The Present Day Problem With Human Species
Can we amortize the depletion of natural resources?
We humans are an invasive species. We occupy all corners of our planet. At 8.2 billion people living today, we are starting to leave a significant footprint on the biosphere. There are naysayers, of course, who will insist that the effects of humans on the biosphere are negligible, but plenty of evidence points at the opposite conclusion.
What are the causes of such self-destructive behaviour? I can name four causes that immediately come to mind:
No natural predators
No mating seasons (we procreate all year long, all seasons)
Advanced technology
Compassion toward maladapted individuals
All four causes I’ve mentioned above are absent in any other existing (or extinct) species on Earth. In that regard, we humans are unique.
Without natural predators, we are free to procreate and multiply without the threat of being hunted and devoured. Not limiting our procreation activities to just one or two seasons per year, we do it all year long. Having advanced technology at our disposal, we can enact impressive control over our immediate environment to ensure sufficient resources necessary for our survival. Having ample compassion for those less fortunate human beings who are born with severe inefficiencies caused by generic defects, we use our advanced technology to make sure they too can afford to live comfortably and procreate (thus risking adding more poorly adjusted humans to the gene pool).
Those factors enable us to not only rapidly multiply and increase the rate of procreation but also prolong our life expectancy. Having more and more people inhabit the planet and seeing how more and more people are now leading active lives even when they’re 90 or more years old, we are forced to up the pressure and increase the exploitation of natural resources. And since those resources are not limitless, sooner or later we start reaching the breaking point, or points. Science predicts that average human lifespan is only going to keep increasing, which means we will have to dig even deeper into natural resources to make sure we can provide for that ever-growing ageing population.
Seeing how the picture is not really all that pretty, we cannot avoid asking the question: How can we fix that? Is it even fixable? I’d be curious to hear your ideas regarding the approach to dealing with this global challenge.