future

Confronting overpopulation

I was taught young that it isn’t the best idea to have too many billions of people on Earth. Elementary school, if I’m remembering correctly: there was some math, and at least one graph. They said food production couldn’t keep up. I think that factory farming methods and workhorse cultivars may have proven by now that technically, it can keep up. All my adult life I’ve thought about that gratefully.

Now the conversation about overpopulation is more about climate change, and has been since the early 2000s. The Georgia Guidestones, a mysterious monument erected anonymously in 1980 in the United States, are sometimes quoted as the potential key to a sustainable world.

Their inscription states the following suggestions (note: I will add my impressions in italics below each point):

  1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
    (note: I mean, why? We would need at least three billion people on Earth to maintain our current diversity of industries, though [according to Earth Logos]. If we want professional sports, comprehensive travel, and exotic pets, a half a billion just isn’t enough people.)
  2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
    (note: But, really? Tell me this isn’t about eugenics. Disregard this one, maybe.)
  3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
    (note: People really like their current languages. There’s the hitch. A universal second language might emerge at some point in the future, and that seems rather exciting.)
  4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
    (note: Sure thing. I’m doing that now. Good stuff.)
  5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
    (note: Yes, this is very good.)
  6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
    (note: This is a nice idea about ending wars eventually, right? Most everyone always likes this sort of thing in theory and most generations going forward are going to be the ones that try it, I think.)
    (note: If we had only 500,000,000 people in perpetual balance with nature we’d probably be extremely worried about losing any to wars.)
  7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
    (note: Probably good. Avoid pettiness in exercising power. Avoid corruption.)
  8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
    (note: Yeah, let us not forget the social contract. It’s the stuff of civilization.)
  9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
    (note: Prize decency too, and wisdom, and kindness, understanding, and productive vision for the future. Prize goodness.)
  10. Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.
    (note: Leave room for civilization in thought, word, and deed. And civilization must leave room for nature. That’s our ecosystem.)

Terence McKenna famously said that education was the way to approach overpopulation and reduce carbon emissions. In his lectures, he’d often point out that women with more formal education tend to have fewer children. The truth is, the education about overpopulation has begun. I think a lot of people worry about it already; but we still like people, right?

Population loss has something to do with what’s been called the Great Reset. Presumably, the Great Reset is about how certain parties have planned for (or perhaps even wanted?) a smaller population, possibly looking forward and foreseeing massive fatalities from climate change, pandemics, and other causes. One crucial point in this matter is to avoid anyone engineering population losses through violent means, or forcibly, which would never be justifiable. It strikes me that on some level it made sense to do economic and civic planning for a population drop, as many countries developed much of their modern infrastructure and systems after a post-1940s “baby boom”, and they were perhaps a little too close to perpetual growth models. Note that I have no idea if the set of plans described as the Great Reset are the right ones, nor even if they are cogent. Many have speculated that those plans may involve new taxes on the megawealthy or on certain industries, especially in light of how skewed wealth distribution has become since the mid 20th Century.

If we’re anxious at all for the population to go down here on Earth, it can be done with birth rates (which are already dropping in most places, they say, perhaps especially since the COVID-19 precautions began). The first-pass solution is probably to make oral contraceptives available over-the-counter (OTC) in as many places as possible. They are safe and effective, and I think their wider availability would help many people in my country, where they are currently sold by prescription only. The population initiative will be further helped by making sure birth control pills are affordable (possibly through insurance, the way some medical supplies are covered by most insurance plans). Hard to say how much we’d see the population go down organically and peacefully in a hundred years, but it is very likely we’d see sustainable population numbers by then.

Are we panicked about population? I don’t think we have to be.

──── by Lync Dalton ────

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What is the Universe up to?

There was a Big Bang very long ago, and now the Universe exists. The Big Bang was the Cosmos giving birth to the Universe, which had a path in mind at the time: a culmination.

The Universe has many galaxies, and in our small part of the Milk Way Galaxy, life has developed on Earth. Life on Earth is very dense. Some of the other life in the Universe is much less dense, and does not manifest all the way down to solid matter. We did. This is somewhat shocking and wonderful for a Universe. It’s good what we’ve done here.

Here is also where we spend time thinking about what will happen to the Universe. Did it really start as one event? Will it end as one event? We think about a singularity that we could experience. A black hole seems like a singularity to us. A singularity is something so rare and full of convergences that it’s remarkably unlikely to ever happen. It gives the impression that nearly anything could happen. We’ve heard about the theory of waiting for a technological singularity to solve our problems, but that’s not really how complex human problems get solved. The more powerful singularity would not be technological.

I’m near a temporal singularity right now, and by times. It’s situated very far in the future, but it knows me already. Theoretically, all human consciousness could converge and unite with it at some point in the very distant future.

It’s not scary, the Divine Eschaton culmination of time. It is where we collectively get to transcend and evolve past time. Heat death is terrifying. It is an unsupportable loss of existence and potential. Eschaton essentially means “final thing”. The Divine Eschaton is God and all possibly other eligible individual consciousnesses together as both final consciousness and final object at the end of time itself. It’s not something that culminates in our human lifetimes, it’s the end of time itself, which is a point in the Universe’s lifespan. Theoretically, our Universe could manifest a binary Divine Eschaton, which would be like two cosmic beings having the best conversation ever while experiencing rapt sexual congress but also all consciousness and all matter combined. The other option is having a more traditional type of singularity, with one, even more integrated consciousness. The Divine Eschaton is how human consciousness can culminate along with the Universe after Earth is gone and we’re sick of doing civilizations and human existence. But let’s play around with them way more first, okay?

Universal heat death would mean there is no final thing, no conservation of consciousness, and everything would grow farther and farther apart, dissipating into non-existence and getting colder, until no life was possible.

──── by Lync Dalton ────

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We have to get to the Satya Yuga.

If we get to the Satya Yuga, everything will be alright.

That’s what I know for sure about the future. I feel something sacred in the way I know that.

──── by Lync Dalton ────

PLEASE DONATE TO WEIRDO CAMP. Do you enjoy and/or enrich yourself with Weirdo Camp? Please send a donation via Paypal (see site sidebar) or to $alchemylynx on Cash App.
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