save because they can not afford the resources to keep these people alive.
Re:Speaking as an example... (Score:4, Insightful)
Economics is a tool that we invented to serve us. It is not some God that we must practice human sacrifice to.
If automation allows us to live a life where we are more free to do what we want, that's a good thing. We're closer to utopia.
Re:Speaking as an example... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Speaking as an example... (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently it seems to be more a tool to create fantasies about why under 1% of the population have a natural right to own more than half of everything while others die from overpriced medical care.
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When the abuses are that rampant and the twisted and broken logic pervades the literature, it does warrant subjecting any claims made to extraordinarily high scrutiny.
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I can as easily say that the abuses are deeper and more fundamental than you might think. You should step back from the trees for a moment and have a look at the forest.
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You seem awfully defensive. Not to mention prejudiced to the status quo.
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The funny thing is, I have presented no argument, only an observation. You have posted only a denial. Did you really imagine this was some sort of deep debate?
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No, they could not have been arguments, but if it makes your ego feel a bit healthier, fine. You win the empty exchange of not quite opinions.
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I'm looking at this as being like a conversation with an argumentative version of Elisa.
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WOW!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
The most wasteful system ever devised by human is suggested as a "tool we invented to understand and control how limited resources are used"?
The system that burns hydrocarbons instead of using them only for organic synthesis (plastics, medicine). The system that resulted in planned obsolesce? The system that...I am lost for words.
There is only one sensible thing in your post - the word "believe" There is no other way to support this inhuman, irrational, wasteful socioeconomic system that to accept it is faith....
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Bullshit. Medicine doubled the lifespan of humans and technology improved quality of life. Capitalism was only there to make a profit.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo [youtube.com]
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Economy isn't about how limited resources are used, it is about how they are distributed and ownership. When it fails society steps in to redistribute, which is why most of western Europe has high quality social healthcare, for example.
The reality is that most western countries have more resources than we need, they are just distributed badly due to economics.
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We didn't invent economics, we discovered it. We don't get to choose what its implications are; we only get to choose what we do with the knowledge. The real "human sacrifice" is in choosing not to know or pursue the optimal solution to minimizing human suffering.
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Unhealthy people produce less and require more from society. The sicker they are, the more this is true. Eventually society may have to let people die that they technically could save because they can not afford the resources to keep these people alive.
These kind of stories are why we have things like the school shooting. It's not guns. This counrty has always had lots of people with guns.
What has changed is the way we see life. We see human life and teach it to our children as a problem. It's an overpopulation problem, people are evil, people are the earth's enemy, etc.
Movies like avator, underworld (last one,) planet of the apes, district 9, and others all show humanity (except for the film's heros) as revolting.
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What has changed is the way we see life. We see human life and teach it to our children as a problem. It's an overpopulation problem, people are evil, people are the earth's enemy, etc.
Today we treat life as more precious than any time in our history. Up until the middle of this century, life was cheap. People regularly dying on their jobs was considered no big deal. People were left to starve or freeze if they couldn't afford to take care of themselves. We spend a fortune on the last few years of life now, before we'd just let people die. Your confused view of history makes me thing you're probably just as wrong about guns, but I don't think you should by trying to pull guns into th
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Re:Speaking as an example... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure in the future we may be able to ban all diseases, then again we may not, but now there is so much we can do as a society and we need to weight the efforts needed, the resources compromised by these efforts and what will be left unattended as consequence.
If you have to neglect the education of 100 people to treat a very expensive disability of a single one for life what will you choose? These are the kind of hard choices that are necessary when the resources are not infinite.
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If you have to neglect the education of 100 people to treat a very expensive disability of a single one for life what will you choose? These are the kind of hard choices that are necessary when the resources are not infinite.
False dichotomy. There simply are not any medical procedures costing that much which would result in someone still being alive and not suffering unduly. Plus as a whole our societies have enough resources to provide everyone with high quality medical care, they are just not distributed in a way that allows that.
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Re:Speaking as an example... (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy.
And assorted people, including those working in the health industry, have explained that this is a simple result of a "market" health system. Thus, I've heard or read a number of exchanges in which an interviewer asks a Pharm rep why their company has gotten out of the vaccine business. The reply is generally of the form "Because vaccines aren't profitable". The interviewer asks for further details. The rep explains that a vaccine cures the patient, or prevents them from even getting sick. This means that you sell them nothing, or maybe a few doses of a medicine, and then you make no more money from them. The profitable drugs/treatments are those that maintains the patient as a patient, requiring ongoing treatment for the rest of their lives.
