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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (1424)	1/24/2001 8:26:03 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 93284

We are at least a few generations away, but people are at least capable of thinking over these circumstances and creating the legal, economic, and ethical conditions for a stable population. Maybe. You are more optimistic than me. A future like that requires world government; otherwise a larger population can confer military advantage. World government is difficult to achieve peacefully. (Of course, it can be achieved with enough military power - if everybody refrains from nukes.) Population may be in for a seesaw ride, going up in peacetime and dropping drastically when major global wars break out. Considering the difficulty of achieving world government peacefully, that appears more likely to me. The alternative I expect would much more likely be like China's dictatorial policies than just crowding and starvation in a free society. India is a democracy- -sort of. Still, dictatorship is a likely outcome of the competition for lebensraum. I suppose that technological innovations could allow billions to live, farm, and breed in immense high-rise environments, but considering the expense and required cooperation I think that is the least likely scenario. If an (apparently unlikely) technological breakthrough is made and cheap, fast interplanetary (or better, interstellar) travel is achieved, these problems can be avoided, at least for the immigrants. The population of earth would probably still increase; the population of Europe is higher now, not lower, than when the New World was discovered.