There are too many people and it will only get worse.
The human race, a too successful species, is ruining its own habitat.
The time of Soylent Green is coming
We won’t prevent it, and once it’s upon us we won’t reverse it.
In fact, it looks very likely that humanity's goose will be cooked some few centuries from now.
It's not just that life will become, for humans, a lot more nasty, brutish, and short - though all that will happen, it appears.
It's that human life may become sustainable only in insignificant populations of desperate primitives living like the Indians of Amazonia, if at all.
And maybe that's only to be expected of us, given human nature and the enormous sacrifices it would take to avoid this prospect, at any step of the way.
The human race, a too successful species, is ruining its own habitat.
The time of Soylent Green is coming
We won’t prevent it, and once it’s upon us we won’t reverse it.
In fact, it looks very likely that humanity's goose will be cooked some few centuries from now.
It's not just that life will become, for humans, a lot more nasty, brutish, and short - though all that will happen, it appears.
It's that human life may become sustainable only in insignificant populations of desperate primitives living like the Indians of Amazonia, if at all.
And maybe that's only to be expected of us, given human nature and the enormous sacrifices it would take to avoid this prospect, at any step of the way.
Metaphorically, the future is another country, very far away, concerning which we are for the most part indifferent.
We don't live there and never will; and, besides, dropping the metaphor, future people don't even exist.
How far will actual people accept sacrifices for future people?
How far will they even agree that we should?
Like any others, all alleged moral duties to the future are nonsense, though discussions of the question by philosophers are often entertaining.
And all allegations of religious duties are, of course, false.
Even allowing for some concern for our own descendants, we have no compelling stake in the future.
Hence, crocodile tears apart, it's pretty much apres nous, le deluge.
That is a fact with which I am content, truth be told, as are most of us, by far.
Though most of us may be in varying degrees uncomfortable facing that fact without a nice buffer of moral or even religious hypocrisy.
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