I first ran across this, years ago, as a criticism of the commercial health system. But now I'm hearing it from the supporters and reps of that health system, as an explanation for why they're so profitable.
So if you want to be kept healthy, maybe you should be pushing for a system that wants you to be healthy, rather than one that wants you as a (paying) patient. The current system (at least here in the US) punishes the companies that market things that keep you healthy, and rewards those who convert you to a patient with a chronic condition.
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Obviously, the solution is that we all pay big pharmacy a monthly fee unless we are sick, in which case they get nothing.
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Vaccines aren't profitable if everyone is making them and the only way to compete is price
True, but that's equally true for all other drugs. The way it's usually handled is that the "innovator" company gets a patent. Then they have a monopoly for many years, because nobody can legally compete with them. Or they can license the drug and collect royalties while others do all the production and marketing work.
That's just what they do with most new drugs. But with vaccines, they don't seem to bother, because even with a legal monopoly, it's still difficult to recover the development costs.
O
Do non-market systems change things? (Score:3)
The biggest richest EU countries have some flavor of public health care (different in all of them, of course). They have universities and scientists: the US isn't the only place capable of inventing drugs and cures.
Do they have single-dose medicines or curative therapies that the US doesn't?
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So if you want to be kept healthy, maybe you should be pushing for a system that wants you to be healthy, rather than one that wants you as a (paying) patient.
Or you could eat right, exercise, and moderate health-negative behaviors like drinking and tanning, and when the end comes to your long life (barring accidents, etc.) just refuse to live as a medicated invalid and move on.
Then you don't have to worry about being "kept" anything.
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Or you could eat right, exercise, and moderate health-negative behaviors like drinking and tanning, ...
My one criticism of this is the extensive evidence that ethanol in "moderate" quantities is very strongly correlated with living longer. The only problem is maintaining the "moderate" level of input.
The first evidence I read of this was back in the 1970s, when the UK's medical folks did what's now called a "data dredging" study of their medical records to learn what things were correlated with lifespan. One of the strongest signals that they reported was with alcohol. Their summary was that, while dru
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Hey, which stock exchange deals in "torch and pitchfork" stocks? Interested potential customers want to know ... ;-)
Meanwhile, on a more serious train, I didn't take note of the names (or employers) of the people in such interviews. I just found that they were making, uh, "interesting" comments that seemed to agree with predictions from assorted economist types. What was most interesting was that they'd so openly make such comments to known interviewers, despite the obvious danger from people with torc
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The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy.
As a generality, this isn't true. We are getting much better at successfully treating many diseases and problems such that people are returning to society more functional than ever. Even older people are often living healthier lives (with concomitantly fewer medical bills).
Even putting aside the individual pain and suffering, there are serious economic consequences. Unhealthy people produce less and require more from society. The sicker they are, the more this is true. Eventually society may have to let people die that they technically could save because they can not afford the resources to keep these people alive.
It's much more nuanced than that. Yes, there are economic consequences. There are always economic consequences. You have to decide just what the economy is there for. Is it to keep JRR Tolikien's heirs rolling in money for multiple
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Isn't something like that curable. fMRI scan of the hip area to see where the pain is occurring? Then realign the bone or nerve to stop the pinching?
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I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later.
What's your point? Better that I was already dead?
Depends. Was the piece of matter your frontal lobe?
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Major cause: person kept alive
Solution: uhhh....
Well yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
People are dying slower.
And the biggest disability is . . . obesity! (Score:2)
http://www.rttnews.com/2024044/obesity-is-a-bigger-problem-globally-than-hunger.aspx?type=hnr [rttnews.com]
Strange for both these news items to pop up at the same time . . .
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Look at that sharp falloff in neonatal deaths (Score:1)
Look at that sharp falloff in neonatal deaths after birth. Whats up with that?
And nice to see diarrhea stays strong in the death game from one end of the spectrum to the other. And yet we have no American Diarrhea Society or Brown-Ribbon campaigns.
With More Disabilities Than Ever? (Score:4, Insightful)
"With More Disabilities Than Ever"?
That is not necessarily so. There may just be more diagnosed and reported than ever, at least in releative terms.
In absolute numbers, yes. But that is due to Earth's population growth...
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In Australia you have an older population. When younger they where exposed to heavy industry, farming, transport over many years.
Mining, electrical, ship building, trams, busses, home building, cloth dying, pest control would be the classics.
Then you have exotic metals been moved down ducts - an example with a small jet with an AC issue. Staff would be feeling ill, not walking in a safe manner. The press LOL at reports - drunk. Heavy metal exposure will mean early and p
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Human population growth. In some ways resulting in Earth population decline.
Personally I think a lot more should be done to reduce or cease increasing our numbers. Great, we can keep people alive for longer, and sure, more people alive as well. But why do we need more people? We did okay being below 1 billion for tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands, depending on how you look at it.
Another in the list of "duh" studies (Score:3)
Torchwood: Miracle Day was a great glimpse into the concept taken to the extreme. *Obviously* the more things used to kill you and now don't, the more people will live with crippling issues that used to be fatal ones. Not really news?
Shifting scale (Score:2)
This is so annoying.
Not too much food. Too much BAD food. (Score:5, Interesting)
As in:
- Destruction through heating (like that whole heated dairy protein causing auto-immune diseases thing, but also destroying vitamins and enzymes).
- Extreme concentrations that would never appear in nature and cause strong imbalances (to the point of collapse) in the body (like sweets / stuff that's nearly pure starch, etc. but also salt or saturated fats).
- Lack of vital substances in plants grown on depleted soil that are only bigger because they have more water in them (adding to the imbalances, and causing many diseases).
- Thousands of drugs and unnatural substances given to animals and added to processed "food".
We shouldn't be surprised we get sick from them. We should be surprised our bodies are so resilient to survive this nasty waste at all!
Dr. M. O. Bruker studied these exact problems for five decades with over 50,000 patients... as did many others. And the result was always, that those so-called "age-related diseases" didn't come because of age, but *with* age... with decades of bad nutrition!
We've known this for 50 years now. But as long as the industry doesn't put the illness and pain of seven billion people above corporate greed, and as long as we the people don't stop buying their trash, and start supporting people people that *do* make good food for us... as long as *we* don't make that happen, nothing will change.
(Ask your local farmer and butcher and baker, etc. He'd love to sell you something of better quality. But he can't give you the illusion of cheapness because he won't employ the tricks and lies and shit that make you sick and will *really* cost you in the long term.)
Final conclusion: Thinking for the long term... thinking ahead... equals intelligence. The more a life-form can predict the future, and manipulate things so it ends up in his favor, the more intelligence it is. But it seems that nowadays, both people and companies, are just really fuckin' stupid.
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And how many times do you see people buy the cheapest and crappiest food and put IMO their $50,000 SUV?
Lots of healthy food available. People choose not to buy it
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Yeah, you're right, it's all 'choice'.
People who have $50,000 SUVs are the top 10% of income earners or better. You say "how many times do you see...". Are you arguing that we wouldn't see the lower 90%, (or the lowest 30% or whatever), who simply don't have the option to pay as much for food, buying the same cheap crappy food in similar or worse proportions? What's your claim here? That if I could see what's really going on, I would see the wealthiest people choosing poorly, but wouldn't see the poor peopl
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Problem is for most products the situation is usually as follows:
Cheap house brand, unhealthy
Expensive AA brand, also unhealthy
Incredibly Expensive biological/healthy brand, with questionable healthiness, and less tasty to boot.
Take meat. You can choose several regular kinds of meat or the biological/vegetarian one. The vegetarian one tastes like crap. With the biological one there is no way to guarantee the chicken/pigs/cows actually have a significantly better life than their normal meat brethren.
Add to t
Re:Not too much food. Too much BAD food. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not like "the good old days" when we all ate organic food and lived to the ripe old age of forty!
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Re:Not too much food. Too much BAD food. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can easily look at the lives of adults (not killed in war) and find a percentage of the total life expectancy that exceeded forty.
"Threescore and ten" (Score:2)
Was the number in Biblical times.
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Yeah, they wished that the could live that long, but they almost never did!
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"Unnatural", "processed" - you know these are bullshit terms right?
Organic food is unhealthier. Plenty of natural things are poison. And plenty of unprocessed things would be impossible to digest.
Heating milk doesn't "cause auto-immune disease". I've drunk plenty of heated dairy products - no auto-immune disease. It doesn't even increase the risk! I hate that evil arseholes like you always pick on auto-immune disease to blame your pet hate for causing. But I know you do it because we don't know much about t
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It strikes me that widespread use of antivirals and antibiotics to treat obvious conditions will tend to favour the evolution of pathogens with unobvious results.
It's not difficult to imagine pathogens that are very hard to culture or otherwise detect which nevertheless cause immune flare-ups.
Evolution happens quite quickly at the microscopic level. Even at the small arthropod scale, I've seen big changes in insecticide resistance since I was a child. Fly sprays would kill flies with impressive effect when
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People have been getting autoimmune conditions for long before antibiotics were even conceived of by humans.
And use of antibiotics favour evolution with fairly obvious results - it selects for resistance to the antibiotic. In fact, we usually know how bacteria do this; They use many different methods, including modifying their own proteins, pumping out the antibiotic, 'digesting' the antibiotic.
I'm sure their are pathogens that trigger autoimmune disease, but antibiotics don't have anything to do with that.
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That said, I'd be inclined to argue that the 'quality of ingredients' problem is really two problems; one is how to keep good food fresh and healthy between production and consumption (a preservation and distribution problem), and the other is th
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"Toxic"? Jesus, you love your hippie buzzwords. Insecticide is meant to be toxic - to insects. Has anyone died from this fantasy corn of yours? Or is it the new cause de jour of autism?
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Agent Orange was meant to kill plants. Guess what else it did? Guess what company was responsible for making it? The effects aren't always as advertised.
I haven't heard of anyone dying from GMO corn, but people have died from eating GMO crops: look up Pioneer Hi-Bred soybeans.
Do people really need to die before you consider something to be harmful? The fact is that with GMO, we do not know the effects, and it could easily be decades before they become apparent. Biology is complicated shit, and changes introduced by GMO are not examined with an eye towards the unknown. We are like Marie Curie playing with glow-in-the-dark isotopes, only in our case there are hundreds of millions of us.
Cite source better? Googling "Pioneer Hi-Bred soybeans" gets me stuff by the company itself, pages of positive news results, and government documents determining that the stuff doesn't pose a risk.
Now, it's all well and good to call for caution. Remember, though... every policy has costs. Do you think people farm with pesticides, chemical fertilizers and toxin-resistant crops just because because they're greedy SOBs and absolutely must take in maximum profit for their investments? No, they do this bec
Too much food isn't the problem (Score:1)
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I agree with one point, too much crappy food is the problem. People are getting too much of certain types of fatty acids (saturated and trans-fatty) while not getting enough of others (poly and monounsaturated) . Plus people are getting too many of the wrong carbs. How many people have enough soluble fiber in their diet? How many people have enough insoluble fiber in their diet? Whole grains are not necessarily the problem. Oats have a great number of nutrients. One such benefit is soluble fiber. Oat
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We are an exception in some sense, by how we work together. An education is an important part of our strengths, passing on knowledge gathered by many individuals, across the generations. I'd rather people learned from the mistakes of others, than die from their own.
pandemic (Score:1)
There are unhealthy lives and unhealthy genes. I'm not too worried about the lifestyles, as long as they're not reproducing. In the event where there are unhealthy genes being passed on, I feel like a good old fashion epidemic will re-balance the tables at some point.
Or alternatively, we can start a new religion that doesn't tolerate unhealthy lifestyles, and at the same time pass more liberal gun ownership laws (meaning all people get guns), and at the same time invest in larger prison systems to hold th
There is simply No Free Lunch (Score:1)
Confused (Score:1)
I remember reading twenty years ago that by now the population would be so big that we couldn't possibly feed everyone, now there is too much food? I also remember hearing that we would be out of oil by now too.
Why is it the "experts" seem to always be wrong?
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Pumpkin... (Score:2)
That's modern
medicine. Advances that keep
people alive that should have died
along time ago, back when they
lost what made them people.
Thank you .... (Score:2)
Captain obvious. No shite!
How did our species survive the 90s!? (Score:3)
According to this graph, in 1990, there were 120k deaths per 100k people amongst the 0-6 day age group alone. I could have sworn that there were at least a few children that survived the decade.
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120k deaths per 100k people? How's that work?
Not PC, but relevant (Score:1)
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Not PC and not relevant either.
Society is also a genetic construct that has (co-)evolved. If the current shape of society results in a poorer survival rate for people, then either people will die out or people in a different form of society will eventually become more numerous. In any case, we won't know the evolutionary effect of a change in societal behaviour for many generations, so it's probably better to optimise for present well-being rather than contemplate sacrificing (other) people for a hypothetic
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Is that God talking to the phenomenon that is evolution?
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The easiest thing to do, is just stop reproducing. At least stop reproducing at these rates. We don't need for every couple to breed, one in ten could do us just fine for a couple of generations. Yes, there's the problem that the elderly depend on the young, but the biggest problem of all, is how many of us there are. We experience Earth's limited resources as more limited, the faster we consume them.
And I'd much rather see people not be born, than be born and then die a slow and painful death.
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Well, the resources on Earth are what it is all about now. Before we get to rely on resources in outer space, to get to that stage, we probably have to solve a lot of problems with the resources available down here.
If you mean there is more space on the planet, I disagree. We're not the only species. And each other species is linked with multiple species. The more we displace and interefere with other species, the more we alter the entire ecology of Earth. It's better the less space we occupy.
And quite a la